Celebrity and Influencer Marketing
The grand prize of marketing for many brands is getting a celebrity placement or endorsement. Although that can be complicated and difficult to achieve, when done right it can bring a lot of positive results.
Although times are different from the days when celebrities could wear a certain piece of clothing and then have everyone talking about it for weeks after, one change really stands out — the price tag that comes with that kind of influence.
In this digital era filled with social media platforms, celebrities and influencers understand the power they have to endorse and promote, and understand how they can transform a company’s brand awareness through such practices.
Nevertheless, organic celebrity and influencer promotions and endorsements still happen relatively often. One the other hand, paid endorsements require a big budget and a lot of work, but they can still be achieved.
Celebrity Access
Getting an endorsement from a celebrity takes a lot of time because it’s not possible to reach out to them directly in the first place. That’s why celebrity and influencer marketing has a lot of different strategies, and they never start with the celebrities themselves.
Since people are constantly sending and promoting products to celebrities, things can get lost in all the noise. Instead of companies immediately trying to market to the celebrities themselves, it’s best to first start targeting those that have access to them.
These are the people that celebrities trust and are more likely to give their attention to, especially when looking for product or service recommendations. To find out who these people are, companies should pay attention to who a given celebrity or influencer interacts with on a daily basis, especially those within the same industry as the company doing the marketing. For example, a makeup company can look up a celebrity’s makeup artist while a wellness company can search for a celebrity’s personal trainer.
Sending Products
Plenty of PR professionals are very familiar with the companies that gift a lot of products to consumers and then hope for the best. In this case, the best way to do it is having the celebrity or influencer talk about the product, or even get spotted with it.
However, instead of sending a product to a long list of people, it’s best to take a slower and more learned approach by sending gifts to those people who have the same values as a given company, and who are likely to use their product.
Timing and Action
Most celebrity and influencer events are public knowledge, and if a company has products or services relevant to a certain event , then sending a note to the celebrity and offering free products for those milestones or events can work really well.
Finally, once a placement or endorsement has been secured, companies should reach out to media outlets. They need to let these outlets know that a celebrity has promoted their product for the company to increase the reach of that marketing effort. Because a celebrity using or talking about a product won’t have as big of an impact as when media outlets and consumers are made aware of such an event.
Ronn Torossian is the CEO and Founder of 5W Public Relations. 5W PR is a leading digital pr and influencer marketing agency.
