Guide To Celebrity Influencer Marketing
“Growing an online presence is important but let’s get real about influence. Presence doesn’t equal influence. Presence can be measured in social media following. Influence can’t.”- Martha Giffen
(Business Growth Specialist)
How do you build your company up from a small local business to a big branded company?
The best way to build this up is through marketing your brand. Now, this marketing can be done in many ways. However, what’s important is to get your brand placed in front of the right audience at the right time. And who could do it better than social media influencers and celebrities with large fan followings? But let’s get real. There lies a subtle difference between influencer marketing and celebrity endorsements. However, what remains constant is the fact that both celebrities and influencers are loved by their audience and can buy products from brands these influential personalities recommend. Here in this article, we shed light on the benefits of celebrity influencer marketing, and how you can use celebrity endorsements for your brand’s success. So, without further ado, let’s dive right in!
Contents:
1. 7 Benefits of Celebrity Influencer Marketing
1. Credibility:
The biggest aspect that celebrity marketing does is add credibility to a product. Since celebrities have a designated fan following, it builds a certain amount of trust with them. They feel the product is worth their money and time, and hence they buy it. Basically, they form a connection with the brand through the celebrity.
2. Significance:
When you use a celebrity for marketing your product, audiences are bound to sit up and take notice. It will lead to your brand standing out and will lead to product differentiation. Product retention increases in the mind of the customer due to their connection with their favourite celebrity.
3. New Avenues:
When using a celebrity marketer, you stand a chance to expand your market into uncharted domains. If the brand is successful, it will again cater to an even wider audience, which eventually leads to its growth.
4. Look For Engagement And Not Followers:
Celebrities use their personal charisma to pull in audiences and entice them. Their appeal leads to an increase in the appeal of the products to the consumers.
5. Drive sales:
A celebrity marketer has a large audience pool to draw in consumers from. When you use them, because they reach a wide range of people across different sections of society, they influence the consumers to make a favourable purchase decision.
6. Brand awareness:
They also help to build brand awareness much more quickly and efficiently than traditional forms of advertising, drawing more attention to the brand.
7. Real Followers:
With celebrities, you don’t have to worry about fake followers. You can count on the real ones to make an impact.
2. 3 Ways In Which Celebrity Marketing Can Affect You Adversely
1. Misconduct:
If by chance, relationships with a celebrity go sour, then it can affect the brand adversely.
2. Overshadow:
When a famous celebrity endorses a brand, it stands a chance to be overshadowed by the personal aura of the person, especially when a celebrity endorses multiple products, or the advertisement is designed to focus more on the celebrity than on the product itself.
3. Expensive:
You need to have higher budgets set apart for celebrity influencer marketing as compared to influencer marketing.
1. Expertise
With influencers, there is a certain niche that they have, and they generally make content related to their day-to-day lives. For a successful influencer, making content within their niche is important. Their niche is what connects them to their audience. They have audiences flocking to them because of their views and opinions on a particular topic and this can limit the influencer’s channels of creating and marketing content that is out of their niche.
Celebrity Endorsements, on the other hand, have a different modus operandi. The celebrity doesn’t need to be an expert in order to endorse a brand. They are loved for their work which is outside the purview of the brand, and brands leverage this reach to assist their product in reaching a wider audience. For example, celebrities who endorse cooking ingredients or materials aren’t essentially food influencers, but because they have a good following and an ability to influence the audience, they are in a position to endorse the brand and create a similar impact to that of influencers marketing.
2. Scope
Influencers can use social media to talk about multiple brands. The job is not limited to promoting only one product. They can promote a multitude of products, and their scope of brand marketing can be limitless. They can either do an on-off post for the brand, or it can be continuous work, spanning a few months. Their job is to authentically share their experiences with the audience. At times, consumers even tell them to try a few products, and they do so. It adds to their visibility and, eventually, the brand’s popularity.
However, celebrity endorsements are a long time game and ultimately, the celebrity becomes the face of the brand. If the contract specifies, the celebrity might not be able to endorse another similar product. Here the brand has control over the script as the ad is created by the brand itself, contrary to influencer marketing, where there needs to be a different strategy for creating content.
3. Community
Influencers put in a lot of time and effort to establish an emotional connection with the audience. Their job is to connect with people and build a community of their own where people love and respect them for their work, values and their overall personality.
When it comes to influencers, they are more reliable and trusted by the audience because with little gestures of love and appreciation for the audience, they have managed to earn their trust. They have built their community over time, and brands leverage that as they want to reach a larger audience pool to increase their chances of reaching potential buyers.
For celebrities, it’s not their job to connect with the audience. Their actual jobs are different, and they are endorsing brands as a resultant work of their actual jobs. They are not as adept at forming personal connections as Influencers.
Influencers need to connect to their audience, be active on social media and forge a relationship ahead, but celebrities are not obliged to do so. It’s not always feasible for celebrities to connect with them, and they only do so in the capacity of their actual professions.
