Influencer content strategy for UK and Irish SMEs

An influencer content strategy plans each creator partnership so that the videos and reviews it produces become assets your business owns and reuses on its website and YouTube channel, long after the original post has left the feed. ProfileTree, a content marketing agency in Belfast, helps SMEs plan that reuse before a creator is briefed.

What an influencer content strategy means for an SME

Influencer marketing pays for access to a creator’s audience, while an influencer content strategy pays for material your business can keep using. Many SMEs in the UK and Ireland treat a creator partnership as a single post: they agree a fee or send a product, watch the likes for a couple of days, and move on. Planning for content asks a harder question at the start, which is what your business will hold once the post has scrolled out of view.

The output of a creator partnership is often called influencer-generated content, or IGC (the videos, photographs, reviews and captions a creator makes as part of a paid or gifted arrangement). Planned well, one interview video can supply a testimonial for a service page, a set of short clips for your own social accounts, and a full-length video for YouTube. Planned as a one-off post, the same video stays on the creator’s profile and nowhere else.

ProfileTree is a Belfast web design and digital marketing agency, founded in 2011 and based at the McSweeney Centre. We do not run influencer campaigns, pay creators on a client’s behalf or sell paid advertising. Our part is what happens to the content after the business has it, which sits within the content marketing Belfast work we do for clients across the UK and Ireland.

Set goals that tie creator content to your own channels

A goal such as “raise awareness” gives a creator nothing to aim at and gives you nothing to measure, so set a goal that names a channel you control. Four goals link creator work to the rest of your marketing plan, and most campaigns should pick one as the lead.

The first is search follow-through. A creator’s post can prompt people to search for your business by name, and the goal is to catch those searches with a homepage and service pages that answer them. You judge it by branded search (searches that include your business name) in the weeks after the post, compared with the weeks before.

The second is content production. If your business needs video for its website and YouTube channel but has no one in-house to film it, a creator who already makes good video in your sector can supply footage you then edit and publish yourself. The third is social proof, where a creator’s honest review becomes a testimonial placed beside the enquiry form on a service page. The fourth is lead generation, where the creator sends people to one landing page, and success is counted in form submissions and phone calls.

Choose the goal before you approach a creator. It decides which formats you ask for and which rights you need, and it gives you something to measure afterwards.

Content rights decide what you can reuse

Paying a creator does not give your business the right to reuse what they make. GOV.UK’s guidance on the ownership of copyright works states that the author or creator is usually the first owner of the copyright, and that commissioned work stays with the person who made it unless both sides agree otherwise in writing. Without that agreement, a business may have no more than an implied, limited licence to use the content for the purpose it was made for, which usually means the original post.

There are two ways to secure reuse. An assignment transfers ownership of the copyright to your business, while a licence gives you permission to publish it on agreed terms and leaves ownership with the creator. Most creators prefer to grant a licence, and for most SMEs a well-written licence is enough.

The agreement should name each channel where you plan to publish it, such as your website, your YouTube channel, email newsletters, printed brochures and your own social accounts. It should also set how long the licence lasts, if you may edit or cut the footage, and if you may show the creator’s name and face alongside it. If you want the raw footage alongside the finished edit, say so in writing, because raw files are often what make later reuse possible.

This article is general guidance and not legal advice. For a partnership with real money attached, ask a solicitor to check the wording of the rights clause before anything is filmed.

Write the brief for repurposing from the start

A brief that plans for reuse asks for the formats you will need later, so you are not trying to rebuild them from a single vertical post. Agree the repurposing plan before filming starts, because a creator who has already delivered is unlikely to reshoot.

Start with the context and the audience, described specifically enough that the creator can make sensible decisions on their own: “owners of independent cafés in Belfast and Derry” gives far more direction than “our target market”. Give two or three messages the content should carry and leave the wording to the creator, because a scripted creator sounds scripted and their audience notices.

Then list the formats. A horizontal cut suits YouTube and a website embed, while vertical cuts suit short-form platforms, and a version without background music is easier to embed on your site. Ask for the raw files, the agreed captions, and any photographs taken on the day.

Set the approval process and the deadlines in the same document, and add the disclosure wording as a condition of the agreement. Our guide to planning an influencer campaign sets out the full brief, the timeline and the contract terms in more detail.

