This week’s guest post comes from Billy Bones who will share how to utilize celebrities to help you reach your target audience via social media.

When it comes to social media marketing, it’s obvious that the latest craze is attempting to sign on a popular social media influencer or a celebrity in order to broaden a brand’s reach, help them gain notoriety, and give them a certain touch of credibility.

But signing on a celebrity is only a good plan if it makes sense for your brand and if it helps to reach the audience you’re intending to target. Many people make the mistake of simply attempting to sign on the hottest, most popular celebrity without putting a second thought toward how that celebrity could help them reach their target audience, whether they’re a good fit for the brand, or whether they could possibly damage their brand’s reputation.

Remember that signing on a celebrity means that they’ll be a representative of your brand. There are dozens of things to consider when contemplating which celebrities, you should even reach out with, and many of those questions are centered around whether or not they can help you reach the audience you intend to reach.

Adding a celebrity to your marketing plan can be a lucrative and effective way to reach the audience and gain the notoriety and credibility you hope to receive, there are just a few questions to answer first. We’ve laid out some of the top ways you can utilize celebrities to reach your target audience, as well as questions to ask yourself about your celebrity candidates!

Picking the Right Celebrity for the Audience You Want to Reach

The first step in using a celebrity to reach the target audience you want is to simply pick the right celebrity for your brand. When it comes to determining a good fit for your brand, and a good fit for getting you access to the audience you want, you’ll need to consider several factors about the celebrity in question, as well as answer a few different questions about your brand and the audience you hope to reach.

First, you’ll need to determine who your target audience is, to begin with. Ask yourself: am I reaching this audience already, but could use some improvement? Do I have any access whatsoever to this audience in the first place? Will gaining access to this target audience increase my ROI? Does it make sense to spend my marketing money on partnering with a celebrity to reach this target audience? Once you’ve determined who you’re trying to reach, why you’re trying to reach them, and which benefits it will give your company, you can begin to figure out which celebrity is the perfect fit.

Then, you’ll need to focus on creating a strategic alignment of the celebrity’s brand with the marketing or your brand. Ask yourself if the prospective celebrity you’re hoping to use can attract attention and generate a certain affinity with the brand that’s going to be positive and engaging with the right type of audience? A good match for your brand will show through when your target audience transfers their confidence and esteem for the celebrity onto your brand and then using those emotions to make their purchase decisions. You’ll always want to make sure that you’re matching a celebrity with your brand for emotional, marketing purposes and influencing the bottom line, but you also want to ensure that they’re growing your fan base. The larger the fan base, the larger your spread of the marketing message, and the larger increase in profitability on your brand because of your celebrity.

Ensure You’re Giving a Clear Message with the Celebrity of Your Choice

Half the battle using a celebrity to reach your target audience is figuring out which celebrity is the best choice, to begin with, but after that comes the fight to ensure that you’re giving a clear, effective message with your chosen celeb.

One of the best ways to utilize a celebrity to reach your target audience is to pick a celebrity that embodies a clear message that that specific target audience wants to receive. You’ll want to ensure the celebrity of your choice is of high moral character to best represent your brand. Ask yourself how the celebrity speaks on social media. Do they have a strong voice you’d want representing your brand? Do they speak to your target audience regularly? How do fans react to them? You want your celebrity to give off a message that’s in line with your brand.

But you’ll also need to use a celebrity to formulate the new, brand-specific message to get across to your target audience. You’ll need a clear and uncontroversial message, and this message will differ based on the target audience you hope to reach. Say, for example, your target audience is young mothers with brand new babies and you’re trying to send a message of strong, independent, feminine power to this audience. It probably wouldn’t make sense to pick a popular male sports celebrity to act as the figurehead for this brand. Aside from the fact that he’s likely not a good fit for the brand overall, he clashes with your message, clashes with your brand, and also likely doesn’t have access to the target audience you’re looking for.

Strategy: How to Utilize a Celebrity to Reach Your Target Audience

Once you’ve picked the correct celebrity, there are a few different ways you can implement a strategy to use them correctly to reach your target audience. You’ve already picked a celebrity who can help you reach the target audience (likely because they’re readily accessible to these fans) and you’ve constructed a clear, effective message with your celebrity. Here are a few strategy steps to consider using your celebrity correctly to reach your audience.

Hiring a Celebrity as a Brand Ambassador

Choosing to seek out a celebrity to act as your brand ambassador, and successfully gaining that celebrity, is a major score for any brand. Hiring a celebrity as your brand ambassador essentially makes them the recognizable face that’s associated with your brand – they’re your spokesperson, your figurehead, the person that consumers think of when they think of your brand. In other words, your celebrity brand ambassador is someone who embodies the brand that they’re endorsing, who influences your customers, and raises awareness about your brand.

Choosing a celebrity to be your brand ambassador requires careful discretion as it’s important that consumers be able to not only relate to the celebrity brand ambassador but aspire and strive to be like them, too. Working with a celebrity as your brand ambassador can help to revitalize your brand, relaunch or renew your brand, catalyze sales, and draw in a larger audience.

How do you go about hiring a celebrity as a brand ambassador? Typically, celebrities of caliber will have agents or handlers – you likely won’t be directly messaging or reaching out first-hand to the celebrity. We suggest writing an email to the celebrity representative – be direct, focused, and let them know what kind of partnership, pay, and perks you can offer the celebrity if they act as your brand ambassador. You can use Booking Agent Info to get the contact information for celebrity representatives.

Engagement with Contests

Instruct your celebrity to engage with your target audience. Have your celebrity run contests or competitions, do giveaways, do product reviews, and even host your social media pages from time to time. This will help get your target audience talking and interested in you, as well as drive traffic to your page.

Work on a Schedule with Your Celebrity Brand Ambassador

We suggest gifting your celebrity partner with plenty of your products and then working out a schedule content deal that ensures your products will be gracing your celebrity’s feed a set amount of times per week or per month. It’s likely that your celebrity will be endorsing other products, so ensure that they’re not partnered with companies like you or with your direct competitors.

What’s likely to happen is that your brand will purchase posts in bulk from the celebrity brand ambassador, and then they’ll set up a schedule with you to have your brand posts on their social media pages on specific days and at specific times. Work with your celebrity to ensure your products are being seen by your target audience, and make sure they’re properly tagging you and sending people back to the correct pages. Additionally, ensure that the posts you buy in bulk are being followed through with by your celebrity.

Billy Bones is the founder of Booking Agent Info which is a celebrity and influencer contact database that provides businesses with the contact info for the official agents, managers, and publicists of celebrities and influencers. He also runs Celebrity Endorsers which helps businesses identify celebrities and influencers to work with based on their endorsement history, interests, and the charities and causes that they support.