Optimizing Video Creation For Influencer Marketing Success

As we all wait to find what the future holds for TikTok over the next few months, the one clear thing is how important the video platform has become for businesses. With over 7 million businesses using TikTok daily, it shows that video content is what sells in the influencer marketing space.

That’s no secret and the fact is influencer marketing and video creation are becoming highly competitive and that competition will only increase in 2025. Brands had it somewhat easy in the past few years as consumers were enamored with short-form videos and the brands that were showcasing their products via these platforms.

But things are maturing, and it will take more to stand out in the years ahead when it comes to video creation and influencer marketing.

In this guide, we’ll share our tips for optimizing your video content and video creation for influencer marketing so you can stand out from the crowd. 

Keep Things Personal

The number one way to stand out is by ensuring your videos on social media are personal and authentic. In the early days of social media, there were no big brands or corporations, it was all individuals telling their stories or showing others the world around them.

That’s why social media has become such a cultural phenomenon that now outpaces traditional media like television. Those origins are no different than what social media is today despite the fact that the largest corporations in the world now also use social media to reach customers.

Authentic and personal content still cuts through the noise more than slick production or other fancy tricks we often see in traditional marketing.

While some influencers do create highly stylized content, a majority of the largest influencers create relatively raw content with minimal obvious production. These are the videos that resonate with users and it works the same for promotional messages on social media platforms.

To keep your promotional videos authentic and personal, try these tips.

Avoid Ad Copy When Not Appropriate

Ad copy still has its place in marketing, but it can be overused in influencer marketing and often hinders what could otherwise be a great campaign. When consumers watch their favorite creators on social media or a promotional message, they don’t want to watch a commercial.

Language that sounds too much like ad copy is an instant annoyance and can even create a negative connotation for the brand. This is particularly true for younger audiences who seem to be more sensitive to ad copy than some older audiences who find it more acceptable and normal.

However, this doesn’t mean your content can’t be exciting or even over-the-top. If your product is about true excitement or fun, you can still convey that without sales-speak. Try to find ways to let the product features speak for themselves and focus on what it can do for the customer.

In entertainment, there’s an old saying that storytellers should “show, not tell”. What this means is you shouldn’t tell your audience what to think or feel, and instead just show them through story and interactions.

Influencer marketing is similar and your video content should show, not tell consumers how the product works or will benefit their lives. This approach is far more effective and authentic, and younger audiences engage with it much more than other types of promotions.

Make It Relatable

The best video content is relatable to the audience. Whether it addresses a problem they face or a situation they’re familiar with, a relatable “hook” is one of the best ways to create videos that have high engagement.

This relatability can be unique depending on your niche or industry, but always be on the lookout for ways to make your video content relate. If you’re struggling with this, look at what consumers in your niche are talking about.

In marketing, you often hear of pain points and then brands create a product that addresses these consumer issues. But it’s also important in marketing. In some cases, they may not always be pain points. Instead, they could be memes or other trends that speak to a certain situation that your consumers find themselves in.

The more you can tap into these feelings and create a video that relates on some level, the higher engagement and conversions you’ll experience.

Keep It Honest

If you pay attention to when a brand releases a new product, you’ll often notice that the reaction to the product launch from top influencers will have more views than the brand’s own release video.

This is because consumers are looking for honesty in the videos they consume. They already know what the brand’s video will contain, so they look for opinions more than the original source.

The more honest you keep your videos, the more consumers will start to use that content as a source of information instead of looking elsewhere. If you notice your own videos getting fewer views than influencers mentioning your video, it could be a sign your content does not come across as honest or authentic.

This can be a delicate balance as you want to promote your product as the best, but you don’t want to seem inauthentic. Striking the right balance can add credibility and attract more viewers over time.

The same is true when partnering with influencers to promote your brand. Avoid being too strict on what they can say or what they can include in the video. Consumers are becoming much more savvy when spotting promotional content. Overly positive product mentions, reviews, or ad reads can instantly put younger consumers off. Try to give your chosen influencer the flexibility to tailor the message for their own audience.

You can optimize your video content by avoiding these possible pitfalls that many brands fall into. When creating your content briefs, always keep honesty, relatability, and authenticity at the forefront of your efforts.

