When you advertise a product or service online, you’re not only competing against thousands of other companies in your niche, but you’re also dealing with the millions of gigabytes of content that people are exposed to every 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 of these tactics work, but they take a lot of time and skill to master. Fortunately, there’s another way that’s almost guaranteed to get people to pay attention to what you’re offering: getting a celebrity to recommend your product.

Celebrity endorsements aren’t just a great way to increase brand awareness and build a strong reputation. A recent study showed that celebrity endorsement can increase a company’s sales by 4%.

The only downside is that it can get very pricey for small businesses to hire a celebrity and in some cases risky. So, how do you get a celebrity to recommend your product if you’re not a big brand, without wasting your entire marketing budget?

Related: 5 considerations when looking for 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. Nowadays it doesn’t matter much if a celebrity endorses your product, but which celebrity you associate with your brand.

Working with a celebrity who is inconsistent with your values ​​and what you stand for isn’t just useless when it comes to 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 loved by your ideal client. A good example of this is Michael Phelps’ endorsement of the TalkSpace™ online therapy app. Phelps has always been vocal about his own mental health. It made perfect sense to endorse a product that helps people ease their psychological pain.

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 recommend your product or service

One way is to find their agent and find out how much they charge for an endorsement.

Another option is to hire an influencer marketing agency.

Finally, you can send samples of your product to the celebrity and wait for them to repost it on their social media account. Once they have done this, you can contact them and propose a partnership. I used this method to get on the radar of people like Tai Lopez and Grant Cardone.

That said, while these strategies work, they can require a big budget or the need to find a good agency to work with.

An alternative for those on a tighter budget is to build a brand that allows you to meet and work with celebrities. Being good at what you do is no longer enough. 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 that you can trade for access to their audience.

This is the path I took. I was one of the top Facebook advertising experts at the time, but no one knew who I was. It took years to build my brand – a brand that has opened the door to collaboration with the likes of Floyd Mayweather and Mike Tyson. It is 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 quickly grow your brand by attracting the right audience. From there you can move up to bigger celebrities as you become more established.