Holiday Pitching Pro Tips Part 2! Everything you REALLY want to know about pitching gift guides.

Learn how to stand out from ALL the other gift guide submissions writers are receiving!

Happy Fall everyone. Can’t believe it’s almost October. We’ve been booking sessions into October for a while now and it’s finally here. Everyone has been excited to get theirs in before the holidays for advice on ramping up their coverage, which makes today’s newsletter especially helpful as we continue our deep dive into all things holiday coverage.

For those of you just joining us, welcome to Top Tier Consulting. We launched early September and have been enjoying every moment of working with publicists and brands since we launched. Our goal is to help you keep getting your clients into top-tier publications and it’s so exciting to see that we’ve been making a real difference in helping this to happen for many.

If you’re just tuning in, make sure you read last week’s newsletter where we talked about working your sources into holiday coverage beyond the world of gift guides. We shared some great examples of past stories we’ve written and talked about the backstories of how publicist pitches inspired them and how clients made it in.

As a reminder, our Substack will always live behind a paywall. That means you’ll have to upgrade your subscription to one of our paid plans in order to take advantage of them. Since we’re two busy writers, we’re treating these newsletters like we would any other article we write. We’ll be putting our heads together to pour our collective best tips into these and will also be including personal examples as they’ve pertained to us in the past. We have different membership options, like discounts for annual vs. monthly, plus Founding Members will be able to hop on our monthly Zooms to ask us anything. We have our first one coming up and would love to have you there.

As a paid subscriber, you’ll have access to our past newsletters so whenever you upgrade your membership or join us, make sure you go back through our archives to reap the benefits of all of our past topics. We know you’ll find your subscription extremely valuable and appreciate you joining us on this journey!

Now for Part 2 of our holiday coverage guide: Gift guides. Every single publication these days is doing them. Some are focused on the hottest toys and gadgets of 2022, while others are more tailored to specific themes such as the best gifts to buy for someone who is busy or holiday items that are eco-friendly. If you rep products, you should be getting them into these. And if you’re not, you’re definitely missing out.

Real talk: Writers’ inboxes are FLOODED with holiday gift guide submissions right now. It’s actually pretty overwhelming. One of us woke up yesterday with over 900 emails in our inboxes by 8 AM and about 90% were gift guide submissions. They kept coming all day long.

So how do you get your clients to stand out right now at a time when inboxes are crazier than ever? How do you convince a writer that a certain product needs that real estate in the gift guide they are working on? And how do you make it easy for them to navigate your product submissions?

Everyone is talking about gift guides this time of the year but we’re fully diving into how to really make your clients sound enticing, why do writers pick the gifts that they do to feature, what goes through a writer’s brain when sourcing for a gift guide, etc. –– at a time when getting your products positioned the best matters the most. We put a lot of effort into this week’s newsletter and we know you’re going to find it helpful! Here is everything you need to know: