How Papier Used Influencer Marketing to Scale to $1m in Its First Year

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Today’s breakdown is about Papier, a British online e-commerce brand specializing in personalized stationery, which made $1 million in sales in its first year through a well-executed growth marketing strategy. In 2023, their online revenue amounted to a massive $47.9 million, with the UK being its largest market and the US coming in a close second.

This is what I’m covering in this edition:

• Unpacking their content marketing approach

• Influencer marketing tactics

• Insight into their full-funnel paid media strategy

Let’s dive in 🙂 🙏

- Dev

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FEATURE CASE STUDY
Papier - Creating a Luxury Stationery Brand

Papier aimed to create a brand that offers high-quality, customizable stationery products that appeal to modern consumers' desire for both luxury and accessibility. The concept was to merge traditional charm with a seamless, tech-driven consumer experience.

A one-of-a-kind brand that is leading the UK and US markets. Most of their sales come from their own website and wholesale deals. Since 2015, they have increased their revenue by 50% each year.

CONTENT MARKETING
Attracting Customers With SEO

Papier uses high-quality content and smart keyword choices to attract customers naturally at every stage of their sales process.

Educational content: They have a blog focusing on themes like wedding planning, personalised gifts, home organisation and creative journaling. These topics are widely searched by their target audience help drive organic traffic and underpin steady growth.

• By creating blog posts and guides optimised for SEO, they focus on topics related to personalized stationery. Blogs like “Top 10 Wedding Invitation Trends” attracted over 50,000 visitors in three months. Plus, according to SimilarWeb, their overall organic traffic is close to 1 million visitors per month.

• They focus on specific, less common keywords and create links to their website. This helps their site show up higher in search results and be seen by more potential customers. These keywords are less competitive but can be very effective if chosen carefully. A few examples of these keywords:

  • Personalised wedding invitations

  • Custom notebooks for students

  • Luxury stationery gifts

Leveraging partnerships: By collaborating with influencers, complementary brands and industry publications they can acquire backlinks. This digital PR helps them leverage mentions and links from reliable sources. It's a clever, long-term strategy that most people can use for their brand or store. By doing this, Papier maximises its search visibility and keeps driving qualified traffic to their website. It keeps sales flow predictable and over time becomes less reliant on paid media to get customers.

With this strategy, it’s no surprise that their website domain authority is 58 (very credible), and they have gained close to 70,000 backlinks and 1 million monthly organic traffic!

INFLUENCER MARKETING
#Stationery

Encouraging customers to share their experiences built a strong community around the brand. This user-generated content served as natural social proof and was also used in paid ads. When people saw how others used Papier products, they felt inspired to personalize and use the products too.

These are four ways they leveraged their influencer program:

• Micro-influencers: They work with people who make content for weddings, home decor, and stationery fans. They create content that their followers love, like unboxing videos, product reviews, and lifestyle photos that inspire others.

• Creator in residence: They made a program to work with influencers for a long time, helping them create real content that can be shared naturally or through paid ads.

• Capitalised on trends: The #stationary hashtag on TikTok became very popular, getting over 1.2 billion views. This helped people get interested in personal journals and other stationery again. Influencers made content that connected with the brand with this trend.

• YouTube: Collaborate with creators on this channel to show different ways to use Papier products. Below is a video of Abril Jauri, an influencer creating unboxing and reviews of Papier’s products. She shares a discount code and encourages potential customers to purchase their product. A simple and effective way to capture creator audiences.

Papier’s influencer strategy fits in well with its broader strategy of collaboration with artists and brands, further pushing its presence further organically across social media.

PERFORMANCE MARKETING
Allocating Budget Based on Different Buyer Stages

They use a full-funnel strategy to reach customers at different points in their buying process using paid media. Here's a simple breakdown of what this looks like:

Top of Funnel: Papier focuses on brand visibility.

• Google ads →  Display ads showcasing Papier’s diverse product range from notebooks to wedding stationery.

• YouTube ads → Highlight their brand story and unique selling points like personalisation and sustainable source paper.

• Facebook/ Instagram ads → Visually appealing images of their products, especially new collections and seasonal items. Plus, video ads showcase the premium quality and in-house designs — giving customers more reasons to love Papier. In terms of Hooks, they’ve recently been using discounts of 20% likely to attract new customers.

Middle of Funnel: Focus on building trust and rapport.

• Google search ads → targeting keywords like "personalized wedding stationery," "custom photo books," and "teacher planners."

• Google remarketing ads → users who have visited Papier's website, showcasing specific product categories they browsed.

• Facebook/Instagram ads → Carousel ads featuring different product lines like wedding stationery, teacher essentials and photo books. This is the stage where they promote community-building initiatives like Papier workshops and events like their Book Club sessions and artist collaborations.

• Remarketing ads → This covers both channels. Focus on retargeting existing customers to drive repeat purchases using a discount code (15% off)

Bottom of Funnel: Drive purchases.

• Google ads → Shopping ads for specific products and remarketing ads to cart abandoners, offering incentives like 15% to 20% off discounts.

• Facebook/Instagram ads → Dynamic product ads showing items users have viewed or added to their cart. Additionally, they promote limited-time offers and new products to leverage urgency.

• Retargeting →  Focus on people who have interacted with the brand but still haven’t converted as customers.
  

Overall, about 30% of their traffic (and likely conversions) comes from their paid media efforts. The rest is distributed across referrals, direct, email and organic searches.

RESOURCES & WRAP UP
Further Reading

That’s all for today! Flick me an email if you found this helpful. As always keen to hear your thoughts and I’ll definitely make sure to reply to each email 🙂

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