best-marketing-companies · case-studies
What Are the Best Marketing Companies in 2026
Forget the agency lists. The best marketing companies are brands like BetterHelp, running 2,728 creator deals. Here is what they do.
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If you searched for the best marketing companies expecting a list of agencies, I want to flip the question on you.
The best marketing companies are not agencies at all.
They are brands like BetterHelp, Skillshare, and Squarespace, quietly running thousands of creator deals while everyone else argues about agency rankings.
I run an agency that tracks 189,607 paid brand integrations across 35,183 brands, and the leaders in that data are not subtle about their method.
They found creators that worked and ran them again, hundreds of times, until the channel became their growth engine.
So this post reverse-engineers what the best marketing companies actually do, using the deal data we hold on them.
Who the best companies really are
Pull the top of our deal set and the answer is concrete.
BetterHelp has run 2,728 deals, Skillshare 2,027, Squarespace 1,768, and Surfshark 1,306 (n=10 top brands).
NordVPN sits at 1,299, Brilliant.org at 1,208, Incogni at 1,201, and Hostinger at 1,021.
Raycon and Aura round out the top ten at 961 and 940.
These are the marketing companies worth studying, because their volume is proof rather than a pitch.
Sanity check on what that volume means.
A brand does not run a 2,728th creator deal on hope.
It runs that many because each batch earned back enough to justify the next, which is the only signal that survives a finance review.
The best marketing companies are the ones whose deal count says the channel works for them.
Compare that to how most "best companies" lists get built.
They rank on brand recognition, revenue, and how often a name shows up in the trade press, which tells you nothing about whether the company's marketing actually drives sales.
A household name can run lazy marketing and coast on awareness, while a company you have barely heard of runs a tight creator operation that prints money.
Our deal data ignores reputation and counts behavior, which is why a privacy tool like Incogni at 1,201 deals sits beside household names.
The companies that show up here earned the spot by spending and repeating, the only test that survives contact with a budget.
Volume tells the truth.
What they do differently
So what separates these companies from the brands that try creators once and quit.
They treat the channel as repeatable.
Across 35,183 brands we have indexed, 15,113 run more than one deal, a 43.0% repeat rate, and the leaders sit at the far end of that curve (n=35183).
They source from a wide pool instead of the same famous names everyone books.
We track 158,555 YouTube channels and 77,835 TikTok accounts, and the best companies fish across that whole universe to find the creators their competitors miss (n=236390 creators).
This is the habit that separates the leaders most clearly.
A weak marketer books the three creators they have already heard of, pays a premium for the name, and competes with every other brand chasing the same faces.
A strong marketer goes deep into the mid-size middle, where a creator with a tight, real audience charges a fraction of the famous name and converts better because the audience trusts them.
The best companies built their volume out of those middle creators, found through data, where the obvious picks would have drained the budget twice as fast.
Finding that middle at scale is the work, and it is the part a search bar cannot do for you.
They keep what works and drop what does not, building a roster over years.
The named pairs show this habit up close.
Roel Van de Paar has run 235 deals each with Bensound and Stocksnap, and Ninad Music 120 each across four separate brands, partnerships that only form when a company commits to a creator that proved out (n=8 named pairs with 10-plus deals).
That is the difference between a company that markets well and one that dabbles.
Notice the discipline hidden in those repeat numbers.
A company that runs a creator once and moves on is guessing, while a company that runs the same creator 235 times has measured the response and decided it was worth keeping.
The best marketing companies built a loop, where every campaign feeds a shortlist of what worked, and the next campaign starts from that shortlist instead of a blank page.
A dabbler restarts from zero each time, which is why their cost per result never improves.
The leaders made creators a system, the exact system we build for brands that want to join them.
Systems beat one-offs.
The volume they run
Let me put the volume in perspective, because it reframes what good looks like.
The top ten companies in our set run between 940 and 2,728 creator deals each.
That is not a campaign, it is an operation, with sourcing, vetting, and renewal running continuously.
You do not need 2,728 deals to start, and reading the number that way misses the point.
The point is the pattern, because a brand running 20 deals a year using the same method as BetterHelp is on the same curve, just earlier (n=35183).
The industry mix proves the pattern travels.
Among the top 50 spenders, three are information-technology companies, two are health and wellness, two are audio, and the rest span telecom, music, furniture, and customer software (n=12 industries).
Whatever you sell, a company in your category has already built this operation, which means the play is available to you.
Copy the method, scale the volume to your budget.
That is how the best companies got there, and it is the number we help you size before you start.
Method first, volume follows.
Vetting
Here is the hard part, the step that separates the leaders from the brands that burned a budget and blamed the channel.
A creator can fake an audience, and a company with no screening pays full price for fake reach.
This is the worry peak.
