How One Agency is Reimagining How Influencer Marketing Drives Results  

This post was created in partnership with Linqia

One influencer agency based out of San Francisco, Linqia, has built a proven framework to help brands scale their influencer strategies and show meaningful results. 

According to Linqia’s CEO Nader Alizadeh, a different approach is required to avoid falling victim to the sea of sponsored content sameness that befalls many brands. 

He says that Linqia’s approach addresses this challenge through a structured framework emphazing “consumer tension” informed creative strategy, predictive technology tools and data, and full-funnel measurement integrated into a brand’s broader media modeling.

Creative Strategy: Finding the human truth

Linqia stresses the importance of rooting creative strategy in a human truth, which the company says can almost always be uncovered by listening to the social conversation. Maria Sipka, Linqia’s Co-founder and EVP of Brand Strategy, says that “your consumers are almost always giving you the answers on social media. It’s just a matter of whether or not you are listening.”

How that human truth fits into the broader influencer strategy and annual planning process is the key. As Sipka explains, “We help brands look at their year and plan how influencer campaigns can complement big national campaigns, develop evergreen content needs, and land key product launches and shopper moments. It’s not just about posting—it’s about making influencer marketing an integral part of the brand’s broader content strategy.”

Linqia also stresses the process of narrative mapping, whereby they create a grid to match brand messages with audience segments. The goal is to make sure that if a brand is looking to land a specific message with a specific consumer group, the actual content shows someone from that consumer group speaking to that key message. “Just because you can target someone doesn’t mean the content is right for them,” explains Sipka. Creators are an amazing way to generate hyper-targeted content to ensure the message is most relevant.” 

Technology and AI: Improving precision and efficiency

Linqia’s platform, Resonate, brings everything brands need for influencer marketing into one place. It simplifies influencer discovery, social listening, and campaign management, making the entire process much easier to manage. Instead of juggling multiple tools or guessing which influencers to work with, Resonate centralizes these tasks so brands can focus on their goals.

“Brands don’t want to manage hundreds of email streams and countless shared docs,” says Keith Bendes, VP of Strategy at Linqia. “They want one location where all communication, content and performance data is housed. That’s what Linqia has done with their Resonate platform.”

Linqia also stresses the importance of predictive data in providing the greatest chance of success. Their platform uncovers the most common conversations happening on social media for searched keywords and shows the best-performing creators and messages within those conversations. That allows their team to provide talent and creative recommendations back to brands based on real-world data and insights.