If you’re looking for a way to boost your brand’s visibility, a celebrity partnership can be a useful tool. By associating your brand with a celebrity, you can leveraging the celebrity’s built-in audience and name recognition and cultivate a customer base that can take your brand to new heights.

Of course, these celebrity partnerships don’t happen overnight, especially if your brand isn’t particularly well-known. To establish partnerships with top-tier celebrities, you’ll need to establish and build your relationship with the celebrity’s representative, whether that’s their agent, manager, or publicist. Once you’ve established a strong relationship with those representatives, they’ll be more comfortable allowing you to present business opportunities to their top-tier clients.

Let’s take a look at how you can network your way up the ladder to the major leagues.

Identify Your “Goal” Celebrity

The first step to establishing a networking connection is to identify the top-tier celebrity you’d like to work with. It sounds simple, but if you’re doing it right, it won’t be. It’s tempting to pick the biggest celebrity you can think of, but just because that celebrity has a lot of name recognition doesn’t mean they’ll be a good partner for your brand.

In order to determine if the celebrity you have in mind is the right one for you, you should consider the following:

• A goodfit between your brand/industry and the celebrity
• The demographics of the celebrity’s audience
• The size of the celebrity’s audience
• The celebrity’sengagement rates on social media

You should also consider what you plan on asking the celebrity to do. For example, some celebrities won’t be interested in acting as spokespeople or brand ambassadors because it doesn’t mesh well with their personal brand. Other celebrities might be popular but lack a strong social media presence, so if you’re planning a social media campaign, they may not be the best option for your brand.

Once you’ve taken a moment to figure out who your ideal celebrity partner would be and confirm that they’re the right fit for your brand, the next step is to…

Find A “Starter” Celebrity

When you’re presenting a business opportunity to a celebrity, you’re not going to be working directly with them. More likely, you’ll be working with one of their representatives — their agent, their manager, or their publicist. And representative won’t risk their relationship with their star client by vouching for you if they don’t already see a benefit in what you are pitching.

When you’ve identified a celebrity, your next step should be to figure out who represents them. You can find out celebrity contact details here. From there, you should go through the representative’s client list to see who else they represent. What you’re looking for is a lesser-known celebrity client of the representative, but remember: whoever you choose to partner with, you still need to be sure that they’re a good fit for your brand.

Agents benefit from every deal their clients make, so by working with one of their clients, you’ll be putting money in their pocket. As you do, you’ll also establish a business relationship with the representative, and that relationship can pay big dividends in the future.

Show Your Value, Make Your Move

It’s important to remember that you’re not just networking by partnering with a representative’s client — you also need to demonstrate your professionalism. Representatives need to trust that you have your act together if you want them to recommend you to some of their A-list clients.

Putting your best foot forward starts from the moment you reach out to a representative, so it’s important that you know the best way to establish contact with them. When you reach out for the first time, it should be via email; representatives are flooded with requests every day, and if they don’t know who you are, they aren’t going to want to sit on a phone call to talk through the opportunity with you.

When you reach out via email, make sure you’re answering the “Who/What/When/Where/Why” questions:

• Who do you want to work with on their client list?
• What do you want that client to do?
• When is the event or partnership kicking off?
• Where is it taking place?
• Why is your brand a good fit for that particular client?

The key is to provide as much detail as possible without getting bogged down in the details. Representatives aren’t going to want to read a 5-page email; what’s more, by providing too much (or too little) detail, you’re sending a message that you don’t know how the process works.

Once you start working with a representative’s lesser-known clients, roll out the red carpet — treat them the way you would treat the A-list celebrity at the top of the representative’s client list. Your goal should be to wow the representative with how professional you are and how easy it is to work with you.

The whole point of this is to build a relationship with the representative, so that you have more ease of access and trust so that you can easily pitch to their other clients for specific campaign. By having a successful partnership with one of their smaller clients, they are more inclined to work with you again on something or more open to communicate with you when you try and pitch one of their bigger clients.

Establishing a good working relationship with a celebrity representative can give you access to a wide range of potential partners for your brand, and not just with that representative’s clients. If you really wow a representative, they might recommend you to some of their colleagues, each with their own extensive client lists. So if you want to set your brand up for long-term success, follow these steps. You’ll find yourself with a solid network of potential celebrity partners in no time.