How to hire a celebrity spokesperson
February 19th, 2010
Because I’ve worked with a pretty wide range of celebrities – from Ralph Nader to Bode Miller -people sometimes call to find out how much it would cost for a celebrity to attend their event, endorse their product or contribute to their non-profit cause. No matter HOW GREAT your product is, or how important your cause, stars generally don’t do anything for free unless its for their own foundation (or for George Clooney). The good news is that almost any celebrity can be booked if you have enough money. Here are a few tips for figuring out how to find someone, how much they cost and what the process might be like.
First, find out who reps the star. The easiest way is to buy a subscription to Who Represents an online listing of virtually every celebrity’s agent, publicist and manager. Although some people like to go through managers first, I always call the agent. Agents are usually straightforward, no BS types who will give you prices and explain the ins and outs of back-end deals and endorsements. (more…)
There are a lot of business owners that despise marketing as much as some people despise working out. Just like going to the gym, it’s easier to stay on track if you’ve got a someone you’re accountable to. Some business owners use groups on social media sites like LinkedIn to ask questions and find guidance but I think it’s important to have a live person you know that can be a sounding board for your marketing activities. There are tons of great networking groups where you can find potential contacts. Here’s a list of some of the small business social networks you can tap into locally to help find your marketing workout buddy. 
It’s important to change up your marketing efforts and try new things…without throwing out the things that work.One of the hardest things to measure is the synergy that develops when you combine marketing mediums. It’s the basis for integrated marketing communications (IMC) concepts but no one has really captured where the actual motivation occurs to get your customer to buy, call, whatever. To keep tweaking your marketing recipe you constantly have to look for new ways to get your message out there…here are a few ways to do that each month that won’t take much time. 
Marketing – as opposed to sales remember – is one of those proactive tasks that seems to get pushed aside for more urgent ones. An astute commenter in my last post mentioned you need to always be planting seeds for future business to grow. Just like your workouts if you put marketing time on your schedule each week and hold it sacred, you’ll see the benefits very quickly. Here are some tips for finding the right time to work on your promotions, social media, advertising, whatever you consider ‘marketing’. 
How much time should you spend on a weekly basis doing marketing and promotion tasks? It will vary of course but there are some rules I’ve learned working with a broad swath of companies and industries over the past couple decades including B2B, B2C, online and retail.Feel free to poke holes in my theories here…but tell us all WHY so we can learn from your successes. 
Rather than reinvent the wheel, here are some links to blog posts and articles to help you figure out the right mix for your business…
I tell my clients that marketing is a lot like working out – you have to be consistent or you won’t see results. No one expects to see muscles popping out all over after one visit to the gym. For the same reaons you can’t expect immediate, lasting results from one promotional campaign. As you look toward 2010 and what will surely be a better year for all of us, it might help to build a marketing practice that looks a bit more like a workout schedule. Here are few ways to do just that. 
, Yale University’s 
