How to adapt your influencer ad creative for maximum impact
Influencer marketing is increasingly becoming a more prevalent part of the marketing mix for brands across industries. But although many brands have begun to acknowledge its potential benefits, many still struggle to extract the real potential from influencer collaborations. If you’re looking to improve influencer campaign performance, this article provides a great breakdown of some fundamental yet often overlooked areas for optimisation.
While different campaign objectives, brands, platforms, and so on might call for different approaches, there are a few fundamental steps you can take to improve influencer campaign performance and ensure you’re extracting the best outcomes from the outset.
Fundamental Steps to Improve Influencer Campaign Performance
Whilst selecting the right platform, influencer, content formats, and so on are a key part of the campaign strategy and setup, this article breaks down tips and tactics you can adopt to optimise the influencer ad creative to improve influencer campaign performance.
On a more fundamental level, there are a few steps that you can take to improve influencer campaign performance. These steps don’t require much effort or additional resources and can fit into your regular campaign setup.
- Add QR codes to video influencer integrations to improve conversions
- Use high-quality visual & sonic assets to grab attention & improve appeal
- Leverage engaging talking points and CTAs to enhance appeal and encourage action
- Ensure the influencer’s face is presented on screen to improve engagement & authenticity
- Place single-click conversion links in visible & accessible places for smoother, trackable journeys
Let’s break down why each of these factors impact performance and what the ideal setup looks like.
1. Add QR codes to YouTube video integrations to improve tracked conversions
QR codes can make a massive difference in improving influencer campaign performance. This is especially relevant in 2025, when YouTube viewership on television screens and connected TV devices has drastically increased. In fact, more people view YouTube on their TVs than on their phones.1
One of the main barriers to conversion in influencer marketing is the fact that not everyone consumes content in the same way or follows the same journey to conversion. As a marketer, you should map all the different routes and scenarios via which your customers may convert, and aim to simplify the consumer/user journey across each of these.
Adding QR codes to your video influencer integration is part of simplifying the user journey for these viewers who are watching YouTube on their television screens.
Whilst these audiences may not be able to click on links in the description box or comments section, they can easily scan the QR code onscreen with their phone and land on your point of sale/conversion without needing to take the extra steps like searching organically, etc – all of which can otherwise contribute to drop-offs and bounce rates.
Minimising these touchpoints and scenarios where potential customers may drop off or fail to convert due to complex user journeys can help improve influencer campaign performance overall.
2. Use high-quality assets in influencer content to grab attention & drive conversion
Like any other marketing channel, the hook is important in Influencer campaigns. Whilst authenticity is essential, Influencer content still has to make your brand look appealing from the outset, and aesthetics and sonic assets are an important part of that if you’re working with a video-based content format.
It’s essential that you provide the influencers with high-quality and memorable assets, right from gameplay for a mobile game or a video game influencer marketing campaign, or product photos or videos for DTC or tech products, down to your brand logos or website imagery.
Of course, some influencer integrations might require the influencers to capture that content (gameplay, product photos/footage) themselves, but even with these, it’s essential to check that these are to a high standard when you’re vetting drafts prior to the influencer’s content going live.
You can also A/B test different kinds of visual and even sonic assets for your influencer ads to figure out if different assets impact your conversion rate and other KPIs in different ways, and to determine the optimal setup for these assets.
3. Leverage engaging talking points and CTAs to improve appeal and encourage action
Your talking points and CTAs are a critical part of your influencer integrations. Whilst the best influencer collaborations will involve the influencer providing a somewhat personalized narrative about why they like your brand/product, and how they integrate it into their daily lives, influencers will still need a basic brief to refer to to shape their narrative, especially if they’re not long-term customers, or new to your product/brand themselves.
This brief you provide the influencers must highlight the key features and USPs of your product, and provide influencers with a general list of talking points influencers should cover within their integration, although the context within which they frame these points should be left more loose and open for their creative interpretation.
To figure out which talking points you should emphasize, you can refer to consumer behaviour and segment insights to understand what consumers look for when they are purchasing products within your category, what kind of appeals your competitors are using, and gaps that your own brand and product can fit into. Since this is largely uniform across your entire marketing strategy, this likely will not be a massive challenge to figure out.
With respect to talking points, it’s important to remember to not only emphasize what your brand or product can do for the consumer, but what it does better than other brands or products, essentially what sets it apart from other competitors in the same category so you can drive better attention and recall.