The best marketing companies screen every creator before they pay, which is why their thousands of deals keep earning instead of leaking money to bots.
A brand that skips screening runs the same volume and gets a fraction of the response, then concludes creators do not work, when the real problem was unvetted names.
Here is the trap in plain terms.
A creator can buy followers for a few hundred dollars and quote a rate that matches that fake size.
A company with no comparison data and no screening pays the same price for a tenth of the response, and at the volume the leaders run, that mistake would bleed millions.
Out of the 158,555 YouTube creators we track, the ones worth a marketing budget are the minority whose audiences hold up under screening (n=158555).
The best companies got large precisely because they found that minority and stopped paying for the rest.
There is a second risk the leaders handle by default.
Every paid creator post carries an FTC disclosure obligation, and a missing disclosure becomes your brand's record while the creator walks away clean.
The companies running thousands of deals build the disclosure phrase into every brief, because one warning letter across that volume would be a headline.
That double discipline, audience screening and disclosure, is exactly what we run for brands copying the playbook. We screen each name for follower fraud and write the disclosure language into the brief. The longer version of why that matters is in our breakdown of what FTC enforcement actually targets in 2026.
Vet before you pay.
The cost of copying them
Let me talk about what it costs to run the best companies' play, because the math is friendlier than the volume suggests.
You do not pay for 2,728 deals up front.
You start with a handful, measure which creators drove a response, and refill from the winners, exactly as the leaders did when they were small.
Across the brands we track, the 43.0% repeat rate is the proof that this compounding works, because brands do not repeat what loses money (n=35183).
Run the math on a starter batch.
Ten well-sourced creator slots cost a fraction of a single broadcast buy, and three of them landing audiences that convert teaches you which names to scale.
The other seven cost you a lesson, which is cheap compared to a year of guessing.
By the third cycle your roster is mostly proven names, and your cost per traceable sale keeps falling while a brand running ads sees a flat number.
Think about why this matters more than the headline volume.
A new brand looks at BetterHelp's 2,728 deals and assumes the entry cost is enormous, then never starts.
The truth is the opposite, because BetterHelp's first ten deals cost the same as your first ten, and the volume is just the result of repeating a method that paid.
The barrier was never money, it was knowing which creators to source and how to vet them, and that knowledge is what an agency rents you on day one.
That compounding is the whole reason the leaders kept running deals, the number we help you size before you commit.
Small starts compound up.
How to run their play
So how do you actually copy the best marketing companies.
Source from data instead of memory, because the leaders fish across the whole creator universe and you should too (+2 hours saved per campaign).
Screen every creator's audience before booking, because that one step is why the leaders' volume keeps paying (+1 dead campaign avoided).
Build the FTC disclosure phrase into every brief, the way a 2,728-deal operation has to (+1 compliance headache avoided).
Keep a running shortlist of the creators that drove sales, so each cycle starts from proven names and your roster sharpens like theirs did (+1 hour saved per planning cycle).
That is the whole play.
I know you wanted a tidy list of company names to admire, and I gave you their playbook instead, which is the part you can actually use. But the 35,183 brands we track already ran the experiment, and the ones at the top all did the same four things. If you want to run their play without spending three years learning it the hard way, that is the work we do, sourced from the same 189,607 deals this whole post is built on. We hand you the sourcing, the screening, and the disclosure discipline the leaders took years to build, so your starter batch behaves like a seasoned operation from the first cycle. Start with a look at who fits your brief.
For the wider picture, the hub on choosing an agency for creator campaigns ties this to vetting, rates, and management. A useful companion is our look at the best marketing agency for creator-led brands, which covers who should run this play for you when you would rather not build it in-house.
Run the leaders' play.
Frequently asked
Which are the best marketing companies right now?
The best marketing companies are the brands running creator deals at scale. BetterHelp leads our set with 2,728 deals, followed by Skillshare at 2,027 and Squarespace at 1,768, across a universe of 189,607 tracked integrations.
What do the top marketing companies do differently?
They treat creators as a repeatable channel rather than a one-off. Across 35,183 brands we track, 15,113 run more than one deal, and the leaders run thousands, refilling from creators that proved they pay.
How many creator deals does it take to be a top marketing company?
The top ten brands in our set each run between 940 and 2,728 deals. You do not need that volume to start, but the pattern is consistent: the best companies run creators systematically and repeatedly.
Can a small brand copy the playbook of these companies?
Yes. The playbook is the same at any size: source from data, vet for real audiences, negotiate from comparison rates, and keep the creators that worked. The volume scales with budget, the method does not change.
How do I avoid wasting budget when copying these companies?
Screen every creator's audience for fake followers before paying, and build the FTC disclosure phrase into the brief. The top companies do both as standard steps, which is why their repeat deals keep paying.