The challenge
Coastal Botanicals is a small Australian skincare brand selling natural face oils through their own Shopify store. Sarah, the founder, was working with three freelancers — one for design, one for copy, one for video — and spending more time coordinating than building the brand.
Posts went out maybe twice a week. Quality was inconsistent. Engagement was flatlining around 1.2% on a stagnant follower base of ~11,000.
Our approach
We started with a brand-voice playbook in week one — a 14-page document covering tone, lexicon, visual references, photography mood, and the kinds of posts that should never go out under the brand name. Sarah signed off on it before we shipped a single asset.
From there we ran the Pro Package: 40 posts/month, 10 short-form videos/month, unlimited graphics. We added the Ads Add-on after month two when the organic flywheel had built enough creative inventory to feed paid testing.
The execution
The cadence shift was the biggest change. We moved from 2 posts/week to 4 posts/day across feed, stories, and reels. Every post was shipped through the playbook review.
Three things drove the gains:
- Tight visual identity. Every asset used the same five-color palette, two type weights, and a consistent photography treatment. The feed started looking like one studio's work instead of three freelancers'.
- Hook-first videos. We tested 18 different hook formats in month one, found the three that worked for Coastal's audience, and rebuilt the video pipeline around them.
- UGC remixes. We pulled customer photos from the brand's hashtag, edited them into branded reels with permission, and turned them into the highest-performing post type by month three.
Results after 4 months
- Instagram followers grew from 11k to 45k (+312%)
- Monthly impressions hit 8.2M, up from 240k baseline
- $184k in attributed DTC revenue from social (first-touch via UTM)
- Customer acquisition cost from organic dropped 41% as creative inventory compounded
- Sarah moved from spending ~12 hours/week on content to 1 hour reviewing the calendar
What's next
We're rolling out a TikTok account in Q2 using the same playbook, plus a quarterly limited-edition product drop strategy where the entire content cadence builds toward a 10-day launch window.