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When you advertise a product or service online, you are not only competing with thousands of other companies in your niche, but you are also exposed to millions of gigabytes of content that people come across every day.
You can win this battle for attention in many ways: you can come up with a new hook, image or video that will make people stop scrolling to read your ad, or you can use content created by other users, and so on.
All of these tactics work, but require a lot of time and skill to master. Luckily, there’s another way that’s almost guaranteed to get people to pay attention to what you’re offering, and that’s getting a celebrity to endorse your product.
Celebrity endorsements aren’t just a great way to build brand awareness and build a solid reputation. A recent study found that celebrity endorsements can increase a company’s sales by 4%.
The only downside is that it can become very expensive for small businesses to hire celebrities and, in some cases, risky. So how can you get a celebrity to endorse your product if you’re not a big brand without wasting your entire marketing budget?
Related: 5 Considerations When Finding A Celebrity To Endorse Your Brand
What to Consider Before Deciding Which Celebrity to Pursue
One thing to consider is that celebrity endorsements look very different today than they did in the past. What matters today is not what celebrity is promoting your product, but what celebrity you associate with your brand.
Working with a celebrity who doesn’t align with your values and what you stand for isn’t just useless in terms of expanding your brand and growing your business. It can even backfire and damage your reputation.
So, it’s important to understand who your target audience is and what they believe in, and it’s also important to find a celebrity that your ideal client likes. A good example of this is Michael Phelps’ endorsement of the TalkSpace™ online therapy app. Phelps has always been open about his mental health. Endorsing a product that helps people relieve their psychological pain made sense.
Once you’ve identified the perfect celebrity to endorse your product, the next question is how to get them to endorse it. As you can imagine, it’s not always easy.
Related: 10 Ways to Get a Celebrity to Use Your Product
How to get a celebrity to support your product or service
One way is to find their agent and find out how much they charge for support.
Another option is to hire an influencer marketing agency.
Finally, you can send samples of your product to a celebrity and wait for them to post it on their social media account. Once they do, you can contact them and propose a partnership. I used this method to get on the radar of people like Ty Lopez and Grant Cardone.
Having said that, while these strategies work, they may require a large budget or the need to find a good agency to work with.
An alternative for people on a smaller budget is to build a brand that allows you to date and work with celebrities. Being good at what you do is no longer enough. If you want to access opportunities to work with bigger brands, you need to be known. You must be invited to events and places where celebrities hang out, meet the people who market and brand them, and have assets and skills that you can trade for access to their audience.
This is the path I took. At the time, I was one of the top Facebook ad experts, but no one knew who I was. It took years to build my brand – a brand that opened doors to work with people like Floyd Mayweather and Mike Tyson. These are investments that take time (and money) but are well worth it.
A good alternative is to work with micro-influencers who have 1,000-100,000 followers. They can quickly grow your brand by reaching the right audience. From there, you can move on to bigger celebrities as you become more established.