Interview with Kaylee Ostrominski - Plant People

Learn how Plant People used minisocial to increase their ROAS by 30% and drop their cost per add-to-cart in half—while significantly reducing time and money spent on UGC.

Kaylee Ostrominski is the Director of Marketing for Plant People, a plant-based supplement company, best known for their line of plant-based functional mushroom gummies. Based in Austin, TX, Plant People is sold nationwide in Whole Foods and Vitamin Shoppe.

Challenge

When Kaylee came on as Plant People’s Director of Marketing, she immediately saw a need for more native video content—but as a bootstrapped, five-person company, they didn’t have the budget or time to manage influencers. 

As Plant People was still discovering their product-market fit, Kaylee also found larger influencers to be a risky bet. “We wanted to expand our breadth and get our product in front of many different types of people—not just one person’s following, where it could totally miss.” 

Microinfluencers—with smaller, more engaged audiences—would allow for clearer segmenting and, in Kaylee’s opinion, create more genuine content. But finding and managing these creators would still be a major lift for the scrappy team. So Kaylee began researching third-party influencer management tools—and when she stumbled upon minisocial, “it answered all of our problems.”

Solution

Within the first month of working with minisocial, Plant People knew they had found a gem. “The price for what you’re getting is just insane,” says Kaylee. As Plant People quickly discovered, “what you’re getting” from minisocial is, quite literally, everything. From initial outreach to the final fully-licensed assets, minisocial handles every step of the influencer management process. Here’s what that looks like in practice:

1. Brand creates brief. Plant People shares detailed info about their brand and outlines what they’re looking for—video vs. photo, testimonial vs. lifestyle, the clear do’s and don’ts of their brand. The brief can stay, well, brief. In fact, Kaylee likes to give “as little direction as possible” to allow the content to come across more authentically. 

2. minisocial scouts the talent. Once minisocial receives the info from the brand, they create a brief and share it with their community of creators. The influencers then opt-in, and minisocial sends back a list of all the relevant creators. While minisocial guarantees a certain amount of creator options, Kaylee reports that they always overdeliver, and never charge extra. 

3. Creator does their thing. The brand then selects the creators they’re interested in working with, ships out product, and in about two weeks, creators start uploading content. 

4. minisocial uploads all assets to their platform. For each creator partner, minisocial delivers both the final product as well as all raw video—aka every individual take that was ultimately cut into the edited video. This allows the brand to use the full footage however they please—potentially squeezing multiple videos out of one collaboration.

Results

Working with minisocial has been a game changer for Plant People. Now, they have a whole library of content that they can leverage however they please. So far, they’ve used minisocial-managed UGC content on their PDPs, across all Meta campaigns, TikTok ads, and organically on IG reels and the brand’s TikTok account. And leveraging this content has led to some impressive metric results, most notably: 

• ~50% decrease in costs per add-to-cart

• Over 30% increase on ROAS

• Significant increase in organic search volume following UGC campaigns

Looking Ahead

Kaylee is certain that minisocial will be a long-term partner for Plant People. “We’ll always work with them,” she says. “minisocial is very reasonably priced, saves us so much time and energy, and the team is incredibly responsive and just fantastic.” 

✨Bonus: Kaylee’s Top Tip ✨

For DTC marketers, any tactic is only helpful if you are also in touch with the conversion rate on the site. “You could spend all day optimizing your ads,” says Kaylee, “but if you’re taking prospective customers to a landing page that doesn’t work or doesn’t convert well, you’re throwing them away.”