Unlike a spokesperson or endorser, brand ambassadors take a much more hands-on role in advertising your brand to the world. A brand ambassador doesn’t just make a few Instagram posts and call it a day; rather, they’ll actively promote your brand to their audience (and your potential customers). And while spokespeople or endorsers usually don’t endorse the brands they’re partnered with beyond using their products or services, brand ambassadors will also speak in detail about the product or service your brand provides. Think of it as having a famous PR partner.

Sounds pretty good, right? Let’s take a look at the end-to-end process of hiring a brand ambassador: figuring out which celebrity or inluencer is the best fit for your brand, making contact with them to discuss the opportunity, and how much brand ambassadors can cost (and how you can structure their deals.

Step 1: Find The Right Person

When it comes to a celebrity or influencer partnership, many brands make the mistake of thinking that any celebrity or influencer will do. Unfortunately, as they soon find out, finding someone to represent their brand isn’t nearly as important as finding the right someone to represent it.

Finding a good match is even more important when it comes to brand ambassadors. The effects of partnering with the wrong celebrity or influencer on a simple endorsement campaign only last as long as the campaign itself. But with brand ambassadors, your brand might be tied to them for years, so it’s crucial that you partner with a celebrity or influencer that’s a good fit for your brand. Here are some of the ways you can narrow down the list. In addition to telling you the steps to hiring a brand ambassador, we are going to show you how you can use Celebrity Endorsers to do the whole process more efficiently.)

Look At Their Endorsement History

One of the first things to do is to look at the brands and products your potential brand ambassador has endorsed in the past. Ideally, you want to find someone who’s endorsed brands or products that are similar to yours (or even someone who has endorsed your competitors before). If they have, look at those brands: do they share the same values as your brand? For example, if you own a cosmetics brand that’s known for its cruelty-free products, do you want a brand ambassador who’s endorsed brands that have done animal testing in the past?

The purpose of researching their endorsement history is to help you figure out whether or not they’ll be well-received by your audience as a brand ambassador. On top of that, it’ll help you figure out whether or not your brand will be well-received by their audience.

There are a couple of ways that you can research the endorsement history for specific influencers and celebrities in Celebrity Endorsers. If you don’t have a specific celebrity in mind, you can take the following steps:

⦁ Go to the  celebrity browse page

⦁ Select brands or products that market to the same audience as yours. For this example, we are going to select brands “Nike” and “Nicole Miller”. After you select the brands or products, you will want to click Update list. You will see a list of celebrities that endorse the brands that you selected. In this case, we see celebrities that endorse “Nike” or “Nicole Miller”

⦁ For this example, we are going to click on AJ Green, and open up his profile.

⦁ If we scroll down, we can see all the brands and products that AJ Green has endorsed, or is currently endorsing. In addition to that, on his profile we can see his interests, and the charities and causes that he supports.

Causes/Philanthropic Work

If your brand has a cause or philanthropy that it supports, it’s also a good idea to see if there are any potential brand ambassadors who support the same causes. A big part of ensuring a perfect fit for your campaign is looking at the celebrity’s overall public brand, not just their endorsement history. If the causes your brand supports don’t align with the celebrity or influencer, there are two possible negative outcomes: they might turn you down or, worse, you’ll pay for them to become a brand ambassador, only to realize that their audience sees their endorsement as inauthentic.

If your brand doesn’t have a cause it supports, you’ll have a little more freedom to find a match for a brand ambassador. But it’s still a good idea to do some research on any causes a potential brand ambassador might support, just to make sure that your brand doesn’t conflict with anything the celebrity or influencer has said or done in the past.

You can find the causes that a celebrity supports with Celebrity Endorsers, by doing the following:

⦁ If you don’t have a specific celebrity in mind. You can go to the  celebrity causes page.

⦁ Select a cause from the list of causes that you brand supports, or aligns with your brand image. For this example, we are going to choose to find  celebrities that support obesity causes. Once we select the cause, we will get a list of celebrities that support that cause.

⦁ For this example, we are going to select Tiger Woods and go to his profile.

⦁ Once we are on Tiger Woods profile, we can scroll down and see the  list of causes that Tiger Woods supports, in addition to his brand and product endorsements, interests, and the charities that he supports.

Identify Their Interests

This is another crucial element of a successful campaign: making sure that your brand aligns with the interests of the celebrity or influencer who’s a potential ambassador. When searching for a brand ambassador, ask yourself the following questions:

⦁ What is this person interested in or passionate about?
⦁ Does my brand share their interests or passions?
⦁ If not, does my brand address the celebrity’s interests or passions?

As you can see, asking these questions gives you two potential approaches to your partnership. Either you can leverage your brand’s shared interests with the celebrity or influencer to add authenticity to the campaign, or your brand ambassador can play on the fact that your product addresses their passions as a way of demonstrating its value to the average consumer.

You can find celebrities that are interested in specific topics with Celebrity Endorsers by doing the following:

⦁ Go to the  celebrity browse page :

⦁ Select the interests that align with the audience that your brand markets to. For this example, we are going to select the options for celebrities that like skateboarding, and are male and are within the ages of 10-30. After you select the option, hit “Update List”.

⦁ We will see a list of celebrities that fit that description.

⦁ For this example, we are going to select Neymar, and go to his profile.

⦁ Once we are on his profile, we can scroll down and see all the interests of Neymar, along with his endorsements, and the causes and charities that he supports.

