As any business owner will tell you, one of the best ways to boost your brand’s visibility is a celebrity endorsement. Celebrities have a unique relationship with their fans — fans take a celebrity’s recommendations seriously, and their audience often looks to them for guidance on what products or brands they should use.
Unfortunately, getting a celebrity to promote your product is easier said than done — especially if you haven’t gone through the process before. So today, we’re going to take a look at the process for getting celebrities to promote your product. Read on for more advice!
Find A Celebrity That Is A Good Fit
While securing a celebrity endorsement can take your brand a long way, you also need to be sure to secure the right celebrity endorsement. Celebrities’ audiences can easily spot when a partnership is inauthentic, and pairing with a celebrity who doesn’t align with your brand is a surefire way to throw money away on a campaign that won’t yield solid results.
There are a couple of ways you can identify the kind of celebrity (or specific celebrity) that would work best for your brand.
The first is to find a celebrity who already likes your brand. You can do this by searching social media for any positive mentions of your brand; if any of those mentions come from celebrities, you can reach out to discuss a potential endorsement.
Another option is to create your own list of potential partners, then narrow it down based on their endorsement history. If a celebrity has endorsed similar brands in the past, there’s a solid chance that they’ll be a good fit for your brand and that they’re open to potential partnership.
Finally, you can use your brand to solve a problem that a celebrity is having. You can do this by monitoring the social media accounts of celebrities you have in mind, which will allow you to spot opportunities to offer your brand as a solution to their problems.
Find Out Who Represents the Celebrity
Once you’ve identified the right celebrity for your brand, the next step is reaching out. How you do that depends on the kind of campaign you’re hoping to run — if you’re hoping to establish an official endorsement deal, you’ll have to go through the celebrity’s agent (or, in rare cases, their manager). The celebrity’s agent is responsible for all their clients’ business arrangements; no celebrity will agree to a deal without their agent approving it first. Agents will also be your main point of contact throughout the contract and negotiation process.
If you’re looking for an unofficial endorsement campaign, try the celebrity’s publicist. Publicists are a great resource if you are sending your product to a celebrity; if it goes well and you want to set up something more official down the road, you can loop in their agent then. In either case, if you’re not sure who represents the celebrity, you can use booking agent info databases to find that information.
Depending on what you want them to do, there are two routes you can take when reaching out to a celebrity’s representatives. For unofficial endorsements, you can just send them some free samples.
No matter which route you take, in order to give yourself the greatest chance of success, it’s not enough just to know who to contact. You also have to:
Contact Their Representative
Whether you’re looking for an official or unofficial campaign and reaching out to an agent, a manager, or a publicist, there are a couple of things you need to keep in mind.
Celebrity representatives have to deal with a ton of requests every single day. Since they only have a limited amount of time to read each request and decide whether or not it’s worthy of a response, you need to be as brief as possible in your initial request, while still providing as many specifics as you can.
Use the booking agent info database we mentioned above to find the email of the appropriate representative. There are two reasons why email is a better option than phone calls. First, emails are less intrusive — the representative will read it when they have time, which means you don’t have to worry about interrupting them with a phone call (or having to call ten times just to get through). Second, having your request in writing makes it easier to reference when you follow up.
So there you have it: the process of finding the right celebrity to promote your product. There are a lot of different ways you can approach this process depending on your brand and what you want from the celebrity endorsement. No matter how you approach it, though, be sure to keep these tips in mind — they’ll make the whole process a lot smoother.