Can Your Brand Get Featured in Holiday Gift Guides?
We haven't even finished swim season and I'm already talking about the holidays, but there's a good reason!
Holiday gift guides are a primo way to promote your business and boost winter sales.
Think:
Everyone’s wallets are already open
People turn to gift guides to discover new brands
If this is your first year to consider getting your brand in a gift guide or if you have tried and didn’t find success, you may be wondering:
Can my brand even get in a holiday gift guide?
To answer this, let’s go through a few points that matter and few that don’t.
Do you have a PR firm on retainer?
True Story: Having a PR firm is not required to get your brand into holiday gift guides.
Did you catch that? PR firms are not a prerequisite.
If you can afford to outsource your PR, that's awesome. But it's not essential..
The media loves to speak directly to the brand and founder, so as long as you know when and how to reach out and grab their attention, you can get PR on your own.
This is something we'll go over in my free webinar titled "Holiday PR for Busy Small Business Owners."
Is your business big enough?
I get this question all the time in many different forms:
Is my business legit enough for PR?
Is my brand established enough to get media attention?
Will the media care about my small business?
All of them have the same answer. YES.
The truth is the media loves small businesses. More and more people are leaving big box stores for boutiques and hand crafted products.
I promise you, there will be many small businesses just like yours getting media attention this winter. You deserve a piece of that pie!
Do you have a holiday gift?
This one should be obvious, but you need a product or service that can be easily gifted.
In some cases, it'll make your brand more appealing to the media if you have a product that is specific to the holidays. You can do this by combining different products into a gift basket or designing a new version of your product that is exclusive to the holidays.
Can you devote enough time?
Specifically, you need about an hour per week to get results with PR.
If you can't commit to that, it's still fine to send out a few pitches when you can because you never know what may happen.
However, after doing this for 10 years, and after teaching my method to countless small business owners, my experience has shown me that an hour a week is the best way to win the marathon.
Will you start in time?
The big holiday shopping kickoff is Black Friday. So working backwards from that, you can guess that most publications will start publishing their gift guides in the weeks before. And most publications need a little lead time to finalize their content.
This means that, yes. You need to start now.
It may be a little late to get into national magazines, but you can still grab plenty of features in their online publications.
(And frankly, online publications have more benefits, including SEO.)
Will you be competitive?
PR is not difficult, but it does take a little finesse.
You need to know things like:
Are you sending enough information?
Are you sending too much information?
Are you saying the right things?
Again, this stuff is not hard at all. It's just about knowing what the media is looking for. You want to know how to stand out in a crowded inbox and serve their end goal. If you can do this, then you are competitive enough to get your products featured in a holiday gift guide.
Have you taken the Free Webinar, ‘Holiday PR for Busy Small Business Owners’?
Is this your first year trying to get into holiday gift guides?
Have you tried in the past without much success?
Are you interested in learning how the professionals do it?
I'm launching a free webinar soon, devoted totally to helping small business owners like you land their products in a holiday gift guide.
Make sure you sign up below to get notified when we launch! This could be the bridge between you and major media coverage during the biggest shopping season of the year.