When it comes to the Calls to Action or (CTAs), it’s important to tailor these to your specific objectives. When you’re working towards brand awareness objectives, your CTAs will be softer – typically encouraging audiences to engage with the video, follow your brand on social media, sign up for something, or take some upper funnel action.
However, when you’re working towards more performance objectives, you will have stronger CTAs, even accompanied by visual CTAs like the words “Download Now” or “Buy Now” displayed on screen during the integration itself.
An often overlooked part of the Talking Points and CTAs is the manner in which they are delivered. You need to ensure that the tone that the influencer adopts when presenting these Talking Points and CTAs is tailored to the kind of mood you want to elicit in the consumer.
Most often, the best-performing influencer integrations involve the influencers presenting the Talking Points and CTAs in an enthusiastic tone of voice and using personalized narratives. This includes strong inflections and intonations or what is most characteristic to the influencer’s usual style, so that it sounds like a genuine and credible endorsement.
Ensuring you’re optimising the talking points and CTAs and tailoring these to your specific objectives, brand, and audience will make a massive difference and help you improve influencer campaign performance.
4. Ensure the influencer’s face is presented on screen to improve engagement & authenticity
Beyond nailing the tone of voice when presenting the talking points and CTAs within the ad, it’s also preferable to have the influencer present their face on screen during the integration, preferably even when interacting with the product itself.
At the end of the day, it’s important to remember that viewers are there to watch the influencer, not the brand. So the longer the influencer stays offscreen, the more likely it is you’ll start to lose your audience’s attention and engagement.
Having the influencer’s face on screen for as much of the integration or at regular intervals throughout the integration not only helps hold attention, but also contributes greatly to the authenticity of the collaboration by making it clear the influencer has actually engaged with your brand and product and isn’t just presenting a brand-produced segment for the sake of the money. Although it may seem trivial, it can go a long way to helping improve influencer campaign performance.
5. Place single-click conversion links in visible & accessible places for smoother, trackable journeys
As mentioned with QR codes earlier, not all users consume content in the same way or display the same behaviours. Some viewers simply watch the video, others like to read the description before diving into the content, whilst others like to scroll through the comments section whilst watching.
So whilst QR codes are essential to provide a path to conversion for those watching YouTube on their CTV devices, it’s still essential to also provide simple user journeys for those who prefer watching on their phones.
This means it’s essential to include conversion links in visible and accessible places.
Of course, not all platforms allow the insertion of links—for instance, within Instagram, this is currently only possible with story posts. So if trackability is essential to your campaign, you need to ensure that you’re choosing the right platforms from the outset- typically, YouTube is the recommended platform for performance-based campaigns. Once you’ve selected the right platform, you need to actually insert the links in visible and accessible places.
‘Visible and accessible’ means you need to add links in the top line of the description box, AND in a pinned comment. Note how it’s not an either/or, and it’s not just ‘the description box’ or ‘a comment.’ That ‘top line’ and ‘pinned’ placement ensures the link is front and centre to all viewers, instead of getting buried under the fold or in a sea of comments.
Conversion links are not only important for simplifying the journey to conversion, but also essential for campaign tracking and measurement. So inserting these links in ‘visible and accessible’ places not only makes it more convenient for users to convert easily, but makes it more likely they will convert through a ‘trackable’ route, which helps massively in measuring and analysing your overall campaign performance.
Besides, it’s important to ensure that this link is a ‘one-click’ link that takes customers directly to the point of sale/conversion without much lag or additional steps or redirections. Often, when user journeys are long and complex, it leads to drop offs or increased bounce rates, which affects the overall conversion and helps improve influencer campaign performance.
Keeping single-click conversion links front and centre simplifies the tracked user journey, and combined with strong talking points, CTAs, and visual assets, makes for an effective, trackable influencer ad.
Final Thoughts: How to Improve Influencer Campaign Performance
These are some fundamental steps for adapting Influencer ad creatives to improve influencer campaign performance. These best practices can be implemented for influencer marketing campaigns across industries and products without need for much additional resource or massive changes in timelines or budgets.
What’s worth noting is that the measures to ‘improve influencer campaign performance’ don’t just stop at improving conversion rates. Improving influencer campaign performance is also about improving the ability to track and measure impact. Since so many conversions in Influencer Marketing occur organically, we’re often unable to get a full picture of the real ‘performance’ of campaigns without the right methodologies for measurement and attribution in place.
On a more advanced level, you can implement specific tactics to improve influencer campaign performance; however, these are slightly more complex and require more prior planning and cross-team collaborations to implement.
Looking for an experienced partner to help improve influencer campaign performance? Check out our services and expertise or book a free consultation call with our team today!