Creator-led paid social took Kesari Naturals from a plateau to a 3.4x blended ROAS

Kesari Naturals had grown to ₹78 Cr in annual revenue on a single hero creative — a studio-shot serum pour that had been running for fourteen months. Frequency on their Meta prospecting campaigns had climbed to 4.8, CAC had drifted from ₹3,150 to ₹5,060, and blended ROAS sat at 1.9x. Their in-house team was producing four studio assets a month, none of which outperformed the original. They were, in their own words, "paying more every month for the same customer."

We diagnosed the problem as a creative supply problem, not a media problem. The account structure was sound; the input was starving. We rebuilt the top of the funnel around creator-generated content: source 40+ creators across skinimalism, sensitive-skin and dermatology-adjacent niches, brief them against four distinct message angles (ingredient proof, texture ASMR, routine integration, before/after with disclosure), then treat every creator asset as a media test rather than a social post. Winners get whitelisted and scaled; losers get retired within 96 hours.

We sourced 42 creators between 8K and 340K followers, weighted 70% toward micro tiers where engagement and per-asset economics were strongest. Every contract included 12-month paid usage and whitelisting rights, negotiated up front rather than retroactively. Creators shipped 168 assets in the first nine weeks. We ran them in a 3-cell testing structure at ₹1.2 lakh/day, promoted anything clearing a 1.8% outbound CTR and ₹1,830 CPA into a scaling campaign via Spark Ads from the creator handle, and rebuilt the landing experience to mirror the winning creative angle rather than the brand homepage. Attribution ran on a blended MER target of 3.1x with post-purchase survey data as the tiebreaker.

Blended ROAS moved from 1.9x to 3.4x over 118 days while monthly spend increased 2.6x. Twenty-nine of the 168 creator assets became durable scaling creatives, and the top performer — a 22-second sensitive-skin routine from a 14K-follower creator — alone drove ₹11 Cr in attributed revenue. CAC settled at ₹2,820, below the pre-plateau baseline, at nearly triple the spend.