Ep 140: How To Secure Your Holiday Gift Guide - Is Your Business Ready?

Can you believe it - the holiday season is fast approaching.  Are you ready for the holidays?  Is your company trying to figure out how to setup and secure gift guides for the media? Figuring out your business's holiday deals and bundles? What are you pitching to the media?  Are you totally confused, and not sure where to start?  Check out this episode of The PR Playbook Podcast to help you get started ASAP...

Be sure to tune into this episode.  Ronjini helps provide expert tips and hacks on how to get your business gift guides ready for the holiday season.   If you want to reach out to Ronjini to have personal 1 on 1 support, then visit The Silver Telegram right away.  You don't want to miss the deadline!  

Be sure to subscribe for the next episode launch.  If you enjoyed the episode, please like and share with your friends.  

Transcript

Episode 140. Holiday Gift guy. Season is here.

Ronjini Joshua: Hello and welcome to episode. 140. Yes, we are now here for holiday gift guides, and it's that time of year again. So I wanted to talk about how to secure holiday gift guides for your consumer products. And what you need to consider when you are preparing for this Holiday Gift Guide season. So first before going into it before, creating your media list and before reaching out to media, you really want to make sure that you have a press kit. That is specific to the holidays, make sure that you are focusing in on kind of the flagship holiday products that you want to sell the most. If you give the media too many traces, they may not choose all of them. So I would pick your top three to five depending on how big your catalog is. Of course if you have one specific product then you could just focus on the one

Ronjini Joshua: but make sure that you have good high resolution.

Ronjini Joshua: Imagery for the holiday season, so it doesn't necessarily have to be holiday focused. It doesn't have to be painted, red and green, but make sure that you have really good close-up photos of the products and maybe one lifestyle photo of the products I like to create a holiday prescott if it's at all possible. So, consider doing that as well, make sure that your photos are 300 dpi and that you have a little bit of variety so that the media has something to choose And so when you're emailing the media, it's up to ask them a request that you're included in holiday. Gift guides, you can actually just send them, the press get folder or link, I usually say, Google Drive, try to make them again, Pngs or JPEGs Do not make them PDFs or put them in another document, Make it really easy and then make sure you also label these photos, correctly Label, the product name. And, if there's any other relevant color schemes or

Ronjini Joshua: That goes with it, go ahead and do that as well. But make sure that they're well labeled high resolution photos. 72, 2 DBI just won't cut it anymore. 300 dpi is the goal. the next thing is,

Ronjini Joshua: do you have holiday deals? Coming up, if you do, create those bundles in advance and know what you're going to be pitching to the media. So sometimes we have special holiday bundles that we're pitching, or maybe it's just you have sale pricing. It could be Black Friday cyber Monday. Don't forget about these special days during the holiday season where people are spending a lot of money. There are specific holiday gift cards that are just for those dates cyber Monday, Black Friday. And then also giving Tuesday, so they all have Boxing Day deals for Canada. So, just keep all these little things in mind, and then create those holiday deals in advance. It's gonna help you with your marketing anyway, and then you could double it for PR. In addition you might want to create specialized utms or aff affiliate links are especially important during the holidays because the media is trying to get as much traffic as they can to those holiday gift guides and earn their keep. So,

Ronjini Joshua: If you have affiliate links, if you're on Amazon, they're gonna pick those links. So, just, have those ready in advance, like what links do you want them to use? And that way, it'll just make it easier for everybody. Third thing.

Ronjini Joshua: Research and choose media targets. So if you're going proactively after holiday, gift guides, the way we do it, is we just basically research and look up the holiday gift cards. We did in 2022 which would be last year and kind of identify the outlets that we want to be in most based on readership and target audience, but then also see who wrote it last year. Now, the turnover in the media has been so great that it's really hard to kind of keep your hands on who's covering what? But every once in a while you'll get lucky, it'll be the same person. You can always contact the editor and chief and find out who's covering holiday gift guide. And then sometimes there's guides editors people who just make guides, they just make gift cards all year round so you can actually look up guides, editors, quote unquote, through Google Search. So, yeah, see where you want to be and find those reporters that are covering it or have covered in the past. And if you're not sure, if they've covered in, if you are not