Tell A Story

By nature, all humans are drawn to a story. Whether it’s around a campfire, told on a big screen, or part of a social media video, everybody can get pulled into and invested in a story.

Savvy marketers have known this forever, but it sometimes gets forgotten when it comes to influencer marketing. Brands often think of one-off videos or a series of videos that have no connection. While these can still yield decent ROIs, they may miss out on higher returns if they are connected through some common theme or story to engage the viewer.

A perfect example is a campaign produced by HireInfluence for Paw Patrol and the children’s media network Nick Jr. The brand wanted to raise awareness for its upcoming Paw Patrol Ready, Race, Rescue DVD release and associated merchandise featured exclusively at Walmart.

Instead of a one-off style campaign with various influencers, HireInfluene created a “Race Across America” storyline that involved characters from the beloved Paw Patrol delivering missions to each influencer and their family.

The chosen influencer and their family would complete the mission in the promotion video, which was part of a series that would continue to the next mission with a new influencer.

To start the campaign, Denise Otico, an Instagram influencer was given a mission to help clean a local beach with her family. During the video, the family was seen keeping their community clean by fulfilling the mission and then alerting viewers what the next stop was on the Paw Patrol Race Across America.

This helped to build engagement and provided viewers with steps on where to go next to see the next event in the series.

The story continued with Instagram influencer Tammin Sursok, who along with her family received their mission from the Paw Patrol characters. For this challenge, Sursok and her kids were tasked with collecting and donating supplies to their local animal shelter.

Along with the original mission reveal, Tammin also created shorter videos showcasing her family’s collection and delivery of the supplies to the shelter. 

By this point in the evolving campaign, Tammin’s videos had reached over 1.2 million viewers. This is one of the most significant benefits of using a story within your video promotion is that when done right, it builds with each successive video. It also allows you to create behind-the-scenes videos to supplement the main campaign.

After several more stops along the promotion, the ultimate ending of the story campaign was reserved for influencer Samantha Busch and her husband Kyle Busch, who is a two-time NASCAR champion.

This final stop tied into the overall story of a Race Across America with Samantha Busch’s video challenge taking place during race weekend for the NASCAR race in Richmond, Virginia.

The result was a campaign that had over 10 million views and over half a million engagements across the platforms. More importantly, Walmart was able to capture 84% of Paw Patrol sales during the campaign, so in addition to the brand awareness, there was a significant sales increase tied to the successful campaign.

Overall, this campaign was such a success because each video created for the campaign was part of a larger cohesive story that encouraged viewers to follow along to see what would come next.

By carefully choosing the right influencers, each video was authentic as the influencer and their family showed genuine excitement when participating in the Paw Patrol challenges and interacting with the popular characters from the show.

Another key element was that the story culminated in a finale that felt rewarding to the viewers and helped to tie the entire campaign around a large event. In this case, a NASCAR race with the family of a driver participating in the campaign.

While this campaign used very popular influencers, these techniques can work just as well with influencers who have smaller, but highly engaged audiences.

Nano and micro influencers can often have more engaged audiences than influencers with a high follower or subscriber counts. This means story-based video campaigns can yield higher metrics, although with lower total reach.

However, the goal is always to maximize the ROI of your campaigns, so this trade-off is acceptable.

The most important thing is to make sure your storytelling resonates with both the influencers you chose and your target audience. The more your influencers feel an authentic connection to the promotion, the more it translates to their followers and helps to fuel engagement.

The best influencer marketing agencies use these techniques and you can use them as well in your campaigns.

Optimizing For Different Platforms

An important aspect of optimizing video content for influencer marketing is to make sure you optimize for each platform separately. While there is some crossover between platforms and optimization techniques, many key aspects are far different.

For example, the level of production expected on Instagram versus TikTok is often much different. Some of the most-watched influencers on TikTok can have very raw production values, including green screen effects with many video artifacts. These would often be harmful to the video’s metrics if used on Instagram.

Another example is YouTube, where thumbnails have become rather standardized and you likely shouldn’t try to deviate too much from what is already proven to work. You still want to experiment and optimize, but use what’s already working for top creators as your starting point.

