Two of the most popular, and effective, kinds of marketing are influencer marketing and celebrity endorsement.
Whether we like it or not, influencers and celebrities have a huge impact on our lives and utilizing them and their endorsements can lead to many benefits for your company. In order to utilize either one of these marketing methods to their full potential, you need to have a good grip on social media usage, and on your consumer market. Although they may sound exactly alike and do share many similarities, there are differences between influencer marketing and celebrity endorsements.
Influencers do the majority of their work and spend the most time promoting themselves and their brand on social media platforms such as YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram, on which they reach millions of people every day. Celebrities may have a large social media presence, but it isn’t their main occupation, so they can film an advertisement or use the product in their field. Whichever way you choose to go, there are a few important things you need to know.
Know Your Target Audience
As with every marketing strategy, it is crucial that you know your target audience or your planning will not be as effective as it could have been. In influencer marketing and celebrity endorsement, this means choosing the right celebrity or influencer to represent your good or service. For example, if you run a makeup or cosmetics company, you want to get in touch with Nikita Dragun or someone else who deals primarily with makeup and beauty, rather than someone like Tiger Woods, a golfer.
Not only would Nikita Dragun have more expertise in beauty and makeup, but her fans are also going to be more interested in those kinds of products than Tiger Woods’ fans would be, and your product or service will be more successful with her. Understanding your target audience, and making decisions based on this understanding, is very important in this kind of marketing.
Decide Which Is Best For You
Do you have a large presence on social media? Do you have a young consumer base? Is there a particular celebrity or influencer that you know would do wonders for your business, and bring lots of attention to your brand? These are all things to consider when you are trying to decide if you should angle more towards influencer marketing or celebrity endorsement.
Younger people are constantly on social media and admire influencers a lot, so if any of your consumers are in this demographic, this would be a great path for you to go down. If you work in sports marketing, celebrity endorsement could be a better option for you, since very few influencers are experts in the athletic realm. Choosing an athlete who has lots of fans and can make your brand very popular would be the right choice in this situation.
Benefits to Both of These Strategies
When a celebrity, influencer, or otherwise well-known person endorses a product or service and starts using it in their daily lives, it adds legitimacy and respect to the business responsible for it. People who admire athletes, singers, actors, and YouTubers want to mimic them and use the same products they do, so by virtue of having a partnership with these people, your product is becoming more famous and more well-known.
Additionally, celebrity endorsement and influencer marketing have been shown to have a direct positive effect on sales, an increase in confidence in the product, and increased awareness of the company, too. Getting involved in either one of these marketing strategies will most likely be extremely beneficial to your business.
However, it isn’t always easy securing one of these partnerships. Some companies have been known to pay upwards of tens of millions of dollars to work with an especially famous celebrity, like Michael Jordan’s endorsement of Nike, and Beyoncé’s sponsorship of Pepsi.
In a day and age where we’re constantly refreshing the news and social media to see what our favorite celebrities and influencers are up to, it makes sense that we should incorporate them into digital marketing. In order to properly take advantage of influencer marketing or celebrity endorsement, you must first understand your target audience, choose which route is best for your company, and make sure what you sacrifice for the partnership will come back to you through the benefits of both of these strategies.
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