How Archive can turn your brand into a growth channel
The Natural Patch Co utilized UGC through Archive to sell over 20M products
Sam Claassen
January 12, 2023
Happy New Year!
I'm going to start doing several sponsored posts a year.
I will only feature a tool if:
a) it is directly used for growth, and
b) I have a real person to interview who has used the tool successfully.
For this interview, I sat down with Michael Jankie, founder of The Natural Patch Co. to discuss how they've been using Archive for growth. If you read the post and want to try it for free, subscribers can get a 2-month free trial by using the code HOG2MOFREE when you check out.
What is the Natural Patch Co?
The Natural Patch Co creates sticker skin patches for kids and families. Each patch safely delivers the health effects of essential oils. The patches have a wide range of uses, such as repelling mosquitos, and helping promote better sleep and stress relief. They work by releasing a controlled amount of vapour, allowing the effects to last for hours at a time. Each product is 100% biodegradable.
The company started in November of 2019 when Jankie's youngest kept getting bitten by mosquitos. They figured it would be cool to do a citronella candle as a sticker. Four months later when the pandemic hit and shut down Australia, they decided it was time to launch! They knew what a good D2C company looked like because they'd done it before.
Why use their patches?
Prevent bug bites
Reduce anxiety
Sleep issues
Meltdowns and tantrums
Not being able to focus
How much have they sold?
The Natural Patch Co has sold more than 20M individual stickers in the last few years. Kim Kardashian even posted about them, which also happens to be where Archive enters the picture. But more on that in a moment.
What is Archive?
Archive is a social media tool that lets you discover people who are talking about your brand online. It detects Instagram stories, reels, feed posts, and TikTok videos (currently in beta). Brands can collect all their tagged posts in one place where they can download, organize and share them.
It's not only a CRM for this kind of UGC (user-generated content), but also a community management and marketing operations tool. They have a feature that allows you to instantly get the rights for any content you want to use in marketing. Something that was key for the Nature Patch Co's growth.
How has Natural Patch Co used Archive to grow?
The power of brand
Natural Patch Co patches have a consistent margin, are cheap to ship and are such an obvious repeat purchase that it almost looks like a subscription model. But more than all of these things, Michael understands branding at all stages of a business. He also understood this was particularly important for a product purchased by parents for their children.
Parents are willing to spend a LOT of money on solutions for their children. When a product solves a child's problem, it also solves the problem for a parent. But there is an obstacle that must be overcome as a new product: trust. And the solution to trust is typically brand.
Consumers are naturally hesitant to purchase things online (even today). One way to solve this is with fantastic customer service. Very early on, Michael enabled his customer support team to respond as fast as possible to reduce the anxiety of the customer. If someone was unhappy, they had full scope and autonomy to do whatever was needed to change it. Usually, this was shipping issues, where they would immediately send out a free one. Their customer support team are pros at turning unhappy customers into advocates.
It's important to go into detail on branding because and trust, because this is the true power of UGC (and in turn, Archive). But you can't magically create a strong brand, you have to build up the foundations. Do the work, and people will very quickly trust and love you.
The Natural Patch Co did something very well early on: they created something people (and parents) were proud to buy.
Converting brand to UGC
Before Michael discovered Archive, they were already utilizing UGC. The problem? It was all manual.
Michael thinks that the market is shifting away from paid influencers and partnerships. The strategy is stale and people don't trust paid recommendations anymore. So people would want paid partnerships with them, but it didn't feel authentic. They wanted to make customers SO HAPPY that they write about them from their own valuation. If you can achieve this, you are safe from copycats entering the market (you can't "steal" UGC like you can an affiliate).
The challenges of UGC
So, they tried to utilize their strongest marketing team: customer service. The team would start asking for photos and media from happy customers. They started collecting UGC that people were already posting across platforms. It turns out, this is quite difficult. Posts are hard to find and some, like Instagram stories, disappear. They had 3 people working full-time trying to catch everything, but even then, they were missing a lot. The process was just rough. The team would take screenshots, download them, and add them to a folder for outreach to use in marketing (they also had to get legal rights to use the content), etc.
Finding Archive
Michael was fortunate enough to come across a PR article about Archive and joined the beta program. He got onto the app and was very impressed. So impressed, in fact, he wished he could have invested. The tool immediately replaced 80% of the work from the team of 3, and it was better quality as well. It saves the data into a usable format, and discovered even more content than they were getting. It never missed a single post.
Since then the product has developed even more. Michael now creates collections for groups of products. When people tag a product, it goes right into an automated flow of becoming a marketing asset.
How does the Natural Patch Co use Archive?
It's actually pretty simple:
Monitor posts people are making about them
Save the content for use in marketing
Automates requesting legal rights to use
The last point is a big one. Even if you were to find every person posting about your brand (which you won't), you can't just screenshot their post and use it in an ad or an email. You have to get the rights to use it. Most companies can't afford to officially go through the process to do everything correctly. The Natural Patch Co did, but it was messy and expensive. They hired lawyers in multiple regions to put together documents, processes, etc.
Then Archive came out with the legal request feature! It fully automated everything: the tool sends them a link with a screenshot of what they are talking about, and then they can check the box and give permission. This for them was the game changer. It saved 5 people's worth of salaries and also improved the process.
Ways to use UGC posts:
Share the post on social media
Use the post in your ads
Put posts on your website to increase the conversion rate
Email marketing and nurturing
Churn messaging
So where does Kim Kardashian come in?
As we mentioned above, Michael worked hard with his team to develop something that was instagramable. Eventually, this led to one of the most famous people in the world adding their product to her Instagram story. A post that usually would have cost $1M+, all organically! And remember, Instagram stories disappear, so it's quite possible they would have missed this post entirely without Archive.
If this would happen to most founders, they would panic (and frankly probably miss the full opportunity). The funny thing is, because Archive is so automated, they treated Kim Kardashian as if she was a suburban mom who posted on Instagram. The tool sent her a short friendly message asking if they could share her post, and she clicked yes!
Michael points out that had he been awake, he would have tried to overthink it and maybe would have blown the process. Instead, the tool handled everything perfectly. Afterward, of course, they thanked her for the support, offered to send her more patches with a kind letter (they didn't ask anything, just said thanks) and a couple of weeks later she posted again!
Every brand creator hopes a major celebrity or influencer naturally recommends them. And when they do, make sure you're ready.
Try Archive for yourself!
Heads of Growth subscribers can get a 2-month free trial by using the code HOG2MOFREE when you check out.
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