The Research Challenge
Mapping a city's influencer landscape sounds straightforward until you're actually in it. Barcelona has a dense and competitive social media ecosystem, and our client needed more than a surface-level list. They were looking for creators with over 100,000 followers who could realistically become brand partners — which meant follower count alone was never going to be enough.
Weak engagement, inactive accounts, and inflated metrics are common problems in influencer research. The client had tried to approach this informally before and ended up with data that couldn't support a real decision. They needed a structured process and a clean, usable output.
How We Approached It
Helion360 treated this as a market research project with a defined methodology. We began by identifying the platforms most relevant to the client's goals — primarily Instagram, with secondary coverage of TikTok and YouTube. From there, we filtered by location signals and follower thresholds before moving into deeper profile analysis.
For each candidate, we pulled engagement rate data, reviewed posting frequency, and documented any visible brand partnerships. Rather than dumping raw data into a spreadsheet, we organized the findings by content vertical — lifestyle, fashion, food, travel, and fitness — so the client's team could immediately map influencers against specific campaign needs.
Every profile in the final report met the same baseline criteria, making the dataset genuinely comparable rather than a patchwork of inconsistent information.
What the Data Covered
The final deliverable included more than 100 verified influencer profiles, each with engagement rate benchmarks, posting cadence, content category, and brand collaboration history where publicly available. The client received both a priority shortlist for immediate outreach and a broader reference pool for longer-term planning.
The report was formatted so the marketing team could apply their own filters and move forward without any additional data processing. That was a deliberate choice — research that requires further cleanup before it's usable defeats the purpose.
Working With Helion360
If your team is trying to map an influencer market, evaluate partnership opportunities, or build a targeting database from scratch, Helion360 is ready to take that on. We bring the same structured, criteria-driven approach to every research project — and we deliver outputs that are ready to act on, not just ready to look at.
Our work on media outlets research and bilingual communications demonstrates our ability to map competitive landscapes across multiple platforms and regions.