4. Engagement Vs Reach
With the advent of communication methods, there has been a need to increase engagement with followers, fans, and customers, and it has been dominating the priority list. Earlier ads mainly focused on and leveraged the larger-than-life image of the celebrities and used hoardings and banners to appeal. However, now brands search for people to whom the audience feels proximity and can connect easily. The gap between common people and famous personalities is narrowing down. Engagement is considered an important measurement metric to understand the success of a campaign. With influencer marketing, you can be economical and still garner good engagement with the audience.
However, although social media has changed the dynamics of the marketing world, it’s a fact that celebrities can reach millions at once, accessing remote and underdeveloped areas where social media hasn’t placed its clutches yet. For those sections, celebrity endorsement is the way out.
5. Appeal
The best part about influencer marketing is its appeal. You can use it with limited resources too. There’s literally something for everyone. The biggest factor here is the utilization of social media. From a platform to share pictures and videos, its transition to generating businesses has come a long way, traversing a long path. With influencer marketing, every business can explore social media without worrying about the budget. Moreover, it’s difficult for smaller brands to connect with celebrities. So a successful influencer marketing campaign can give you the opportunity to connect with people in a more authentic way.
Here, you are only paying for the final content and using the platform for free. Here, you can negotiate your prices on your own. However, celebrity endorsement offers a wider scope of brand positioning as the celebrity’s personality reflects in the brand. Customers form a perception of the brand on the basis of the perception of the celebrity. It might even affect adversely at times. If the celebrity falls from grace, he/she takes along the brands they endorse with them too. However, choosing the right celebrity as the face of your brand is a way out of this challenge.
4. 10 Ways In Which You Can Get A Celebrity To Market Your Brand
1. Brand Or Product Launch Campaigns
The number one and most utilized way to help your target audience take notice of your brand with its promise. It’s particularly effective while launching a new product or a new campaign. Celebrities can present your brand and product in such a way that comes across as both attractive and appealing.
2. Get Them To Do A Common Activity
People are always intrigued with glamour, and consumers love to see celebrities doing normal activities like them. Using celebrities for events such as marathons, or competitions can be a great way to showcase the core values of your brand, along with attracting people to know more, and talk about your brand.
3. Brand Character
Once you build this up, now it’s your job to find celebrities who can pull that off with elan. This way, you can focus on creating a long-running campaign. A celebrity’s individual panache could make or break the campaign.
4. Find An Expert
The perception of the celebrity in terms of his expertise, personality and performance ability should be in alignment with the brand promise. For eg: If a brand stands for high performance and durability, then celebrities or sports persons with such abilities should be roped in.
5. A Role Model
Using celebrities as role models, you can use their imagination to influence a younger section of the audience. In this case, celebrities become the face of your brand. It might even happen that people remember your brand with the name of the celebrity, thus ensuring a strong image and identity of your brand in the minds of your potential customers.
6. Contrast Casting
The basic idea is to delve deeper into a stat? one way of doing this is for the core idea to give an insight, real or imagined, into the star’s personality, which the audience can connect with, thus enhancing the entertainment quotient of the ad, eventually garnering more engagement and involvement of the audience.
If there’s a big campaign and you choose the right personality to uphold the values of your brand in an entertaining and fun manner, you can quickly and efficiently build up impeccable campaigns.
7. Role-Playing
Roping in a celebrity to take part in narration and bringing a grand envisioned idea to life if used properly, this method can be game-changing. Using creative, quirky characters can work only when the exception is on point, and that needs to be ensured thoroughly
8. Revelations
Most of us common mortals are beguiled by a celebrity’s life. We want to catch a glimpse of their normal life. This craving can be aptly used by communicating brand messages in a way so as to reveal an important aspect of the celebrity’s life. Revealing new, interesting information about the celebrity can engage the audience and make them feel that authentic connection.
9. Interaction
If you can bring in a good number of celebrities on board for a campaign, that could churn out amazing results. Using multiple celebrities to interact with the audience and build up a story is an amazing idea to work on.
10. Representation
Using celebrities creatively in communication patterns of emojis and filters is another fascinating way to go about celebrity endorsements.
Conclusion
While celebrity marketing is a fruitful venture, it’s important to remember that a celebrity’s public persona is what you are banking on. So while picking a celebrity, be cautious about who they are. Their values, their choices, everything should be taken into consideration. Just as a celebrity has the power to lead to a fortune windfall, it can also lead to your downfall. However, given the benefits of celebrity endorsements, celebrity influencer marketing is a must-try venture for brands.
Being a global influencer marketing agency, we at Confluencr have closely studied the influencer marketing industry and have come up with unique solutions that drive significant results. We have served a diverse range of brands with a striking 15000+ influencer network and 500+ content-driven brand campaigns for 200+ leading brands across India. We have got the perfect ingredients in place for a successful celebrity influencer marketing strategy for your brand and can help you build it in return for skyrocketing results. Got questions regarding influencer marketing? Write to us at [email protected], and we would be happy to help!
