#SellerHacks 1 – How to Get a Celebrity to Endorse Your Brand

This is the first installment of the #SellerHacks series. These are based on hacks shared by Bradley Sutton at the SellerCon event in Las Vegas.

We’ve all heard about the benefits of “influencer marketing” but the idea of celebrity endorsement (arguably the ultimate influencer strategy) seems a bit out of reach for smaller brands. In fact, it is likely that most private label Amazon sellers have never even considered the possibility.

The first thought that comes to mind is that surely the cost would be completely infeasible for someone boostrapping a startup brand.

When we hear stories, like how the guys from Woodies wooden sunglasses hired Kendal Jenner and other celebrity models to promote them, for “paltry” thousands (and sometimes tens of thousands) of dollars, it all just seems an impossibility not worth spending brainpower on.

That’s right, that is an endorsement from THE Kevin Sorbo of the hit TV series Hercules (for those of you around in the 90’s).

And here’s the hack for how you can get this type of endorsement too.

The Hack

Bradley’s secret here was the use of a website called Cameo.com which offers a service where you pick from hundreds of celebrities (all over the spectrum, from musicians to models, actors to athletes) and hire one to film for you a “shout-out.”

Now, the reason this is a hack is because the service wasn’t intended for product endorsement. It is more for people to hire beloved celebrities to say “hello” in a personalized video for someone’s birthday or special occasion.

However, a small percentage of clever marketers and brand owners have figured out ways of making it work. Sometimes it is all just a matter of how you word the endorsement. Other times, celebrities simply won’t take the job. But some will, regardless of how blatantly commercial the message is.

To give a real-world example, if you go to the site today, you can see a page of examples for any chosen celebrity offered in the service.

Tommy Lister, otherwise known as Deebo from the Friday movie franchise, was hired by a martial arts studio for an endorsement. So clearly many once-famous individuals have no qualms with putting their name, face, and voice behind a brand they’ve never personally experienced.

Why This Hack Works

On Amazon the name of the game is visibility. While Amazon brings a ton of traffic, it is a huge catalog that new products can and do get buried at the bottom of without corrective action. So any method that gets shoppers’ eyeballs in front of your listing is a step in the right direction.

Now, conventional wisdom would say that not all traffic is good, because you don’t want to drive irrelevant users to your products and have them not convert. This is usually true, but some of the rules are a bit different on Amazon.

First off, outside traffic is not factored into the unit-sessions percentage. This means you can drive tons of traffic from outside of Amazon to your listing without any of it converting and it won’t have a negative impact on your metrics (or whatever connection to those metrics Amazon’s mysterious algorithm has).

Second, there might not be such thing as irrelevant traffic on Amazon.

Wait…..wuuuuuuuut?

I know that sounds absurd, but hear me out. See, arguably everyone that browses Amazon has buyer intent. While everybody still shops in their own niches and follows their own interests, Amazon is essentially the mall, so people are shopping all over the place, crossing in and out of their respective interest “lanes.”

To illustrate this, lets look at an affiliate report.

This is a list of items purchased through an affiliate link for a client’s grocery products. I’ve removed their products to protect their anonymity, but take a look at the stuff their target audience ALSO purchased.

Baby products, supplements, zip ties, electronics, women’s clothing, kitchen products, etc. Do you see any common thread among these items? I certainly don’t.

The point I am making here is, on Amazon sometimes any traffic is good traffic because every product has purchase potential.

So with that in mind, having a celebrity endorse your brand, and then broadcasting that endorsement far and wide could give your next product the bump it needs in attention and visibility.

But wait….we still haven’t addressed the cost issue.

As mentioned before, most bootstrapped brands aren’t in the market for a celebrity endorsement that will cost them an arm and a leg. The cool part about Cameo.com is that these celebrities sell their service for anywhere from $50 to just a couple hundred bucks!

Overall this seems like a pretty awesome hack for a new and interesting way to market and get exposure. Amazon sellers definitely should take advantage of it while it is still available. Of course, having rapper and actor Ice T tell the world they should try your collagen peptides is no substitute for good keyword research using tools like Magnet and Cerebro, but it could help in your efforts to get people excited about your products.

Catch the whole hack here: