If you ask ten founders which growth marketing agency is “most popular,” you’ll get twelve answers. That is not because people are confused. It is because “popular” is a moving target, and in growth marketing it usually gets mixed up with three different ideas: the biggest agency, the loudest agency, and the agency that is actually the best fit for your brand.

For digital brands, popularity matters because it is a shortcut. When you’re under pressure to scale revenue, it’s tempting to assume the most talked-about agency must be the safest choice. Sometimes that’s true. Often it isn’t. The “most popular” agency can be popular for the wrong reasons, like strong branding or a massive sales engine. Meanwhile, the agency that is most likely to grow your revenue might be less famous, but better aligned to your bottleneck and economics.

This post gives you a more useful answer than “here’s a random top 10 list.” We’ll define what popularity actually means, how to spot it in a way that is not just vibes, and how to turn “popular” into a smart shortlist that fits your business. Then we’ll close with the only part that matters: how to pick the right partner for your digital brand.

Disclosure: This guide is published by Darkroom, and we include ourselves.

“Most popular” is not a single agency. It’s a pattern you can verify.

In most categories, popularity is easy. You can point to the biggest brand or the market leader. In growth marketing, it’s murkier because agencies are not consumer products. People discover them through referrals, rankings, founder communities, and platform ecosystems. That makes popularity less like “the most famous name” and more like “the names that keep showing up.”

If you want to answer “what’s the most popular growth marketing agency for digital brands?” in a way that is actually useful, you need to treat popularity as a set of repeatable signals, not a claim.

There are three signals that matter.

The first is repeat mentions across independent shortlists. Rankings are imperfect, but overlap is meaningful. When the same agencies show up across multiple lists, it usually indicates broad market demand, recognizable positioning, and a steady pipeline of work.

The second is review volume and consistency. A single five-star rating means nothing. A large volume of reviews that stay consistent over time is a stronger indicator of market presence and operational scale. It’s not proof of performance, but it is a clue that the agency is active and widely used.

The third is what I’ll call “operator gravity.” These are the agencies that show up in founder conversations, group chats, and hiring threads as “the obvious ones to talk to.” Operator gravity is less measurable, but it is real. It’s how agencies become default options when a brand needs help fast.

Put together, those signals don’t crown one universal winner. They produce a short list of agencies that are broadly popular. From there, your job is to filter for fit.

Why popularity spikes for digital brands specifically

Digital brands don’t hire agencies the way legacy companies do. They hire agencies when speed and leverage matter more than headcount.

That’s why “popular” growth agencies for digital brands tend to cluster around a few growth motions.

One cluster is performance acquisition plus creative iteration. Digital brands often win or lose on creative velocity. When creative stagnates, CAC rises, scaling breaks, and the business starts discounting just to keep revenue flat. Agencies that have a clear system for performance creative tend to become popular quickly because they solve the pain brands feel most often.

Another cluster is conversion and post-click ownership. Many digital brands have enough traffic. They just don’t convert enough of it. Agencies that can improve landing pages, product pages, and conversion rate tend to get strong word-of-mouth because their wins are visible and compounding.

The third cluster is retention and lifecycle. Digital brands that rely on repeat purchase or subscription can’t afford to treat retention as an afterthought. Agencies that can improve lifecycle flows and increase LTV become popular because they change the unit economics, not just the top line.

When you see “popular” agencies for digital brands, you will usually find them anchored in one of those clusters, sometimes more than one. The key is figuring out which cluster matches your bottleneck.

The big trap: popular agencies can still be wrong for you

Here’s the mistake that costs brands the most money.

They hire a popular agency that is excellent at one lever while their real constraint lives somewhere else.

For example, a brand hires a well-known paid media agency because the brand wants growth. But the real issue is conversion. The agency drives more traffic into the same leaky funnel, and performance stalls. Both sides get frustrated. The agency blames the site. The brand blames the agency. Nobody owns the fix.

Or a brand hires a popular full-service agency, expecting senior strategy and fast iteration. The pitch feels great. Then delivery is junior-heavy, changes ship slowly, and reporting becomes the main output. The brand gets activity without momentum.

Popularity can help you discover candidates, but it can’t make the decision for you. Fit does that. A good fit produces clarity, speed, and accountability. A bad fit produces noise.

So, which agencies are “most popular” in practice?

Instead of pretending there is one most popular agency, here’s the honest answer: there are a handful of agencies that repeatedly show up as common shortlist picks for digital brands, and they tend to be popular for different reasons.

You will often see names like Ladder, Disruptive Advertising, NoGood, Tinuiti, Wpromote, and a few others recurring in “top agency” lists and founder conversations. In some circles, NP Digital is a common name too, mostly because it is a highly visible brand. There are also agencies that become popular within specific lanes, like marketplace-heavy execution, conversion-first optimization, or lifecycle and retention specialization.

