Influencer marketing has been one of the most effective ways to generate leads and get inbound traffic to your business.
According to a study published by Forbes magazine, 74% of consumers say that social media posts have impacted their purchasing decisions. In turn, 86% of marketers have included influencer marketing in their strategies in 2019.
Social media influencers have also impacted consumers’ trust in brands by a factor of 72%.
Over the past few four years, influencer marketing’s market size has grown an incredible amount, and in 2019, it was estimated to be worth 6.5 billion USD.
Source: Statista
Of course, not all influencer marketing campaigns have led to success. These campaigns could be a blunder for the brand — like Ciroc receiving bad press for their influencers violating Federal Trade Commission rules. The mistakes of Ciroc’s influencers, like having the alcohol in videos with minors, hurt the brand’s identity and they could also be fined for each ad that violates regulations set by the board.
Source: The Spirits Business
Influencer Marketing Agency vs Influencer Marketing Platforms
Both an influencer marketing agency and an influencer marketing platform serve the same purpose. They are both used to make influencer marketing easier, from finding potential influencers for your brand, to tracking analytics for your campaigns.
The difference lies in the work needed to use them.
An influencer marketing platform is a tool that you can use to track down influencers to collaborate with for your brand and manage the content that they produce for your campaign. It also tracks engagement for your branded content, which you can use to analyze the success of your campaign.
An influencer marketing agency is a team that can handle your entire influencer marketing campaign, from planning your KPIs to picking influencers to gather data for analytics.
Partnering with an influencer marketing agency makes launching influencer marketing campaigns easier because they already have the expertise and experience to run them smoothly and deliver results.
Reasons to work with an influencer marketing agency
Hiring an influencer marketing agency saves your company from an influencer marketing nightmare. An influencer marketing agency can determine the best influencer marketing strategy for your brand, and work on the plan right away.
Save time and money
An influencer marketing agency can help save time and money for your company. Spending on influencer marketing doesn’t always guarantee success with it, and an agency can make the most out of your money through their expertise and experience in the field.
Overall campaign management
Managing the influencers and the content can be infuriating to a newbie in the field, with a huge number of metrics to take note of to guarantee influencer marketing success. The agencies can manage the campaign for you, assuring results for your brand.
Data-driven insights to measure ROI
Calculating and measuring your influencer marketing ROI can be tedious and confusing. An influencer marketing agency, however, understands how to do this, and are equipped with measuring tools to give you an accurate report of your ROI at any point in your campaign.
Things to consider when choosing an influencer marketing agency
With the rise of influencer marketing, many different agencies have come up to help brands with their campaigns. Here are a few things to consider when picking an influencer marketing agency:
Knowledge on influencer marketing trends
Source: Influencer Marketing Hub
YouTube content creators, social media competitions, and affiliate marketing — these are just some trends that have become key to any influencer marketing strategy. Make sure the influencer marketing agency you work with knows what’s hot and what’s not to your consumers.
Pool of influencers
It’s not just the number of followers that dictate whether an influencer is right for your brand, and agencies will have a better idea which influencers might be suitable for you. Finding an influencer marketing agency with the appropriate pool of influencers is crucial to making the most out of your social media marketing budget.
Cross channel capabilities
According to Pew Research Center, YouTube and Facebook are still the top social media platforms in terms of usage across the board, but Instagram and Snapchat rule the 18-24 demographic.
Source: Pew Research Center
Finding an influencer marketing agency that recognizes these statistics and is capable of providing content for all of them can give your brand the boost it needs.
Quality of branded content:
Content creators have been just as important to influencer marketing as the influencers themselves. The focus has shifted from just getting your brand out there to how your brand is shown, so the branded content made for your brand should be high quality to make the audience take note of your brand.
Success stories
An influencer marketing agency’s track record is what helps you trust in their services. Make sure to look for their successful activations and campaigns, then see if their services there can help your brand skyrocket in popularity.
Most influencer marketing agencies showcase their case studies on their websites. This helps you gauge the expertise that each influencer marketing agency has, and whether their strategies can be useful for your own brand.
Industries serviced:
Always consider the industries the influencer marketing agency has excelled in and the industries they’re ready to serve.
For example, beauty influencers like Jeffree Star and MMMMitchell are shaping the make-up industry, so if you own a make-up brand, partnering with an influencer marketing agency that specializes in beauty influencers is a must.
Budget:
Take note of the content and engagement you need from influencers and make your influencer marketing budget accordingly. An influencer marketing agency can help you determine realistic prices on how much money you need to achieve a good ROI on your influencer marketing expenditure.
Source: American Marketing Association
Top 25 Influencer Marketing Agencies
1. IZEA
First and foremost a SaaS influencer marketing platform, IZEA offers end-to-end influencer marketing campaigns of your brand. It prices its services as a percentage of your entire marketing budget.
The software itself already has tons of tools for finding influencers, managing your content campaigns, and even submitting analytics to you.
Hiring IZEA as an influencer marketing agency can save you time as campaign management can still be tedious. Availing of their services assures you the guidance of their topnotch marketing experts who will be readily available to help with all your influencer marketing needs.
2. VaynerMedia
VaynerMedia is a full-service digital agency that has produced content for big companies like Unilever and PepsiCo.
Their parent company, VaynerX, has a variety of tools at their disposal to produce top quality content for your influencer marketing activations.
One of their sister companies, VaynerProductions, leads the creation of the content and produces everything from social media trends to videos.
CEO Gary Vaynerchuck puts a premium on meaningful engagements, and his company’s micro influencer-centered services allow those engagements to happen.
Cable channel TBS and VaynerMedia increased awareness for the new show Angie Tribeca using a 25-hour binge-watching event, with the help of 16 social influencers and Facebook Live content.
The campaign trended on Twitter at #2 nationwide and they brought the viewership to 15.5MM during the 25-hour marathon.
3. The Influencer Marketing Factory
With ROI the most important factor in mind, The Influencer Marketing Factory puts a premium on the process in their services. They can help your brand from the beginning by figuring out your target audience, to reporting and analytics to show how successful their activations are for your brand.
Their campaigns focus on Instagram, Twitch, YouTube, and foremost TikTok. They even have an in-house creative team dedicated to making sure your brand is the face of the latest trends on the app. Their works include influencer videos for Walmart ads and TikTok song challenges for the Warner Music Group.
One of their successful campaigns was for Sony Music for the promotion of pop star Shakira’s new song.
The Influencer Marketing Factory hired six influencers between two countries with a combined following of 39.5 million people. From these influencers, they reached 19,100 user-generated videos with 12 million hashtags for the campaign.
@minnieandtink We ❤️ @shakira new song!!! Tag her so she see’s this! #megusta #megustashakira #shakiramakeup #ad
4. Fanbytes
Focusing on Gen Z, Fanbytes is an influencer marketing agency for brands that cater to 13-24-year-olds by using platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, Tiktok, YouTube, and even AR Lenses.
The London-based agency cracked the code when it comes to reaching the youth.
This is evident in the brands that they work with, from media company Deezer to fast-food giant McDonald’s.
Warner Music approached Fanbytes to increase the attention on pop artist Charli XCX’s song “Boys”. Fanbytes created a Snapchat roulette filter, where users picked between the boys that pop up on the screen.
Using Snapchat as a platform, they successfully increased the viewership of the music video by hundreds of thousands.
5. ShaneBarker
ShaneBarker’s digital consulting agency focuses on Instagram influencer marketing campaigns. Their influencer marketing agency is very sales-driven, and they focus their campaigns on selling your product to your audience.
The agency offers two modes of consulting services. The first is hiring them to do part of your marketing campaigns, like analytics or campaign management.
The other is outsourcing your entire digital marketing campaign to the agency, saving you time and human resources in the process.
6. HireInfluence
Established in 2011, HireInfluence pride themselves in being the first influencer marketing agency in the world. They’re the go-to partner for Fortune 1000 brands, like McDonald’s and Barnes & Noble, and have worked with a wide variety of clients ranging from sports brand Adidas to entertainment company DC Comics.
Human experiences are HireInfluence’s specialty. They design experiential campaigns for brands to give a more personal approach to the traditional ad campaign with the help of influencer engagement.
They put a creative spin on the campaign they arranged for candy Sour Patch Kids, who were promoting their Sour Patch Kids Zombies available at 7-Eleven stores.
After hand-selecting 7 spunky, foodie, young influencers, they challenged them to go to 7-Eleven to create a snack stash they would take to a zombie apocalypse, including the Sour Patch Kids Zombies.
Source: HireInfluence
They reached 13.9M potential customers through this campaign.
7. Viral Nation
Viral Nation prides itself as a worldwide leader in managing influencer campaigns. They’re responsible for huge marketing success stories like PUGB Mobile for Tencent.
They’re leaders in the online gaming industry as well. They cover a wide variety of influencer following sizes, managing celebrities all the way down to regular people as brand ambassadors.
Besides PUGB, Viral Nation also launched a successful activation for lingerie brand Victoria’s Secret. Over the course of six months, they hired 175 brand ambassadors.
Viral Nation content for Victoria Secret was distributed through these ambassadors’ social media channels and Victoria Secret’s own, reaching 2.8 million interactions through the campaign.
Source: Instagram
8. Go Fish Digital
Go Fish Digital guarantees that their social influencer marketing agency can find influencers and service any kind of niche industry globally. Their most notable clients include Airbnb and Geico.
In addition to being an influencer marketing agency, Go Fish Digital also specializes in SEO and online reputation management, so they are most helpful for brands looking to build up their searchability on Google.
9. Mediakix
Mediakix has refined its process to do data-driven campaigns for top companies in their almost ten years of doing influencer marketing.
Specializing in YouTube and Instagram influencer marketing, Mediakix is committed to connecting top influencers with big brands like Uber and Universal. They focus primarily on YouTube, creating YouTube sponsorships, and partnering with top YouTube influencers for your brand.
Tropicana approached Mediakix for an event activation, where they invited participants from their pool of influencers.
These influencers spread Tropicana’s brand values and processes to hundreds and thousands of their followers, leading to 640,000 Instagram story views all sharing the story of Tropicana.
Source: Mediakix
10. TopRank Marketing
TopRank Marketing is known as one of the leading B2B marketing agencies in the industry since they started in 2001. Their influencer marketing strategy has a specific focus on content, creating top-quality branded content to benefit both the brand and the influencers.
They have helped companies like LinkedIn and Cherwell by enabling them to gain significant traction in social media by connecting them with the right influencers for their specific needs.
One of TopRank Marketing’s most innovative campaigns was for business tech company Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise (ALE). TopRank created the IT Vanguard Awards, where the judges were prominent influencers in the IT field.
These awards aimed to recognize leading IT professionals, and in turn, gave positive press and 14,00 landing page views to ALE in 10 weeks.
11. Billion Dollar Boy
Billion Dollar Boy has made a name for themselves by working closely with brands like Bose, Primark, and BMW.
They also have their own campaign management and analytics technology that manages all the data you need for your influencer marketing needs. They have a market presence across six continents, showcasing their diversity when it comes to activations.
Billion Dollar Boy helped make-up brand Bobbi Brown promote their fall line and their limited edition holiday collection. Leveraging on the power of beauty influencers, they created 139 pieces of content across influencers with a combined reach of 24 million. This reached a total of 344,000 natural engagements for the brand.
Source: Billion Dollar Boy
12. Cure Media
Cure Media has had over 10,000 campaigns with major companies like Disney, Coca Cola and Samsung, and is a reputable influencer marketing agency for brands who need support in strategizing influencer marketing campaigns from start to finish.
The influencer marketing agency is also known for collaborating with smaller brands across Europe like Froosh and ACO.
Their process ensures that influencer marketing tactics are seamlessly integrated with your existing marketing mix. They also allow you to track your campaigns in real-time, assuring you that your investment pays off every step of the way.
When Sweden needed more police officers, the Swedish National Police Authority approached Cure Media for their influencer marketing help. They hired trustworthy Swedish influencers who could target women, their most important target market.
Source: Cure Media
The influencer marketing campaign spread the word about the application process, but also inspired and motivated audiences to apply. They reached a 36% increase in admissions and a record 43% of applicants who were women.
13. SugarFree
SugarFree is responsible for the rise of TikTok’s fame. When TikTok acquired Musical.ly, they took care of their most important creators and supported them through the transition to TikTok.
After this, they did rapid successions of TikTok campaigns to be shared on platforms such as Twitter, Snapchat, and most importantly, Instagram stories. This led to over a billion downloads of the TikTok app in 2018.
