Influencer Agencies vs. Marketplaces vs. DMing Creators Directly: What Actually Works for Small Businesses in India

There isn’t a universally “best” way to find influencers for your business — there’s a best way for a business your size, in your city, with your budget and time. Small businesses in India generally end up choosing between three real options: hiring an agency, messaging creators directly, or using a marketplace. Each one genuinely works, and each has a real cost that doesn’t show up until you’re already in it.

Option 1: Influencer marketing agencies

Agencies manage the whole process for you — sourcing creators, negotiating rates, handling contracts, and reporting results. For a business with a large recurring budget and no time to manage campaigns personally, that’s genuinely valuable.

• Strength: hands-off, professional execution, useful for big or recurring campaigns.
• Weakness: agency fees are usually a percentage on top of creator costs, and most agencies have minimum budgets that price out small, local businesses entirely.
• Best for: businesses running large, multi-city, or ongoing campaigns with a marketing budget to match.

Option 2: DMing creators directly

Sliding into a creator’s DMs costs nothing but time, and plenty of small businesses have built real relationships this way — especially with creators they already follow or know locally.

• Strength: zero platform cost, and a direct relationship with no middleman.
• Weakness: it doesn’t scale — you’re manually vetting engagement, chasing replies, and negotiating each deal from scratch, and you have no reliable way to check whether a creator’s audience is genuine before you commit.
• Best for: a business that already has one or two creators in mind and just needs to close the deal.

Option 3: Influencer marketplaces

Marketplaces sit between the two — you post what you need once, and relevant creators come to you instead of you chasing each one individually. This is the category Rybbly’s influencer marketplace falls into, matching businesses with creators by city and category rather than a generic national database.

• Strength: far faster than manual outreach, no agency-sized minimum spend, and creators typically come with real, checkable engagement data instead of just a follower count.
• Weakness: you’re still the one reviewing applicants and making the final call — it removes the busywork, not the decision-making.
• Best for: local businesses that want more reach and better vetting than manual DMs, without agency fees or minimums.

How to actually decide

If you’re running one campaign a year with a specific creator already in mind, DMing them directly is genuinely the simplest option — there’s no reason to add a platform in between. If you’re running large, recurring, multi-city campaigns with real budget to spend on execution, an agency’s hands-off management earns its fee. For the large middle ground — a local business that wants to run a few campaigns a year, reach more than the one or two creators you already know, and avoid both agency minimums and hours of manual vetting — a marketplace is usually the most efficient option, because it replaces the slowest parts of DMing (finding people, vetting engagement, chasing replies) without the cost structure of an agency.

A realistic hybrid approach

Plenty of businesses use more than one of these at once, and that’s reasonable — keep DMing a creator you already have a relationship with, while posting a campaign on a marketplace to find new ones you wouldn’t have discovered otherwise. The goal isn’t loyalty to one method, it’s finding creators whose audience actually overlaps with your customers, however you get there.

Where to start

If manual outreach has felt slow and agency minimums are out of reach, posting a campaign on Rybbly is a reasonable middle step — it’s free to create an account, your signup bonus covers your first campaign, and you can see exactly who applies before spending anything further. Post your first campaign and compare the applicants against whatever else you’ve tried.

Looking to put this into practice? See Rybbly's influencer marketplace.