With TikTok or Instagram, the choice of thumbnail has more options and you can generally pick what’s best for each video. On Instagram, you can upload a thumbnail allowing for even more creativity.

Overall, just make sure to optimize for the specific platform you’re targeting and avoid using the exact same techniques across all of your channels.

Should You Repurpose Video Content on Different Platforms?

Repurposing video content for different social media platforms is a strategy that many experienced marketers employ to maximize the value of their efforts. Creating content costs both time and money, and businesses are always looking for ways to keep costs as low as possible while still maintaining quality.

While this approach offers real advantages, it does have certain drawbacks. Below we’ll outline the pros and cons of repurposing content so you know what to look out for in your own campaigns and whether it’s worth the trade-offs.

Pros of Repurposing Video Content

Cost-Effectiveness

Repurposing content definitely reduces production costs and this is the main benefit. By adapting a single video to suit multiple platforms, marketers save resources on creating new content for each channel.

If you’re on a tight budget or a startup, this is often the best strategy to get the most bang for your buck across the social media platforms you’re targeting.

Consistency in Branding

Using the same core video across platforms reinforces your brand’s message and aesthetic, creating a cohesive experience for the audience. This is common in traditional marketing strategies where companies intentionally present the same advertisement across channels to create a powerful sense of branding.

Increased Reach

Each platform has a unique audience. Repurposing allows you to tap into multiple demographics without the need for entirely new content. Although you do want to optimize content and that’s the theme of this article, some presence on a social media platform is generally better than no presence at all, even if it’s through repurposed content.

Efficient Content Strategy

A single video can be reformatted into snippets, stories, reels, or long-form posts, allowing you to maximize the value of your content creation efforts. Repurposing content doesn’t have to mean just copying and pasting across every platform.

Clever editing like the addition of overlays or other techniques can make the content fresh and look like it was made exclusively for each platform. Performing these edits is often far less work than creating entirely new video content.

In some cases, AI or automated tools can be used, such as the addition of text overlays to short clips so users can follow along with they have the sound muted.

Cons of Repurposing Video Content

Platform-Specific Expectations

Audiences on TikTok expect fast-paced, trend-driven content, while LinkedIn audiences may prefer professional, educational videos. A one-size-fits-all approach can reduce engagement if the content doesn’t align with platform norms. Some of this can be overcome with editing as we mentioned previously, but editing can only get you so far.

Risk of Overexposure

Followers who engage with your brand across multiple platforms may tire of seeing the same content repeatedly, leading to diminished interest. There’s a fine line between cohesive branding and message fatigue. Using the same content can look lazy if not enough effort is used to customize it for the platform.

Algorithm Preferences

This one is often overlooked and it’s the fact that social media algorithms favor native content that aligns with user behavior on the platform. Repurposed content may be deprioritized if it doesn’t meet these preferences.

If you’re in digital marketing or ecommerce, you already know you can live and die by the algorithm. Posting too much content that runs afoul of what the algorithm prefers can negatively impact your entire account.

Even when you do start posting customized content for that platform, it may take a while for the algorithm to adjust. In some cases, accounts can find themselves with reduced reach regardless of what they try to do to improve things.

This is less common today as the algorithms have become more sophisticated, but it still happens to smaller or newer accounts. If you plan on repurposing content, it works best on accounts that are already established. 

Another benefit of using established accounts is that you can quickly notice if your analytics turn negative when repurposing content. With newer accounts, you may not be able to detect if your problem is repurposed content or something else.

Experiment And Carefully Check Results

For experienced marketers, testing different video content on social media platforms is essential to fine-tune strategies and maximize ROI. By using analytics, you can identify what resonates with your audience and optimize future campaigns.

The real trick though is to not just experiment and instead follow a protocol of proven methods so you can find the best results with the least amount of trial and error.

Techniques for Optimizing Video Content

1 A/B Testing

How It Works: Create two or more variations of a video where you change only one element at a time. For starters, the simplest way to do this is by changing the thumbnail. Changing a thumbnail can often increase view counts substantially and it’s not always obvious which thumbnails will perform best. This is why A/B testing is so important.

