Tribe Dynamics, a leader in marketing technology and social analytics for beauty, fashion and lifestyle companies, is expanding to serve international markets. Beginning in the first quarter, the company will begin focusing on the UK, France, Spain, Italy and Germany, with future activity planned for South Korea, Brazil, Japan and China.

Over the past few years, Tribe has become a respected name among beauty brands for its focus on building, scaling and measuring digital earned media – third-party content about brands created by social influencers. Founded in 2012 by Conor Begley and Jon Namnath, the company now works with some of the industry’s most well-known brands, private equity firms and Fortune 500 companies.

Conor Begley, Co-founder and President of Tribe Dynamics, said that the largest single change in the role of social media in beauty over the last few years “has been the shift of focus from owned media (a brand’s own channels) to earned media (other people creating content about brands). Much of this has to do with the way today’s consumers are discovering brands and products. Consumers are actively seeking information online and prefer organic, authentic third-party recommendations [versus a brand’s owned media and/or paid ads] as a means to discover and ultimately inform purchasing decisions.”

To keep up with the pace of growth, Tribe, which currently employs 30 people and hasn’t taken on any significant outside investment to-date, will “continue to focus on building out our data science and engineering teams, and invest in support staff who have an understanding of local markets and language. We plan to have teams on the ground in Paris and London as early as the first quarter of 2017, and will grow as needed to best support our international clients,” Conor said. “Fortunately, we have been able to grow off of the strength of the value we deliver to our customers, so outside investment has been unnecessary. This has only been possible because of the strength of our offering, as over 70 percent of our clients are referrals. By having our clients drive our growth, it allows us to be solely answerable to our clients’ needs and to focus all of our effort on delivering a product of great value.”

Tribe pointed to several companies that are succeeding in recognizing the importance of this shift, and are actively investing time and resources on fostering a community of digital content creators to drive sales, including Anastasia Beverly Hills, the fastest growing consumer brand in its field. Too Faced Cosmetics, which in November was acquired by Estée Lauder Companies for a record $1.45 billion dollars, is also named as a brand succeeding in the space.

Numerous companies look to Tribe as a means of maintaining an advantage within a rapidly changing and increasingly competitive space. Toto Haba, VP Strategy, Global Digital Marketing for Benefit Cosmetics, noted, “Benefit Cosmetics uses the earned media insights from Tribe Dynamics to quickly see the ROI of our influencer activations. Knowing how individual influencers have responded to our campaigns has given us an understanding of who our best ambassadors are and who we need to adjust our strategy to reach. This allows us to vary our engagement strategy for future campaigns to improve our ROI.”

As brands focus on international growth, they are looking to establish communities of local influencers around the globe. Mara McCune, VP Brand for e.l.f. Cosmetics, shares that Tribe’s “ability to track and analyze earned media value (EMV) in the marketplace allows us to stay on top of the dynamic growth in the influencer space. As e.l.f. evaluates international markets, we believe we can utilize the Tribe platform to help replicate our success of building our brand through authentic digital engagement and strong word of mouth.” The newly public cosmetics brand, which saw retail sales growth of 43 percent in 2015, has never relied on traditional big-budget ad campaigns.

In addition, brands recognize that their influencer communities should reflect their diverse consumer bases, both in the US and abroad. “International coverage is critical to our future success because we need a diversity of influencers to represent the diversity of beauty worldwide. Customers want to see products on familiar faces that they trust, and in many foreign markets, that isn’t always someone that speaks English,” Toto acknowledged.

As for Tribe Dynamics, the company has always adapted to better serve the changing needs of the beauty industry, and international expansion is no exception. As Begley puts it, “Our growth is directly connected to the needs of our clients, and their current needs are international expansion.”