The Natural Spa is an ethical lifestyle brand that creates & retails handmade, vegan & plastic-free products for personal care.

The founder, Zoe, started developing her natural products for personal care as she was unable to find products on the market that would meet her needs. She soon realized there was business potential in this market, and in 2016, The Natural Spa was founded in Devon, UK, and currently retails for the UK marke

The brand’s primary target is men and women between 18 and 60 years old.

Niche

Lifestyle and Personal Care

The Challenge

The Natural Spa Cosmetics faced two main challenges.

As a new brand, they needed sales to keep the business going and growing, and at the same time, they required user-generated content for their Marketing channels.

Initially, they partnered up with paid micro-influencers that aligned with their brand, but after a few campaigns, they realized this was not cost-effective. The UGC obtained did not meet the standards they were looking for; sales-wise, they have not seen an uplift to make the amounts paid the worth.

The Solution

The Natural Spa began collaborating with Social Cat in April 2021, with the primary goal of obtaining user-generated content and finding micro-influencers that could potentially generate sales.

In this time frame, the brand collaborated with 260 micro-influencers in the wellness, skincare, personal care, and lifestyle niche. The brand built a pipeline of user-generated content focused on high-quality product photos, how-to videos, and unboxing videos later repurposed for their marketing channels.

On top of working with new micro-influencers each month, most of the Social Cat creators she previously worked with posted for her regularly at no extra cost, helping to build Brand Awareness and trust over time.

The Results

Since starting with Social Cat in April 2021, The Natural Spa has completed 243 collaborations and has 17 others in progress. To the present day, the company has gifted 243 products, a total worth of $1,167.

On top of this, the fees for Social Cat sum up to $587 from April 2021 until September 2022. The Natural Spa works with Social Cat on a yearly based subscription.

Collaborations completed

243

Avg followers per influencer

10,101

People reached

490,908

The Natural Spa worked exclusively on gifted collaborations on Social Cat. The only costs related are the gifted products and the Social Cat subscription. There are no other costs related to micro-influencers payments or content usage rights.

Total cost

$1,754

Impressions

638,181

CPM

$2.74

Check some of the collaborations

Comparison with other platforms

It's important to notice, Social Cat is the only platform that helps brand find micro influencers that are happy to work on gifted collaborations. All other platforms are focused on paid influencers.

In comparison, if The Natural Spa decided to partner up with paid micro-influencers (5k - 50k), the minimum influencer fee for one single campaign would be $100 (according to Influencer Marketing Hub). To this, we add the costs of the products plus the platform used to discover the mid-tier influencers and the price for content usage rights. The minimum charge for content usage rights when working with micro-influencers is a minimum of $50.

Social Cat is by far the most affordable platforms on the market. Most other platforms use obscure pricing and it usually starts at a minimum of $300 per month. The cheapest plan at Social Cat is $49. Here's the pricing for some of the other platforms out there (for working with 243 influencers):

Let's break down the pricing if The Natural Spa were to use one of the other platforms and use paid micro influencers.

By working with gifted influencers from Social Cat instead of paid micro-influencers on other platforms, The Natural Spa saved more than $42,183 over the course of 16 months.

Comparison with influencer marketing agencies

We gathered data from 50 brands on Social Cat and their previous experiences with influencer marketing agencies. We discovered that the minimum fee to work with agencies is billed at $1500 per month for outsourcing about 20 micro-influencers and running campaigns with them. On top of these costs, we need to add the influencer fees and the fees for content usage rights.

Let's break down the pricing if The Natural Spa were to use an influencer agency.

By working with gifted influencers from Social Cat instead of hiring an influencer agency, The Natural Spa saved more than $50,863 over the course of 16 months.

Final Notes

The Natural Spa is just one of the thousands of satisfied brands that chose to work with micro-influencers on Social Cat.

Influencer marketing is a must have a tool in the stack of any marketeer or business owner. It works great in addition to your paid acquisition channels to generate awareness, build brand trust and get user generated content to use in your ads.