Look At Their Audience

Finally, it’s also a good idea to look at the audience of your potential brand ambassador. It’s crucial to consider whether or not their existing audience overlaps with your target demographic. On top of that, you also have to consider whether or not their audience is sufficient to make a big enough impact on your revenues to justify the cost of the brand ambassador agreement. As we’ll discuss a little later, brand ambassadorships aren’t cheap, so you want to get the highest possible return on your investment.

Step 2: Get In Touch

Depending on your brand, your product, and the kind of celebrity or influencer you want to partner with, there are a few ways you can establish contact.

Through Their Representation

In most cases, the celebrity or influencer you’re targeting probably won’t handle their own business deals or requests; it’s much more likely that you’ll have to touch base with their representation to get the ball rolling on a potential agreement.

The majority of the time, you’ll be working with their agent; in some rare cases, you may work with their manager, but their agent is typically responsible for handling any business opportunities that are presented to them.

When reaching out to an agent or manager, the most important thing is to be concise. Agents and managers have to deal with a flood of requests every single day, and because they only have a short amount of time to read each request and decide whether or not it’s worth a response, you should also be as brief as possible in your initial request.

The goal is to provide as many specifics as you can in a limited amount of space. You should be able to keep it to the key details using the “Who/What/When/Where/Why” format:

⦁ Who are you interested in? (The celebrity or influencer you’re targeting likely isn’t their only client.)
⦁ What do you want them to do?
⦁ When do you need to know whether they’re interested?
⦁ Where would their client have to go to promote your brand?
⦁ Why do you think your brand is a good match for their client?

Lastly, make sure your initial email includes some sort of call to action. Emails are more likely to be responded to if you leave the reader feeling as though some sort of action on their part is required.

You can find out who represents a specific celebrity or influencer along with their contact information by using a celebrity contact database like Booking Agent Info. Here is how you do find the info using Booking Agent Info:

⦁ First  log into your account here. Once you are logged into your account, you will be taken to the main page.

⦁ Use the search bar to search for whichever celebrity that you need to find contact info for. Once you type in the persons name in the search bar, you will want to hit enter on the keyboard, then you will be shown the search results. For this example, we’ll use artist CADE.

⦁ You will then click on the person, and you will be taken to their profile where you can see who represents them, along with their agents, managers, and publicists contact info.

Direct Contact

For certain influencers, you can make direct contact with them through the social media platform that they are most active on. This is usually works for influencers that are smaller (under 500,000 followers). You should send them an initial message through the platform, and go from there.

If you haven’t heard back after 3-5 business days, know how to correctly follow up. Odds are, their schedules are busy, so you shouldn’t expect a response right away; if you get one, great, but don’t send follow-up emails every day until you get a response — that’s a guaranteed one-way ticket to the spam folder. If you believe in your product and the value of the opportunity, then it should read like less of a request and more of an opportunity; if they’re not interested, then it’s their loss.

Finally, it’s also important that you clearly outline that you’re looking for a brand ambassador partnership and not a one-off endorsement campaign. By doing so, you’re offering the potential for a more long-term commitment, which may help your email stand out from everyone else who’s asking for the celebrity or influencer’s time and effort.

Step 3: Payment and Contracting

Once you’ve gotten through the first two steps, the final one is the contract and negotiation process. More than likely, you’ll be working with their agent or lawyer on the details of the agreement. We’ve covered the ins and outs of the contract phase before, so let’s focus on some of the more pressing details.

The Cost

The first thing you should know before undertaking a brand ambassador agreement is how much it will cost you. Unfortunately, celebrities and influencers keep their prices confidential, so the only way to get an accurate figure is through reaching out to their representative. Depending on the size of their audience and how well-known they are, your costs will vary. There are a few different ways you can structure the deal; the method you choose will depend on your brand’s specific financial situation. Let’s take a look at some of the more common ones.

Per Hour

The first is a fairly straightforward pay-per-hour structure. With these kinds of deals, the celebrity or influencer is expected to spend a minimum amount of hours per month (starting at 5 hours or more) doing brand-related work. Basically, you would pay the influencer according to how much time they spend per week or month acting as an ambassador for your brand.

Per Action

Another option is to pay the celebrity or influencer for each action they complete as a brand ambassador. So rather than paying a set rate per hour, you’d pay slightly more for every completed task they do (like posting about your brand on social media, attending an event as an ambassador for your brand, or talking up your brand in an interview).

Commission

A third option is to pay your brand ambassador according to how much business they bring in. This can be a little trickier; for one thing, it requires more work on your end to track each of your sales back to the point of origin to determine whether your brand ambassador should get credit for it. And for another, many brand ambassadors would prefer to be paid based on the work they do rather than on how much revenue their work brings in.

Equity

Finally, if you’re a startup, you can also offer a celebrity or influencer equity in your brand. Not a lot of brands take advantage of this option, but it might work for you. Much like the brand ambassador arrangement itself, equity deals are long-term; simply put, a celebrity or influencer would get equity in your brand in exchange for their help getting the word out.

Equity deals do have some great benefits. First, if an influencer knows the value of their equity is tied into their work as an endorser, they’re more likely to enthusiastically promote your brand. And if you have limited cash on hand, an equity deal is a good way to spread the cost of the influencer campaign and avoid overextending yourself financially.