Best Performance Marketing Agencies for B2B Brands in 2026

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Kim Hamilton

Kim Hamilton is a mom of two teens based in the San Francisco Bay Area. With a background in marketing, creative strategy, video production, and content writing, she brings both expertise and creativity to everything she creates. At Affiliate Strat, Kim writes about affiliate strategy, ecommerce growth, creator partnerships, and how brands can build programs that connect with the right audiences and drive lasting value. She’s also an avid traveler who’s always planning her next trip, whether that’s a solo flight or exploring somewhere new with her kids.

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When you Google “performance marketing agency” for a B2B brand, you’ll find plenty of firms promising results. But they don’t all do the same thing.

Some manage paid search, LinkedIn ads, and landing pages to turn ad spend into qualified pipeline. Others focus on affiliate, referral, and partner programs, helping you generate leads or sales through publishers, creators, and partners, often with payouts tied to performance.

Both types are called performance marketing agencies, but they focus on different pain points, work with different budgets, and require different levels of involvement from your team. Choose the wrong fit, and you could waste months of time and a chunk of your marketing budget.

That’s why this list separates agencies into two categories:

• Paid media and growth agencies: Turn paid campaigns into qualified leads and pipeline.
• Partner and affiliate specialists: Build performance-based channels through affiliates, publishers, creators, and strategic partners.

Best Performance Marketing Agencies for B2B Brands at a Glance

Paid media and growth agencies

These agencies help B2B companies acquire customers through paid campaigns and related marketing services. 

Some focus on media buying and conversion optimization; others, like Kalungi, provide broader marketing strategy and execution. Fees often include a retainer plus ad spend for paid campaigns, with results measured through qualified leads, pipeline, or revenue.

Directive

Best for: B2B SaaS and tech brands that want paid media and SEO tied to pipeline, not lead volume.

Directive, based in Irvine, California, was founded in 2014 and has worked with more than 420 B2B brands. Beyond paid and SEO, it also offers PR, content, and lifecycle marketing. Its “Customer Generation” approach pushes clients to judge campaigns on qualified pipeline and closed revenue instead of MQLs. That works well for teams that report to leadership on revenue, not lead counts.

Keep in mind: Directive is built around paid, SEO, and CRO. If affiliate or partner revenue is part of your plan, you’ll likely need a specialist alongside it.

Hey Digital

Best for: SaaS teams that want a focused paid ads partner and a steady stream of fresh creative.

Hey Digital works exclusively with B2B SaaS companies and says it has partnered with more than 125 since launching in 2019. It manages campaigns across LinkedIn, Google, and Meta, helping SaaS teams reach potential buyers across key paid channels. Beyond campaign management, the agency builds landing pages and delivers new ad creative within two days, giving teams a way to keep testing messaging and refreshing campaigns without managing creative production themselves.

Keep in mind: Hey Digital focuses on paid acquisition for SaaS. If you also need SEO, content marketing, or affiliate and partner programs, you may need additional vendors.

NoGood

Best for: Growth-stage brands that want an experiment-driven team working across paid, content, and lifecycle.

NoGood is more of a growth agency than media buyer. It works with B2B and consumer brands across paid media, SEO, content, and lifecycle, with a heavy focus on testing. It’s a fit for B2B teams that want one partner for ads, organic, and retention.

Keep in mind: Because NoGood serves B2B and consumer clients, ask for B2B case studies with long sales cycles similar to yours.

Kalungi

Best for: Early-stage B2B SaaS companies that need an outsourced marketing team and a fractional CMO.

Kalungi, founded in Seattle in 2018, often becomes the marketing department instead of plugging into one, pairing a fractional CMO with a team that handles GTM strategy, ABM, SEO, content, and marketing ops. It says it has worked with more than 100 B2B SaaS companies. One client, CPGvision, credits it with $4.7M in sourced pipeline.

Keep in mind: Kalungi is built for software companies still building their marketing function. Mature teams with in-house leadership may want a channel specialist instead.

Partner and affiliate specialists

These agencies build and manage affiliate and partner channels. That can include recruiting publishers and review sites, negotiating partnerships, tracking referrals, and managing commissions. Unlike paid media, where you fund ad spend directly, partner programs often tie part of the cost to results but agency fees, platform costs, and partner payments can all factor into the budget.

The hard part in B2B is tracking: long sales cycles, multiple stakeholders, and deals that close offline make it easy to pay partners for sales that would have happened anyway. Look for a specialist that can show which sales are incremental.

PartnerCentric

Best for: Mid-market and enterprise brands that want to understand which partners drive incremental revenue.

