How Lion Pose drove new sales at Sephora through creators

Madhu Punjabi

Co-Founder & CEO

“1stCollab helped us run a complete marketing campaign in under three weeks for the Sephora Spring Sale and they really delivered! The campaign was profitable and we reduced CPMs by 64%.”

Driving Sephora Sales with Influencers

“We knew influencers were critical for making Lion Pose top of mind in skincare. But we wanted to try something different than the traditional influencer playbook.“

Lion Pose is a Sephora skincare brand with formulas created by Harvard-trained dermatologists. Like other skincare brands, they realized that influencers would be a pivotal part of their marketing and growth efforts and had already created an influencer program with their existing in-house team.

However, ahead of a major spring sale at Sephora, they wanted to try leveraging a platform to expand their influencer marketing capabilities. So they tested out 1stCollab to understand how an automated, more scalable approach to influencer marketing would perform.

Lion Pose's Needs

"Our influencer team was already familiar with every influencer platform out there. 1stCollab was the only solution that allowed us to move quickly with relevant beauty microinfluencers."

Lion Pose already had an influencer team and network of influencers they had previously worked with. But three weeks before the Sephora Spring Sale, they realized they wanted to create even more buzz through influencers.

While they wanted to expand up their efforts, they also had specific requirements for how they wanted to scale and what the needed:

• The ability to scale without requiring additional headcount and minimal increase in work. They wanted a solution that’d require less than 2 hours of work a week on their end.

• The option for the entire team to provide input on creators and content. Lion Pose had specific requirements for the types of creators and content for the campaign.

Most importantly, they wanted to test if a new influencer process could improve their ROI. From working with beauty influencers previously, they had seen these influencers becoming more expensive and wanted a solution that could identify influencers that would be positive ROI.

1stCollab's Role

“1stCollab helped us create a process that would’ve required two additional dedicated influencer marketers being hired and several months of extra time to get up and running.”

1stCollab is an AI-powered in-house influencer marketer that can run an influencer program for any business in a way that optimizes performance. Instead of buying a platform or hiring new members for their influencer team, Lion Pose worked with 1stCollab to run a campaign for the Sephora Spring Sale.

Less than three weeks into the partnership, here’s what 1stCollab helped Lion Pose achieve for the campaign:

• 240+ creators outreached. These were creators that 1stCollab had sourced for Lion Pose and had been vetted by the Lion Pose team for fit.

• 155+ bids received. In order to help maximize performance for Lion Pose, 1stCollab facilitated a real time bidding process across over 155 different creators who provided rates to join the campaign.

• Top 10% of best performing creators selected. Using their proprietary engagement prediction technology, 1stCollab helped Lion Pose select the top 10% of creators who submitted a bid based on predicted post performance for their campaign. 1stCollab then executed contracts for these top performing creators.

• End-to-end management of the entire campaign process. This included sourcing, contracting, product fulfillment, analytics, and payment.

Outcomes

“Our 1stCollab campaign was a success. It showed us that we could be much more efficient by outsourcing the outreach and contracting process. The key to making the program successful is to have a really clear understanding of what types of influencers resonate with your audience. It takes much longer to learn that on your own. With 1st Collab we could search, contract, and iterate quickly. As a startup, time is money. It’s rare to find a partner that can deliver results in such a short time.”

Lion Pose’s experimental campaign with 1stCollab was a resounding success. For the Sephora Spring Sale campaign, Lion Pose ran two campaigns: one that was focused on creators they had existing relationships with and the other was their 1stCollab campaign. Compared to their in-house managed campaign, the 1stCollab campaign had:

• A 64% reduction in CPMs, with similar reductions in lower funnel engagement and conversion metrics.

• No reduction in content quality. While 1stCollab ran the campaign in a more automated manner, the end content continued to be high quality. The Lion Pose team ultimately felt there was no difference in the quality of content produced by the 1stCollab campaign vs. the in-house campaign.

• 2 headcount saved. A campaign like the one 1stCollab ran would’ve normally taken at least two full time marketers to manage. But because 1stCollab took care of most of the execution work, Lion Pose didn’t need to add additional headcount to scale their campaign.

Beyond that, Lion Pose continues to see benefits from their Sephora Spring Sale campaign even after the campaign was complete.

• Creators who originally joined the campaign continued to post about Lion Pose for free. Because they were genuinely excited about Lion Pose and saw great audience engagement from their original sponsored posts, many of the Spring Sale creators continued to post about Lion Pose organically.

• Lion Pose boosted their favorite posts from creators. 1stCollab helped Lion Pose manage usage rights and ad codes in their Content Library to make ads management a breeze.

• Lion Pose continued to collaborate with creators on UGC content. When Lion Pose needed new content created for their website, they leveraged the creators from their 1stCollab campaign to help create UGC content they could feature on product launches.

Sample Videos from the Campaign

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