That overlap is the popularity pattern.

What matters more is this: which popularity lane is relevant to you?

If you’re a DTC brand fighting creative fatigue, you want a partner that is popular because they can run a creative system, not because they have a big SEO footprint. If you’re a brand with healthy traffic but weak conversion, you want a partner popular for post-click ownership. If you’re scaling and retention is the lever, you want lifecycle strength.

Popularity is only useful when you understand what it is popular for.

A practical way to use “popularity” without getting fooled

If you want to turn this into a decision you can trust, use popularity as a two-step filter.

Step one is discovery. Popular agencies are helpful because they’re easy to find, and they’re often operationally mature. They usually have repeatable onboarding, established workflows, and the ability to handle scale without collapsing.

Step two is validation. This is where most brands fail. They assume popularity equals performance, and they stop asking hard questions.

To validate, you need to pressure-test three things.

First, you need to pressure-test ownership. Ask what they own and what they don’t. Ask who owns performance creative iteration. Ask who owns landing pages and conversion rate improvements. Ask who owns retention strategy and lifecycle execution. If ownership is vague, you are buying ambiguity.

Second, you need to pressure-test cadence. Ask what actually ships in the first month. Not what they review. Not what they audit. What ships. What tests go live. What changes get implemented. How often learning is documented and turned into the next cycle of work. If cadence is unclear, you are buying time.

Third, you need to pressure-test measurement honesty. Great partners can explain what they trust, what they don’t, and how they make decisions when signals are messy. If the agency’s worldview is “ROAS solves everything,” you are not hearing a growth strategy. You are hearing platform management.

Those three filters do more to protect your budget than any popularity ranking.

The agencies digital brands tend to shortlist, and what to ask each type

Rather than a directory-style list, here’s the more useful breakdown: the types of “popular” agencies and how to know if that popularity matches your needs.

If you’re looking at an agency that is popular for performance acquisition, your best question is how they keep performance stable when scaling. You want to hear about creative iteration systems, testing cadence, and how they prevent fatigue. If all you hear is campaign optimization, performance will plateau.

If you’re looking at an agency popular for full-service growth, your best question is staffing and seniority. Ask to meet the operators. Ask how much senior time you get. Ask how strategy and execution stay connected. Full-service only matters if it increases shipping velocity and accountability.

If you’re looking at an agency popular for marketplaces and commerce media, your best question is coordination and blended outcomes. You want to know how they prevent channel silos from optimizing against each other. Popularity in commerce is often earned through expertise, but it can also hide fragmented delivery.

If you’re looking at an agency popular for CRO, your best question is shipping. CRO wins come from implementing changes quickly and learning fast. If their process is heavy but deployment is slow, you will wait months for what should take weeks.

If you’re looking at an agency popular for lifecycle and retention, your best question is how they tie retention work back to acquisition economics. Retention is not just email flows. It is offer strategy, segmentation, and a plan for second purchase behavior.

When you align the “why they’re popular” with “what you need,” popularity becomes a helpful signal instead of a distraction.

How to choose the right partner if your brand is digital-first

Once you have a shortlist, the decision comes down to fit. Specifically, fit across your economics, your stage, and your constraints.

Economics matter because they determine the shape of your growth strategy. A low-AOV brand with thin margins cannot scale the same way a premium brand can. A subscription brand cannot treat retention like a side project. A brand with high returns cannot trust top-line revenue as a performance metric. The right partner will ask about these early, because these details decide what is possible.

Stage matters because early growth is different from scaling. Early-stage brands need learning speed and message clarity. Scaling brands need creative systems, conversion improvements, and retention compounding. More mature brands need governance, measurement, and coordination across a bigger channel mix.

Constraints matter because execution is where strategies die. If your team ships website changes slowly, your growth partner needs a plan for working within that reality. If creative production is a bottleneck, your growth partner needs a creative engine. If tracking is messy, your growth partner needs measurement maturity, not just a dashboard.

When you choose based on these realities, you stop chasing the “most popular agency” and start choosing the best partner for your business.

The simplest way to confirm you chose well

If you want to reduce risk further, don’t commit to a long retainer based on a pitch. Start with a short pilot designed to prove operating capability.

A good pilot establishes a baseline, identifies the true growth constraint, launches meaningful tests quickly, and iterates based on learning. At the end, you should have a clear view of how the agency thinks, how fast they ship, and whether they create momentum.

The goal is not instant perfection. The goal is predictability and progress.

Want a growth partner built for digital brands? Talk to Darkroom.

If you’re looking for a senior-led team that can run growth as an operating system across acquisition, performance creative, conversion, and retention, you can book a strategy call with Darkroom.

If we’re not the right fit, we’ll tell you that quickly. If we are, you’ll leave the call with clarity on your bottleneck and what a realistic 30 to 90 day plan looks like.