Hero Bread

A new health food brand drives viral sales by building authentic relationships with content creators through Aspire’s Agency Services team.

Key Performance Indicators

• ROAS: +2x
• Conversions: 1200
• Increase in AOV: 8%

Key features used:

• Agency Services
• Creator Marketplace
• Social Listening

“Between influencer and agency fees, we were looking at around 25k a month for output that didn’t perform well even with paid amplification. Now using Aspire, we’re able to create content that roughly doubled our ROAS, which is outperforming our paid social programs.”
— Christina Blaisdell Oyler, VP of eCommerce at Hero Bread

Challenge

Hero Bread, backed by high-profile investors, recently announced its flagship low-carb bread alternative will be available in stores nationwide. While the brand is a staple within the tight-knit keto community within 16 months of launch, Hero Bread’s goal is to expand their market share beyond niche health shoppers. To connect with this audience at scale, Christina Blaisdell Oyler, VP of eCommerce at Hero Bread, leveraged Aspire’s influencer marketing solution to reach a broader audience of shoppers through social media.

Solution

Activating “always on” interest through Aspire’s Creator Marketplace

Before partnering with Aspire, Hero Bread found it challenging to build authentic relationships with creators. Without the ability to manage inbound interest through Aspire’s Creator Marketplace or Social Listening features, Hero was relying on an agency to cold email creators who weren’t necessarily passionate about Hero Bread’s brand or product.

Once Christina’s team started using Aspire to find and communicate with creators, Hero Bread quickly connected with influencers who believed in their product and were eager to share it with their audience. These creators were able to produce influencer-generated content that aligned closely with the Hero Bread mission and translated directly to high engagement and conversions.

Creator Spotlight: Sonya Esman, a macro-influencer on Instagram, applied to work with Hero Bread through Aspire’s Creator Marketplace and crafted this recipe using Hero Bread that drove 172,000 impressions and 44,000 engagements.

Leveraging affiliates to drive sales

In the past, Christina’s experience with affiliate marketing with influencers was not a seamless process for either the brand or creators. Because of how complicated it was to establish and attribute promo codes and affiliate links, she wasn’t seeing great results for the amount of time and money she was investing into the program.

That’s when she decided to partner with Aspire’s Agency Services. Our Campaign Manager, Emilee Mast-Monnig, launched an affiliate campaign for Hero Bread that doubled the brand’s ROAS. Emilee and the team used the following strategies to help drive sales:

• Find creators, including nano and micro-influencers, who create content that aligns with Hero Bread’s aesthetic.
• Customize application pages to find influencers who are true brand fans and can tell Hero’s story authentically.
• Ensure that creators submit raw and final files that can be edited by the team and optimized for paid placements before launching them as ad units.
• Ask content creators to show off the product within the first 3 seconds of a video, keep the videos around 30s, and use text overlays wherever possible.

Results

2X ROAS and $25K Saved

By partnering with Aspire, Christina was able to:

• Replace an expensive influencer marketing agency that was charging her $25K while only driving a handful of sales.
• Double her ROAS by curating IGC that was optimized for ads.
• Increased AOV by 8%.

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