Case study · CBD & Wellness Brand
Organic growth that reaches past the existing audience.
Plant of Life sells through social and email, with almost no paid support. We rebuilt their content around tested pillars and replaced paid influencer deals with a seeded creator program, so reach started landing outside the audience they already had.
Project overview
Plant of Life is a Canadian CBD and wellness brand. The range runs from full and broad spectrum oils to gummies, topical heal sticks, pet formulas, and adaptogens like mushroom capsules and shilajit. Everything is organic and third party lab tested, and the brand sits around calm, sleep, and recovery.
The challenge
Plant of Life runs very little paid advertising. Social and email carry the business, so organic has to do the job paid does for most brands.
Social had settled into sales giveaways and high level educational posts. Giveaways created spikes, the educational content was too general to give anyone a reason to click, and neither built momentum in between. Influencer activity was light, roughly three paid partnerships and seven unpaid ones a month, with most of the budget going to mid and upper tier creators.
The channel held the existing audience but struggled to bring in anyone new.
Our approach
Content pillars. We tested in depth education, product awareness, ingredient awareness, and casual meme led content. Education was already working, so we went deeper into product highlights and ingredients. That gave viewers real knowledge before they reached the product page and carried far more buying intent than the high level posts it replaced. The meme and trending content earned the engagement and the shares. Giveaways stayed, but we structured them as creator collabs and internal runs built for reach instead of one off sales pushes.
A seeded creator engine. The paid partnerships were not returning enough to justify the spend, so we cut them entirely and moved to product seeding. We shifted from mid and upper tier names to small and mid sized creators with a genuine fit and a tighter relationship with their audience. Wellness, yoga and pilates, and pet creators all performed. We scaled outreach to around 400 creators a month and partner with roughly 20% of them, which took partnership volume to about seven times what it was on a comparable budget.
Ambassadors, affiliates, and events. We brought on ambassadors from the creators with the strongest brand relationships to cross promote sales, giveaways, and launches. We built a small affiliate structure that is in testing with more in the pipeline. We also started sponsoring fitness, yoga, and pilates events.
The results
Reach doubled in the first month. Followers have climbed every month since. Around 60% of monthly activity now comes from non followers, so the content is landing well outside the people already buying.
Creator partnerships run at roughly seven times the previous volume on a comparable budget, because spend moved from placements to product.