Keenya Kelly knows the power of video. As the CEO of video marketing and consulting agency If You Create It, she’s helped entrepreneurs turn short-form content into big results. Her passion comes from her own experience. After growing an audience of 600,000+ and generating over $2 million with vertical video in just four years, she’s now on a mission to help others do the same.
During a recent Social Media Breakfast of Houston, she shared her top insights about using TikTok to help businesses grow.
Be Willing to Try New Things
Keenya’s path to success began back in college when she first started working for a network marketing company in Michigan, eventually becoming the top salesperson in the state. Realizing she had a knack for sales and marketing, a few years later she opened her own brand design agency “just teaching people what I knew about personal branding.”
When Covid hit in 2020, she started experimenting with TikTok. At first she simply created random content and posted it, admitting she “didn't know what was going on.” Then one of her videos went viral.
She now says that TikTok “changed my entire trajectory of my life and my business. And at the end of that year, I cancelled my design agency and said ‘I'm going all in on video marketing,’ and everything has just catapulted since then.”
Her story is a great reminder that business growth often comes from being open to experimentation, even if at the beginning you don’t fully know what you’re doing.
Building Community Through TikTok
When Keenya moved back to Houston after living in California for a few years, she knew she wanted to make new friends as quickly as possible. She created a second TikTok account, this one focusing on her personal life. “I started creating content about my life in Houston…. talking about all the different things. And then it started to really grow because I was just implementing my own strategies.” She posted a get-together notice on her TikTok that said, “Hey, if anybody wants to meet up, I want to get out and make friends. If you're lonely like me because you work from home or whatever, fill out this form.”
She hoped for 50 people, but the group grew so large that over 400 people showed up the very first weekend she held the event. “Since then, we've had hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people come to all the different events. And we launched this thing called the Social Infusion that's designed to just help people over 30 get outside and make friends.” Today Social Infusion has over 50,000 people signed up.
What started as a simple idea to make friends has since blossomed into a thriving community, proving the power of TikTok to build real-life connections and more.
The Most Common Objections to Building a TikTok Page
Despite her proven success using TikTok, Keenya still meets people who are hesitant to use the social media platform, falsely believing it is just for young people. But, she points out, “the businesses who are really looking at what could be happening there are crushing it.” In fact, she says, older platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube now offer short-form video to keep up with TikTok.
Similarly, she says the assumption that businesses can’t make money on TikTok or that B2B audiences aren’t present there simply isn’t true.
“If you have a business and or a nonprofit and they're thinking about getting on TikTok, it's important for them to find out who are they trying to reach, and what is the goal they're trying to reach,” she explains. “Let's…say they're trying to get donors. Well, who are donors? Donors are people. Okay. So, do people watch social media? Yes. Are people in this room or people that have watched Tik Tok videos? Yes. Well, then, the job is to then create content to connect with those people wherever they are.”
She suggests businesses “stop looking at Tik Tok as this goofy dancing place and look at it as here is the new way to do social media, which is short video.” For business leaders still on the fence, her message is clear: TikTok is no longer optional, it’s where the attention is.
Keenya’s TikTok Approach
Because short-form video is attention-grabbing, she makes sure all her platforms feature such content. “Anytime you are creating a video, [you need to keep in mind that] your audience usually is going to scroll away within two seconds,” she points out. That makes finding the right hook especially important.
However, she doesn’t create a different video for every platform. Instead, she and her team create one short video that’s shared across all social media platforms, ensuring that all her audiences – wherever they are – see her content.
“The thing is that the people that we're trying to reach, they're consuming content in all different places…. Everybody has all the things that they like to watch wherever they like to watch it, and you want to reach them wherever they like to watch content.”
In terms of length, she points out that “short form by definition is a video that is one minute or less” and that because “the average attention span of a person is 8 to 11 seconds, you got to get your message done and done right.” She suggests that for people just getting started with short video, “try to keep your videos 30 seconds or less,” noting that “eventually, you want to get to the point to where you're like, ‘okay, sometimes your videos are 15 seconds.’”
In other words: grab attention immediately, or risk losing your audience.
How to Hook Your Audience
On many platforms, videos autoplay on mute. That means the first job is to get viewers to stop scrolling and actually tune in. That’s why Keenya says people need to use three different hooks, is this order:
1. The visual hook
2. The text hook
3. The audio hook
She also recommends approaching video creation with these key points in mind:
1. Be clear on specifically what you hope to achieve
2. Realize that over time you’ll become more comfortable appearing on video
3. Stay consistent – it’s the habit of creating that builds momentum
You Don’t Need a Lot of Fancy Equipment
Additionally, Keenya points out that you don’t need fancy equipment to shoot quality videos and post them online. “You just need an updated smartphone,” she says. “Everything that I do for the most part all happens on my phone.”
Smartphones can be used to both record and edit videos, although editing software isn’t a requirement to get started. She herself didn’t start editing the videos she posted until years later. “I'm a creative, I'm not a technical person…. It took me four years to finally start learning. But when I finally started, I was like, ‘okay, this is not as hard as it seemed.’”
Now, her go-to approach is to film the videos on her phone, edit them with CapCut, and then distribute across platforms. Other editing software options include InShot and Filmora.
She also recommends using a ring light. “And when you get a ring light there's a phone holder that goes in that. So I have one of those too,” she explains.
Focus on Batch Content Creation
When it comes to actual content creation, batching is a huge time saver. “We run businesses and the last thing we want to do is be filming content every single day.”
Instead, when she’s scrolling on social media and sees something that inspires her, she makes a note in a document she calls ‘Shoot This,’ along with the link and any specific ideas she has for using them in her work.
Once a month, she records all her B-roll (supplemental footage) in a single session. “I'm doing all these little things… I film probably like a hundred videos in an hour ‘cuz each video is just like seven or eight seconds long,” she explains.
Also once a month, she films her talking-head videos. “[I get] maybe 20, maybe 30 done, because I already have the scripts and I just film it.”
The editing is then outsourced to her team in the Philippines.
Keenya says the payoff is that “it lets me film what I film and I can focus on clients and living my life… Because if you're trying to film every day, you'll never do it because it's… just a lot.”
Embrace Imperfection When You’re Starting Out
One of the positive things that came out of Covid was that people embraced imperfection. With Zoom calls full of barking dogs, kids, and everyday background noise, audiences got used to the authenticity of real life and carried that forward to today.
“Let's just let people see the imperfections, you know? And I teach my clients… I'm not going to make you look bad, but they're not going to be perfect when you first get started,” she says. “And you got to give yourself permission to go, ‘it's fine, it's not that big of a deal.’ And it brings back the humanity.”
Getting to the Conversion Stage with Short-Form Videos
Ultimately, the goal of posting videos online is to get viewers to engage with your business and take action. Keenya recommends preparing for success before it happens.
“I like to tell our clients that you have to prepare that you're going to go viral. It could be your first video. It could be your 100th video. And you have to make sure that your business is ready for that,” she explains.
That preparation includes having something in place for people to opt into, whether a free download, an email sign-up, or another call to action. “And no matter what it is you're doing in that video, if they want what you've got, they are going to take an action.”
One important reminder is to avoid sending people off the platform. “When you say ‘link in bio’ or ‘click the link,’ any of that, your content gets suppressed…because you're going against the [platform’s] algorithm.”
Getting a lot of views is nice, but engagement is what matters most. “One of the things the algorithm is looking for is that you are keeping people on the platform [and] that means you're getting people to engage, you're getting people to DM,” she explains. To encourage that, she recommends using a chatbot or virtual assistant to follow up with people who comment or message.
To hear all of Keenya’s insights, watch the full podcast.