Besides thumbnails, you can also experiment with opening hooks or how the video begins. On short-form platforms, the beginning of a video is often the most crucial. 

Best Platforms For A/B Testing: Facebook and Instagram Ads Manager have built-in tools for A/B testing, while YouTube and TikTok can also support split-testing through creative variation.

Sequential Storytelling Tests

How It Works: This is similar to the storytelling campaign created by HireInfluence that we outlined earlier. Try to test videos that follow different storytelling arcs (e.g., chronological narrative vs. problem-solution format). This helps determine which structure keeps your audience engaged.

Best Platforms For This: TikTok and Instagram Reels are great for sequential tests due to their short, engaging formats.

Time-of-Day Testing

How It Works: You can start by publishing videos at different times of the day to see when your audience is most active. Pair this with platform-specific analytics for more precise targeting. Different creators and different types of content can perform better at different times of the day.

This is crucial because most social media platforms decide on the quality of a video based on early viewing metrics. The better your video performs early after publishing, the more likely it will be suggested to other users. Platforms like TikTok can give videos a “second chance”, but others like YouTube or Instagram often limit reach if a video performs poorly right after publishing.

Best Platforms: Platforms like YouTube allow you to schedule when your videos go live. On other platforms, you may have to use third-party tools to handle more precise scheduling of multiple videos.

Creative Element Testing

How It Works: Experiment with variations in visual styles, music, captions, or video length. For example, test how videos with or without subtitles impact watch time or other engagement metrics. Different styles of captions can also impact how well the video does. Captions that are too large, too small, or don’t follow along properly can all have a negative impact on how the video performs.

Try a few variations to see what your audience prefers. Different videos in different niches may require tweaking in this area to get the best results.

Best Platforms: TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube Shorts are ideal for this because they support rapid iteration and testing.

Metrics to Track for Social Media Video Testing

Engagement Rate

This is going to be one of the most important metrics when tracking changes to your videos. This measures likes, comments, and shares relative to the number of views. 

View-Through Rate (VTR) Or Average Watch Time

For paid ads, VTR is useful as it shows how much of the video ad was watched before being skipped. For non-paid ads, you want to focus on average watch time for the video. Short watch times for non-paid content mean there was a mismatch between the content title and the actual video or the initial hook was not engaging enough.

Click-Through Rate (CTR)

This measures the percentage of viewers who click on your call-to-action link. This is essential for evaluating the video’s ability to drive traffic or conversions. For ecommerce or DTC style promotion, this is something you’ll also want to track carefully. Generally, if you optimize for the previous metrics, your CTR will also go up organically.

However, optimizing specifically for CTR is generally done separately from other metrics.

Impressions and Reach

Total number of times the video was displayed (even if to the same user). Optimizing other metrics will increase impressions as a by-product, usually by making the video more appealing to the platform’s algorithm, so it gets promoted more vigorously.

Additional Tips for Success

• Analyze by Platform: Performance metrics can vary greatly between platforms, so avoid one-size-fits-all conclusions. Optimize for each platform individually to find what works best. Although this takes more time, you’ll end up with far better performance in the end.
• Combine Metrics: Use a combination of engagement, retention, and conversion rates for a holistic performance analysis. These metrics often work synergistically to provide the best optimization due to the algorithmic benefit. 
• Iterate Continuously: Use insights from analytics to refine video elements and re-test for better outcomes. Social media is ever-evolving and trends or other factors can impact your optimization efforts. The same can be said for algorithmic changes to the platform. If you optimized a year ago, those efforts may not be yielding the best results anymore.
• Set Goals: Define specific, measurable goals for each test, such as “Increase engagement by 5% on TikTok.” Setting goals gives you more direction during optimization and can prevent you from losing focus or wasting your efforts on too many things at once.

Set Optimization As A Priority For Your Social Media Marketing Strategy

Social media platforms are always evolving. Whether it’s the underlying technology, the algorithms, or just the trends that pop up throughout the year. Being aware of the importance of optimization will help you quickly adapt to these changes and make sure your marketing videos reach your audience and get the results you need to grow your business.