PartnerCentric is the largest independent partnership marketing agency in the U.S. with 80+ active clients and no holding company behind it. Founded in 2017 and headquartered in New York, it works across B2B SaaS, retail, travel, and other verticals. Clients include Stamps.com, CarGurus, and TikTok.

PartnerCentric’s FUSE™ tools connect affiliate network tracking data with a client’s own data to assess which partners drive incremental sales, rather than relying solely on network-reported conversions. For B2B brands, where long sales cycles can make it difficult to connect partnership activity with eventual sales, this provides a more informed basis for evaluating partner performance and deciding where to invest. FUSE can also identify double-dipping on card-linked offers, helping prevent duplicate partner payments. PartnerCentric offers AI visibility and answer engine optimization (AEO) services to improve brands’ organic and affiliate presence and make their content more discoverable to AI systems. The agency reports an average client partnership tenure of 33 months.

Keep in mind: PartnerCentric is best suited to mid-market and enterprise brands, and also works with well-funded startups ready to invest in affiliate as a serious growth channel.

Partner Commerce

Best for: B2B software and service brands that want an agency focused exclusively on B2B affiliate marketing.

New York-based Partner Commerce was founded by Adam Glazer after he saw that most affiliate agencies and platforms were built around consumer brands. The agency focuses solely on B2B programs, helping companies use partnerships to reach business buyers and generate new opportunities. It says it can tap a network of more than 75,000 B2B partners and was impact.com’s first B2B Top Partner. Its clients have included major brands such as Microsoft and Alibaba, making it worth considering for companies looking to build or expand a dedicated B2B partner channel.

Keep in mind: Partner Commerce is built around B2B. If you also sell directly to consumers, ask how much consumer-side experience the team brings and whether it can support both sides of your business.

Acceleration Partners

Best for: Global brands running partner programs across multiple countries.

Founded in Boston in 2007, Acceleration Partners is one of the larger partnership marketing agencies, with a team of more than 300 managing client programs in over 40 countries. Its international reach can be useful for brands coordinating partner recruitment, campaign management, and performance across multiple markets. Its past B2B clients include LinkedIn and GoToMeeting, and it has won Best Affiliate and Partner Marketing Agency at the Global Performance Marketing Awards six times. For companies managing programs across regions, that combination of scale and experience is worth exploring.

Keep in mind: A large agency team can offer broad coverage, but the people managing your account day to day matter most. Ask to meet your proposed team before signing and clarify who will own strategy, communication, and performance reporting.

Affilial

Best for: SaaS companies building an affiliate channel to grow recurring revenue.

Affilial works exclusively with B2B SaaS companies, managing affiliate programs from partner recruitment through ongoing program management. The company claims it can recruit new partners within a week of starting and targets companies looking to add $1M to $10M in annual recurring revenue. Its model combines a retainer with a performance fee, tying its work to the company’s growth goals.

Keep in mind: Affilial is a SaaS-only specialist. Brands outside software, or those that also want influencer work, should look elsewhere.

How to choose between the two

If you need pipeline this quarter and buyers are already searching for your category, a paid media agency will be a good starting point, provided you have budget for both its retainer and ad spend. An affiliate or partner specialist, meanwhile, will be a better option if your buyers rely on review sites, comparison articles, industry creators, referrals, or AI assistants like ChatGPT before booking a demo; or if you already have a partner program but can’t tell which partners bring in new customers.

These programs take time to recruit partners and build reliable tracking, and commissions aren’t the only cost; factor in agency fees and platform costs, too. Before signing with either type, ask how the agency will connect performance to your CRM and closed revenue, how it distinguishes genuinely new business from sales that would have happened anyway, who will manage your account day to day, and what your team needs to deliver in the first 90 days.

AI assistants are also becoming part of how buyers research and compare vendors. Ask prospective agencies how they help brands appear in AI-powered search and relevant publisher content, and how they assess whether that visibility contributes to business results.

Final Thoughts

Directive and Hey Digital are strong picks for SaaS teams focused on paid, while NoGood and Kalungi make more sense if you want one team covering more of the funnel.

If your ad costs keep climbing and you’d rather pay for results, look at the partner and affiliate specialists. PartnerCentric is a strong option for mid-market and enterprise brands, since its FUSE tracking shows which partners bring in new revenue. Partner Commerce and Affilial suit software-only programs, and Acceleration Partners fits brands running programs in several countries. Whoever you hire, make sure they can show you which sales are new, not ones you would have closed anyway.

Many growing B2B companies end up running both. Decide which job comes first, shortlist two or three agencies in that group, and use the questions above to see who understands your business best.