Turning brand advocacy into a customer acquisition engine

The Insight: Skinstitut’s strongest asset was advocacy – a loyal base that genuinely rated the product and said so. But that word-of-mouth only ever reached people who already knew the brand, and the growth target was new customers who didn’t.

Cold prospecting audiences don’t take a brand’s word for it – they take the word of people they trust. So rather than manufacture that credibility from scratch, we borrowed it. Creator partnerships let us take the authentic recommendation Skinstitut was already known for and hand it to trusted voices who could carry it into new, high-value audiences – turning organic word-of-mouth into a scalable acquisition channel.

The Approach: Rather than treating influencer marketing as a standalone awareness play, we used creator partnerships as a performance lever – pairing the trust of a genuine recommendation with the precision of Meta’s prospecting tools. A structured burst strategy then concentrated that activity so awareness peaked right ahead of key sales moments, when purchase intent was highest.

Execution included:

• Burst ThruPlay campaigns to maximise reach across qualified prospecting audiences.
• Budget weighted to content quality – targeting and spend allocated to the relevance and performance of each creator’s content, rather than spread evenly.
• Flighting around demand peaks – creator activity ramped ahead of major product launches and promotional periods to build demand before intent peaked.
• Meta Partnership Ads to amplify top-performing creator content, combining the credibility of an influencer recommendation with Meta’s advanced targeting.