Influence & Co. is a content marketing agency that specializes in creating engaging content that fuels companies’ content marketing efforts and positions their key employees as influencers within their industry.
Influence & Co. exists to embrace the power of storytelling in marketing and sales. For its clients, this dedication to storytelling is what sets the agency apart from others and enables it to show off the faces behind brands. As content creators, the people of Influence & Co. have devoted their time to finding effective, engaging, and unique ways of telling their clients’ stories since the beginning. About eight years ago, the world of content marketing looked a lot different. It was very new, and most people didn’t fully understand what it was.
They heard people talking about it, primarily in conjunction with the term “thought leadership,” but they had no idea how to create content and use it to their advantage. It was then that Kelsey Raymond, CEO and co-founder of Influence & Co., along with John Hall, co-founder and board member at Influence & Co., and Brent Beshore, co-founder and owner of Adventures, saw a tremendous opportunity to fill a gap in the market. If they could leverage relationships with online publications that need content and help others get content created and published, they could make big moves within this budding industry.
So in 2011, Kelsey, John, and Brent co-founded Influence & Co. The company they created quickly became the leading provider of bylined, guest contributed content to major online publications, helping its clients solidify placements in Entrepreneur, Business Insider, Harvard Business Review, Adweek, and more. As the content marketing industry evolved, Influence & Co. and its people had to evolve, too. They invested in developing their own project management and analytics software to enhance their clients’ experience with the team.
They examined the industry and expanded their offerings based on what they knew their clients and future clients would need. They added services like blog content, whitepapers, infographics, keyword research and technical SEO audits, public relations, social media, graphic design, and email marketing to their roster. Influence & Co. was no longer solely a guest-contributed content provider; it had evolved into a fully integrated content marketing agency.
As Influence & Co.’s services grew, so did its team, placing the agency on the Inc. 500/0 List of Fastest Growing Companies four years in a row (2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019). It was also named one of Inc.’s Best Workplaces in 2017 and was a Content Marketing Agency of the Year Finalist in 2015, 2017, and 2018. Today, Influence & Co. continues to create content rooted in thought leadership. Its content creators approach each piece with engagement, quality, and message in mind, resulting in content that is goal focused and communicates the thought leadership of their clients.
An example of this is a recent article in Fortune, “Smartphones Need Cobalt—but It’s Mined by Children. What Should Manufacturers Do?” This article discussed sustainable innovation and the pressing moral dilemma around the creation of smartphones. At Influence & Co., the desire to go beyond just creating content to delivering powerful news, starting conversations, and inspiring action is the reason its people do what they do.
, 
In October 2018, Kelsey bought the controlling interest in the agency from its previous holding company, making Influence & Co. a womanowned business. It’s under her strong leadership that the company grew to serving over 200 clients, including big brand names like Facebook, Google, Salesforce, and Microsoft.
