What Are Celebrity & Influencer Relations?

Celebrity and influencer relations can grant your brand access to partnerships and endorsements with renowned public figures in your industry. These services bolster your marketing efforts to generate mainstream brand awareness. 

With the third-party support of a trusted public figure, celebrity endorsements and partnerships can put your organization in the spotlight and unlock access to an expanded digital audience for your brand. 

Chances are, your target customers are familiar with endorsement programs—even if they don’t know it. After all, the viral brand collaborations and celebrity product endorsements they regularly see online are almost always backed by a robust celebrity or influencer relations team.

Why Do Companies Need Celebrity and Influencer Relations?

Familiarity breeds liking. Research has proven this to be as true in marketing as it is in personal relationships. A third-party endorsement from a respected high-profile spokesperson lends the kind of familiarity to your brand that has been historically reserved for industry behemoths. 

A celebrity or influencer engagement helps build your brand reputation by creating a link between your brand and the customers you hope to reach. That sense of familiarity and community a celebrity enjoys can translate to an affinity for your brand, by extension. 

Studies have shown that celebrity endorsements can supercharge brand credibility, improve customer recognition, and strengthen customers’ psychological associations with your brand. Partnering with a trusted influencer—especially someone your customers admire and respect—translates to real value in terms of brand reputation.

Today, those celebrity endorsements can reach beyond Hollywood. Access to the A-list has been increasingly democratized on social media, and more than 60% of consumers between 18 – 60 trust influencers’ recommendations for products and services. 

By building relationships with key influencers on social media and in the press, your brand can increase awareness and align itself with established household names that embody your company’s mission.

What Should Your Endorsement Campaign Include?

Partnerships, promotions, and shout-outs from public figures in your industry can deepen trust and engagement for your brand. Clients interested in pursuing these types of partnerships often assume that securing celebrity endorsements and influencer engagement is a typical part of the PR process. While a common misconception, this is not true. The cultivation and maintenance of partnerships with public figures requires a specific subset of PR expertise—and that expertise is worth the investment.  

To help paint a clearer picture of what a celebrity and influencer relations campaign includes, we’ll take a deeper look below.

1. Celebrity Identification & Research 
   A solid PR strategy is informed by research. Your PR practitioner shouldn’t make any recommendations on your behalf without conducting thorough research and due diligence to identify relevant and well-respected celebrities with a personal connection to your brand. 
   
   
2. Celebrity Partnerships
   After identifying trustworthy and relevant influencer targets, the next step is to pursue strategic partnerships with them. Your agency team should handle the entire scope of the celebrity relations process, securing celebrity spokesperson opportunities designed to amplify personal messages about your brand to reach your target audiences.
   
   
3. Influencer Relations
   Influencer engagement is similar to celebrity outreach. Your agency team should first research and develop targeted outreach campaigns specifically geared to reach social media influencers. A savvy PR practitioner will guide you every step of the way and assist with developing unique campaign offerings like premium gifting, VIP offers, joint publicity initiatives, product/service reviews, and behind-the-scenes insights. Those opportunities, ideally, would result in mutually beneficial, long lasting partnerships with leading influencers in  your industry.
   
   
4. Third-Party Expert Engagement
   From there, your team of relationship management specialists would begin to develop targeted outreach campaigns to connect with professional experts who could potentially serve as spokespeople for your brand. This phase would include engagements such as media interviews, broadcast program appearances and podcast conversations featuring third-party experts as official brand affiliates for your company.
   
   
5. Brand Collaborations
   Your agency team can leverage that press coverage to unlock strategic collaborations with other brands which align with your company’s goals and mission. These collaboration opportunities often entail corporate gifting, cross-promotions, limited-time product collaborations, and other limited-time offers.
   
   
6. Influencer Management
   To sustain your influencer relationships cultivated from these partnerships, your PR team should manage your ongoing influencer relationships throughout the entire influencer engagement lifecycle, from negotiations and product requests, to content coordination, monitoring for social media posts, and generating coverage reports.

How Do Celebrity and Influencer Relations Build Trust for Brands?

Ultimately, the goal of any celebrity or influencer relations campaign is to build brand trust and authenticity. 

At Trust Relations, this concept is central to everything we do. We even have a golden rule: As a brand, you must do what you say before you can say what you do. 

“Trust Relations” is a term coined by President and Founder April White to describe a new approach to strategic communications. It’s about earning the trust of your audience and stakeholders, based on who you are—not who you pretend to be. This principle guides our approach to celebrity and influencer relations. 

Every partnership your brand undertakes should be founded on an authentic, mutual commitment. Does this influencer support your brand’s goals and mission? Is this celebrity respected amongst your target audiences? Will this person lend credibility to your business? Does the chemistry feel right?

That trusting relationship is essential for any influencer or celebrity partnership.

Before we begin influencer relations for any brand we assess their brand to ensure it’s a perfect match. Want to learn how we can do the same for your brand? Reach out to us here.