How Kettle & Fire achieved <$5 cost per mille with Aspire

Founded in 2014, Kettle & Fire is the leading, shelf-stable bone broth brand. Available in 12,000 doors nationwide and online, Kettle & Fire makes each organic bone broth with 100% grass-fed, grass-finished, free-range, or pasture-raised bones that are slow-simmered for 10-20+ hours to create nutrient-rich broths that are excellent sources of collagen, protein, and other key vitamins and nutrients.

Kettle & Fire needed a lean workflow for managing influencers

Influencer marketing has always been the backbone of Kettle & Fire's marketing strategy. Take it from Nick Politi, the company's Director of Strategic Partnerships: "People truly love our products – so, getting third-party validation which amplifies our customer's voice has been a key growth lever." 

Kettle & Fire already leveraged an influencer management software to oversee these third-party amplifications. However, the solution was increasingly difficult to manage with each additional influencer and lacked a robust reporting feature. As a result, the tool wasted hours of the team's time on tedious, redundant administrative tasks. 

Looking to double down on influencer marketing, Nick and Armani Jain, Influencer Marketing & Social Media Manager at Kettle & Fire, started searching for a solution that was built for scale and could offer deeper insights into individual campaigns. That's when some of the brand's influencers recommended Aspire. 

“The entire process – from sending a welcome email to sending products & tracking content performance – was a manual, time-consuming drag. Aspire instantly stood out as the perfect tool to streamline it.” - Armani Jain, Influencer Marketing & Social Media Manager at Kettle & Fire 

Aspire drives scalable, data-driven growth for Kettle & Fire

Convoluted activation flows and time-consuming data practices used to bog down the Kettle & Fire team. Since partnering with Aspire's creator marketing software and world-class support team, the bone broth brand has leveled up their influencer strategy in two significant ways:

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1. Kettle & Fire drives $200K in sales in a few months on Aspire

The Kettle & Fire team used promo codes to incentivize creators to drive sales while also repurposing their content into UGC ads.

And because Aspire enables brands to easily scale partnerships to thousands of creators, the Kettle & Fire team was able to execute their two-sided strategy that:

• Drove $135K in sales through UGC ads from 2000 pieces of content
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• Along with $50K in sales through 612 promo codes
  
  

2. Aspire fuels faster growth with first-class tracking & reporting

Obtaining key influencer metrics was one of the most tedious tasks on Kettle & Fire's plate. Fortunately, Aspire offers the team total visibility into their performance data. 

With this data in hand, the team can now: 

• Vet mission-aligned influencers – Our Influencer Search Engine gives Kettle & Fire easy access to data-rich creator profiles across all the major social platforms. Using this database, the team ensures they partner with the right people.

• Optimize ambassador-generated content – Thanks to our rich content analytics, the bone broth brand quickly identifies top-performing partners, so they know who to invite back. This transparency not only saves Kettle & Fire time and resources but ensures every campaign converts. 

• Secure sustainable growth – Integrations with top apps streamline the influencer evaluation process and ensure every post aligns with social platforms' latest terms of service. Leaning on these integrations, the bone broth brand unlocks bigger benefits from every campaign and confidently scales their influencer marketing. 

“As a team managing a million conversations with different influencers, getting creator stats directly through Aspire’s integrations has been an absolute game changer for securing sustainable growth.” - Nick Politi, Director of Strategic Partnerships at Kettle & Fire

3. Our high-touch support sets up every campaign for success

Unlike other platform providers, the Aspire team offers white-glove customer support that continues to exceed Kettle & Fire's expectations in three ways: 

1. Near-instant communication – Besides replying "right away," the Aspire team packs every response with personalized expert advice and relevant guiding materials.

2. Hands-on technical support – Per Armani: "It's hard to excel with a new software when no one taught you how to use it." With Aspire, the Kettle & Fire team received in-depth training and custom code solutions that fit their unique needs.

3. Passion about the customer experience – The Aspire team is always "genuinely excited to hop on a call," Nick shares. "They want to make the product work for you." 

“Aspire genuinely cares about the customer – that’s very hard to find nowadays. Most companies go after the contract, not the partnership.” - Nick Politi, Director of Strategic Partnerships at Kettle & Fire

Kettle & Fire now confidently runs more campaigns than ever before

‍The only regret Kettle & Fire says they have is that they didn't partner with Aspire sooner. Our influencer marketing platform gives the bone broth brand an on-demand performance report for every partner and campaign – past and present. 

Armed with these insights, the two-person team now make quick, strategic adjustments to their influencer strategy, unlocking some impressive wins:

• Running 6 campaigns simultaneously
• Keeping cost per mille (CPM) under $5
• Cutting cost per engagement (CPE) to $0.17