Despite TikTok having a primarily Gen Z audience, SugarFree still manages and uses many mature and experienced creators for their campaigns.
By using the relationship they have with top influencers and content creators, they leverage on the influencers’ industry experience and capitalize with their behind-the-scenes coordinations.
Their strategy focuses on selecting the right influencers that are a good brand fit, while keeping a strong focus on brand storytelling. . This includes finding the most apt influencer for every brand they work with.
Source: SugarFree
14. Carusele
Despite their whimsical name, Carusele is an influencer marketing agency that prides itself in solid, data-driven results.
Using their patented Content Performance Index, they study the influencer-produced content in each campaign to best engage their audiences with their content.
With clients like Starbucks and Haagen-Dazs, they’ve proven that hard data and strategic targeting can create the most engaging content for your brand.
They offer continuous programs for brands, as they have determined that these on-going campaigns increase efficiency by around 50% for their clients.
The IKEA Foundation approached Carusele to help them with their cause: #PlayForAll. Carusele approached influencer parents to share content of their children playing and spread it over channels like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.
Source: Carusele
This caused a 4.12x media value ROI on over 5,000 engagements.
15. Kairos Media
Kairos Media provides attention-grabbing content for their clients, making the output entertaining for audiences. They pride themselves on hitting the clients’ target audience perfectly every time.
Video game company Activision, the Amazon Appstore and pizza chain Papa Johns are just some of the clients they’ve produced creative, storytelling campaigns for.
The Syfy Channel needed to advertise the televised championship of their tournament of the video game Rocket League.
Kairos Media took on this project and used 4 YouTube content creators to make Rocket League videos advertising the tournament. This led to 1.5 million engagements from the content published.
16. Obviously
With offices in the US, France and Australia, Obviously is a global office that helps your activations in three continents.
Partnering with brands like Google Hardware, Uniqlo and dozens of others Obviously specializes in communicating with the best influencers for your company. Their database of over 400,000 influencers assures you that you will find the best influencers for your products.
17. PYMB
PMYB prides themselves as the only Chromo-Influencer agency in the world. These Chromo-Influencers are content creators that satisfy the high standards of PMYB’s 5 Stage Chromo-analysis, an analysis that observes 46 key data points that influence consumer behavior.
With the highly selective influencer process, this British influencer marketing agency assures high levels of genuine audience engagement for your brand. Their 17,000-man worldwide influencer network delivers personalized campaigns catered to help your brand reach its exact target audience.
One of PMYB’s successful campaigns with their Chromo-influencers is for Groupon. These influencers with big followings posted content of them in restaurants, spas, gyms and ski trips, all thanking Groupon for their deals.
Groupon also created physical ads like branded beauty trams in Milan and Turin. These all lead to 198 pieces of content that resulted in 5.8M impressions overall.
18. CloutBoost
CloutBoost is an influencer marketing agency that exclusively caters to the video game influencer market.
Focusing on Twitch streamers and YouTube gaming content creators, they sift through your brand’s data and the data of Twitch and YouTube users to target the best communities for your brand’s needs.
Their unique gamer-based services also allow for large-scale ambassador campaigns that produce results. This ambassadorship includes seamless structures and rewards systems for your consumers, making it attractive to you and your audience.
Their experience with gaming influencers came in handy when they were approached by Anchorfree to market their product Hotspot Shield VPN.
They approached 4 Twitch streamers to advertise the VPN and host giveaways for the product. Over three months and 80 hours of live streaming on Twitch, they achieved 30k unique viewers on Twitch and 2500 giveaway entries, increasing awareness for Hotspot Shield VPN.
Source: CloutBoost
19. Ignite
Presenting themselves as the original social media agency, Ignite Social Media started their services in 2007. Their experience is their advantage over other agencies, even granting them the Social Agency of the Year award in 2016.
They have always believed in creating genuine content to connect brands to their customers through social media. Their client list is diverse and extensive, including top brands like IKEA, Estee Lauder, UNICEF and Microsoft Office.
Ignite successfully targeted a niche market with Crocs. Focused on reaching the teenage athlete market, they created #SquadGoalsSweeps to build brand affinity for their clogs.