Ronjini Joshua: Are covering it now you can always ask them we're all human. So I think that's the other thing is. Don't be afraid to ask questions if you're not sure. It just makes it seem like you did a little bit more homework and that you're more genuine. make sure number five, make sure you include who you think your gift is good for? So, this might sound confusing because when I said it, it didn't sound totally straight forward. So imagine that these holiday gift guides have so many different audiences, right? You have for Holiday gift guides for baby for toddler, for teens, for men, for women, for travelers, for readers, for all these different things.

00:05:00

Ronjini Joshua: Figure out what category Your gift factors into. Is it for fitness? Buffs, is it for teachers? Who do you think it'll fit in? And the more specific you The more likely it is that you can get into these other unique gift guide, so you can get into general gift guides that are, gifts that are great for everyone. There's gifts that are great under $50 over, a hundred bucks, There's luxury gifts. So just remember that each gift can have various categories and that you should pitch them for as many categories as possible because you have a higher chance of getting into those gift guides.

Ronjini Joshua: And last but not least, Always follow up. That's always my instruction. For any pitching that I always tell you guys to do, make sure you follow up, just kind of say if you're not sure what to say, you could say, Hey, I wanted to kind of see when you were gonna publish your gift guide. when it'll be coming out, Is there anything I can help you with? Can I help you find products for your upcoming gift guide? Things like that, be helpful, be human. I always try to kind of offer a hand to see if I can get a little bit of favor too. So you give me a favor. I give you a favorite kind of situation because the truth is, they're getting hundreds of pictures and people are trying to get them to cover their product, but what they really need is help siphoning through things. So you might even get a request to help them. Write the article or find other products that could fall into the category. So there has been times where we've actually created a whole gift guide ourselves and it included a couple of our clients and

Ronjini Joshua: Couple of other people just because it was a specific So a gift cards for travelers, and I would include, maybe a couple of our clients products and then some other things that we thought were good for travelers. And that's another really interesting way to make a press release, or do some pitching, as well as just creating kind of like a all-encompassing gift guide. That's sounds really cool. So don't forget to follow up. It is worth mentioning that haro help a reporter out and quoted both have gift guide requests. So make sure those are free things that you guys should be subscribing to. However, I have found that I don't look at quoted as much. I don't do a lot of pitching anymore. I do some proactive pitching on my own, but I don't do a lot of pitching against quoted in haro anymore.

Ronjini Joshua: But I do find that Haro Gift Guide requests have kind of come down and quality. So a lot of them are blogger requests. If you're not sure if you want to do a blogger request just take a look at their website and see if it fits with your audience. you actually ask any blogger for their media kit and their numbers. So if you feel good about it, if it's the right niche then it might fit and then otherwise maybe it's not the right niche and it won't fit. So I just have noticed that there's just a lot more bloggers on the haro platform for holiday gift guides and then every once in a while, you get Readers Digest or USA Today or Worth magazine or magnetic magazine or something? Cool like that, every once in a while. But it just do your research and then if it says there's no name to it, then.

Ronjini Joshua: I don't know, sometimes I submit it and then see what comes back. But most of the time when they don't have a name, It's 50/50 half the time where they don't have a name. It's someone who probably doesn't have any more of mentioning and then the other half. It's like they're so high top tier that they just didn't want to get a l huge of submissions. So I don't know If you have time submit to everything and that way you have the option of eliminating them as they come in as the details of those opportunities come in. So anyways if you guys need help getting into holiday gift guides. We do have a holiday gift guide programs that we run and we have some guarantees of getting you guys into some holiday gift guide. So if you are interested, you can reach out to us and my email is ronjini at the Silver Telegram.com

Ronjini Joshua: As always, and we'd be more than happy to help you get your product into guides. All right. I hope you guys have learned a lot about holiday, gift guides, and are ready to go. If you have any questions, you didn't do me. Otherwise, catch you guys next time.

Meeting ended after 00:10:03 👋