How Your Business Can Harness the Power of Celebrity Endorsements to Skyrocket Your Online Growth and Brand Awareness Here's how celebrity endorsements can boost your brand and some tips for how to go about getting a celebrity on board.
By Rudy Mawer Edited by Chelsea Brown
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
When you advertise a product or service online, you're not only competing against thousands of other businesses in your niche, but you're also up against the millions of gigabytes of content that people are exposed to every single 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 generated by other users — and so on.
All these tactics work, but they take a lot of time and skill to master. Luckily, there's another way that is almost guaranteed to make people pay attention to what you're offering — getting a celebrity to endorse your product.
Celebrity endorsements aren't just a great way to boost brand awareness and build a strong reputation. A recent study demonstrated that celebrity endorsements can increase a company's sales by 4%.
The only downside is that it can become very pricey for small businesses to hire a celebrity and, in some cases, risky. So, how do you get a celebrity to endorse your product when you are not a huge brand without wasting your entire marketing budget?
Related: 5 Considerations When Seeking 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. Today, it doesn't matter so much that a celebrity is endorsing your product, but what celebrity you associate with your brand.
Working with a celebrity who isn't in line 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 who is liked by your ideal customer. A good example of this is the endorsement Michael Phelps gave to the online therapy app TalkSpace™. Phelps has always been vocal about his own mental health. Endorsing a product that helps people ease their psychological pains made perfect sense.
Once you've identified the perfect celebrities to endorse your product, the question is how to get them to endorse it. As you can imagine, this isn't always easy.
Related: 10 Ways to Get a Celebrity to Use Your Product
How to get a celebrity to endorse your product or service
One way is to find their agent and ascertain how much they charge for an endorsement.
Another option is to hire an influencer marketing agency.
Finally, you could send samples of your product to the celebrity and wait until they repost it on their social media account. Once they do so, you can reach out to them and propose a partnership. I used this method to get on the radar of people like Tai Lopez and Grant Cardone.
Having said that, although these strategies work, they might require a big budget or the need to find a good agency to work with.
An alternative for people with a smaller budget is to build a brand that puts you in a position to meet and work with celebrities. Being good at what you do isn't enough anymore. If you want to access opportunities to work with bigger brands, you need to be known. You need to be invited to events and places where celebrities hang out, meet the people who handle their marketing and branding and have assets and skills you can exchange for access to their audience.
This is the path I took. I was one of the top Facebook ads experts at the time, but no one knew who I was. It took years to build my brand — a brand that's opened the door to working with people like Floyd Mayweather and Mike Tyson. It's an investment that takes time (and money) but is well worth it.
A good alternative is to work with micro-influencers who have 1,000-100,000 followers. They can grow your brand quickly by attracting the right audience. From there, you can then transition to bigger celebrities as you become more established.