Disclosure rules in the UK and Ireland

Any creator content your business has paid for, gifted a product for or influenced must be labelled clearly as advertising, in both the UK and the Republic of Ireland. In the UK, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) and the Committee of Advertising Practice publish an influencers’ guide to making clear that ads are ads, developed with the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). The edition updated in October 2026 adds the CMA’s enforcement powers following the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act.

In the Republic of Ireland, the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (CCPC) and the Advertising Standards Authority Ireland (ASAI) published joint guidance on social media advertising for influencers in October 2023. It asks for #Ad, or a platform’s own paid partnership label, as the first word of the text, and it limits #Gifted to unsolicited products where the brand has not shaped the post. A disclosure in the account’s bio is not enough, and a video needs a visible label in its opening seconds and a spoken one at a suitable point.

Northern Ireland businesses work under the UK rules, and a campaign that also reaches customers in the Republic should meet the Irish guidance as well. When you reuse creator content on channels you control, we advise clients to keep it clear that the material was made under a commercial partnership. The disclosure section of our social media influencer marketing guide covers the labels for each platform.

Turning one creator video into a content library

A single creator video, filmed with reuse in mind and cleared for your channels, can supply content for months. The table shows how the formats in a typical brief map to the places a business can use them.

YouTube is where creator video keeps working longest, because people search it the way they search Google. Title each video the way a customer would phrase the search, say in the description who your business is and what it does, and add chapters (timestamps that split a long video into labelled sections) so viewers can jump to the part they need. Put a link to the relevant service page near the top of the description. Our video marketing service edits and optimises creator video for YouTube for businesses that would rather not do it in-house.

Ciaran Connolly, founder of ProfileTree, says: “A creator’s post is a piece of content a business has paid for, and too often it is gone from view within days. Our content marketing team in Belfast holds it to the same standard as every page we write for a client: it should say something the customer cannot find elsewhere, and it should keep earning long after the campaign has ended.”

Prepare your website before the campaign goes live

A popular post can send a sudden rush of visitors to your site, and a slow page with no obvious next step loses most of them. Before the post goes live, check the page the creator will link to on a phone, because a creator’s audience is likely to arrive on mobile.

The page should load quickly, say in its opening lines what you offer and to whom, and give one clear action, such as a short enquiry form or a booking button. Add UTM parameters (short tags added to the end of a link that tell your analytics where a visit came from) to every link the creator shares, so their traffic can be separated from your other visitors. Give each creator a different set of tags if you work with more than one.

Creator content for B2B buyers

Business-to-business firms can use the same approach, but the choice of creator and platform changes. A buyer in manufacturing, construction or professional services is more likely to follow a respected voice in their sector on LinkedIn, or to listen to an industry podcast, than to follow a lifestyle creator.

B2B creator content also tends to run longer: a podcast interview, a webinar the creator co-hosts, or an article written jointly with your own specialist. Those formats suit reuse well, because a forty-minute conversation can supply an article, a run of LinkedIn posts and several short video clips. Success is measured in conversations with the right people and in enquiries that reach the sales process, so record where each lead first heard of you.

Measuring content value as well as reach

Views and likes show that people saw the content, but they say little about what the partnership was worth to the business. Set up the measures below before the brief goes out, because most of them cannot be reconstructed afterwards.

Track the visits that arrive through the tagged links, and look at engaged sessions (visits that lasted longer than a few seconds or included a meaningful action) and key events (the actions you have marked as valuable, such as form submissions) in Google Analytics. Compare branded search in Google Search Console for the four weeks after the post with the four weeks before. Then divide the full cost of the partnership, including your own staff time, by the number of usable assets you received, which gives a cost per asset you can compare across creators and against producing the content yourself.

The last measure is the easiest to overlook. If the video now sits on a product or service page and the clips are running on your own accounts six months later, that ongoing use is part of the return, and it only exists because the rights were agreed at the start.

Get help turning creator content into owned content

If your business already works with creators, or plans to, the next step is a reuse plan agreed before the next brief goes out. ProfileTree’s content marketing service plans that reuse with you and then puts the content to work on your own website and channels. We have more than 500 Google reviews with a 5.0 rating from businesses across the UK and Ireland, and a call with the team is the quickest way to see whether this approach suits your next partnership.

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