Ten thousand fewer followers, and the best Instagram reach of the year.
A UK wellbeing brand asked its marketing department to make the numbers true before making them big. Six months into a follower clean-up, reach and engagement rose as the count fell. The report says where revenue still falls short.
Period: July 2026, one month inside an ongoing retainer. Every figure is taken from the client report and labelled with its source. No figure has been rounded upward.
The client
AEQUIL is a UK wellbeing brand spanning supplements, essential-oil patches and digital breathwork and sound tools, with a clinical side and a patient list. Cush is its marketing department: content, video, email, paid, search and the monthly read-out that includes the bad news.
Where they started
An Instagram account of 52,608 followers that behaved like an account of five thousand. Email going to a list nobody had segmented. Search Console inaccessible since a migration. A product range with a real clinical audience and no way to speak to it separately.
What was wrong
Inflated audiences hide performance, distort paid targeting and flatter everyone into inaction. The first job was to make every number a true one, even when the true one is smaller.
What we did
A follower clean-up programme running since January, removing inactive and fake accounts month by month.
Twenty-seven videos in the month at a 1.2-day average turnaround, with people in them rather than products, because three reports in a row had shown people outperform product imagery.
Eight email sends, segmented: an appointment update to the patient list opened at 71.51 per cent; the founder's newsletter with a 20 per cent offer produced the month's only attributed email revenue.
Search Console access restored, so organic search was reported for the first time since February: 214 clicks from 4,260 impressions, up 48.4 per cent in impressions.
What changed
Instagram reach reached 14,706, up 141.5 per cent and the highest of 2026, with engagement up 63 per cent, on a following that had shrunk by 10,400. Facebook reach rose 71.9 per cent with no boosted spend. Five Meta-attributed sales, the best since launch, and five consultations booked without paid spend. Revenue remained weak and the report says so; August was set as a build month for a September clearance with dated deadlines.
The evidence
Every number on this page carries one of three labels, and the period it covers is stated above the figures.
A smaller true audience beats a large false one.
The sector was wellbeing. The move was cleaning the audience before scaling it, and reporting the shortfall alongside the gain. The discipline is uncomfortable and it is why the numbers can be trusted.
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