They enlisted a unique brand of influencers: high school sports teams. These teams were engaged to capture content and post it to enter their team in a sweepstakes that gave them a chance to win Crocs for their team and money for their school.
Source: Ignite
20. August United
August United’s goal is to rid the world of boring marketing, or marketing that doesn’t move people to action. They believe influencers produce ripple effects, and with their help, you can use influencers to deliver your brand’s message effectively.
Their most unique service is offering brands to personally meet influencers through their influencer brand retreats. This allows influencers and brands to set up long-term marketing campaigns between them, making passionate brand advocates for your brand.
Grocery giant Ralphs enlisted August United to help them increase the organic engagement on their branded posts.
Using top lifestyle and food influencers in Southern California, August United achieved an ROI of 7x for this campaign. The influencers for the campaign have also established a long-term relationship with Ralphs, becoming parts of future Ralphs campaigns monthly.
Source: AugustUnited
21. Open Influence
Open Influence is a global influencer marketing agency, with offices in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, London, Milan, and Hong Kong. Their goal has always been to bring the human element into advertising so people create and share in the most natural way possible.
They use their own proprietary influencer platform, allowing them to do goal-specific activations with the hundreds of thousands of influencers signed on to them.
The technology analyzes billions of data points to point you to the best influencers for you, and to access the metrics to your campaigns at will. They’re also well-versed in all social media platforms and work with clients from a vast number of industries.
OpenInfluence helped horror movie Ma to reach their target audience with a story-based Instagram Stories activation.
Influencers brought the #PartyWithMa experiences to life by acting out the experience the characters in the movie go through, culminating with an actual party.
This campaign ended up with a 4.5% in-feed engagement, compared to the 1.5% industry standard.
22. The Outloud Group
With 12 years of experience connecting content creators to brands that need marketing services, The Outloud Group grows brands using quality content and data. They specialize in direct response ads from the influencers themselves to produce instant results to the brands.
From start to finish, they’ve had their hand in the strategies and execution of campaigns for brands like 23andMe and GrubHub.
One of their most notable partnerships with NordVPN resulted in a video with over 73 million views. The internet privacy company sponsored a video of Mark Rober, a YouTube influencer, setting a glitter bomb trap for the security of his packages.
23. Sway Group
The Sway Group is an all-female company that provides hands-on influencer marketing strategies by becoming partners for their clients, working on every single detail step-by-step with you to ensure full coverage service from their end.
They also focus on finding the perfect fit between brands and influencers and demand high-quality content from the creators they partner with your brand.
They’ve handled campaigns for personable brands such as Dove, Domino’s and Coca Cola. Each campaign they handle has produced results due to their meticulous handling of every step of the process.
The Sway Group partnered with McCormick to create a campaign to promote their herbs and spices for the holiday.
With a tight roll-out of two weeks, they rolled out 168 pieces of content from their food influencers, who posted nostalgic creations to stay in-line with McCormick’s brand messaging. All their content produced 25.5k social media and blog engagements.
24. Audiencly
With its pool of over 500,000 Youtube, Twitch, and Instagram influencers, Audiencly specializes in launching influencer marketing campaigns targeting enthusiasts of mobile games like Lords Mobile and RAID: Shadow Legends.
Now and then, they also create campaigns for charities and fundraising events. One of the most notable campaigns was the one they launched for GTArcade to raise awareness about child hunger.
The concept of the campaign was simple: get six of their influencers to experience what it’s like to be hungry.
What made this influencer campaign click was the way how their influencers shared their personal experience about starving and going hungry.
After running for ten days, the campaign not only generated over a 10% engagement rate, but also raised enough funds for 42,000 meals.
25. LEADERS
Although the campaigns this agency launches are data-driven, LEADERS understands that it’s the influencers they collaborate with for these campaigns are what drive success.
LEADERS was responsible for generating buzz for Pepsi Max’s Food Festival and selling out Justin Timberlake’s concert in Israel.
Conclusion
Influencer marketing agencies provide many similar services like big pools of influencers and reporting analytics. But the important differences between them all are their specialties and the way they use their platforms so you can reach your goals.
Find an influencer marketing agency that fits your target market the best, and always make sure that your goals align with their services.
If any of the agencies listed above catches your eye, contact them through the links to their websites.
You forgot about Syft!