Writers Are Trying to Include Your Clients in Holiday Gift Guides — Are You Unknowingly Sabotaging the Process?
You're pitching writers for holiday gift guides but writers are also finding brands to feature organically ... Is your client's PR contact information hard to find?
Happy Thursday all!
Hope your November is going well. We saw this meme today and it made us laugh because it’s SO true. Are you feeling this as well?
Wishing everyone luck as they buckle down over the next month or so. We’ll make it to the holidays with our sanity and hopefully have some much needed time to relax!
A few bits of housekeeping before this week’s topic:
Pitching Holiday Gift Guides? Here’s Everything You Need to Know:
Grab these recordings from our 1-hour workshops we did over the past few months on the topic:
Get Your Copy of the Recording from Our Popular Christmas in July Affiliate Marketing Workshop: We teamed up with our affiliate guru Sarah Karger to talk everything to know about getting your clients affiliate ready for the holidays.
Get Your Copy of HGG Power Hour: Improve the ROI On Your 2024 Holiday Pitches: We dove deep into all the dos and don’ts of pitching for HGG this holiday season + included our essential checklist of what to include in a holiday gift guide pitch.
To get your copies, just email us at info@toptierconsulting.NET
And a few past Substacks we recommend reading for some refreshers:
What NOT to Pitch in a Holiday Gift Guide
Holiday Pitching Pro Tips Part 2! Everything you REALLY want to know about pitching gift guides.
How to Work Your Sources into Articles Around the Holidays
How to Make YOUR Product Stand Out From ALL the Other Product Pitches In a Writer's Inbox
We have a few spots left for Nov/Dec Consulting Sessions
Here’s a reminder of the sessions we offer, both to agencies and solo/freelance publicists:
All Your Questions Answered Session
Have a bunch of questions you’ve been dying to ask two top-tier journalists? Here’s your chance to learn about what goes on behind the scenes. Book a panel with us and prepare your list. You’ll walk away with all of your questions answered, plus we’ll sprinkle in our best practices throughout the session to help give you (and your clients!) an edge in this highly competitive media landscape.
Pitch Perfecting Strategy Session
Ready to take your pitches to the next level? Or are you wondering why certain pitches aren’t getting much response? Learn how to take your emails from, “Here’s a client I represent,” to “Here’s a story idea you can’t possibly turn down.” Between the two of us, we receive thousands of pitches per week, so we have many tips — and examples — of what works and what doesn’t. From coming up with the perfect email subject line to improve your open rates to sealing the deal with your closing remarks, your word choices matter throughout the entire pitch. We’ll help you perfect them … and we’ll workshop some of your actual pitches too!
Become a Journalist’s BFF: Networking and Relationship Management Session
Some publicists seem to have a transactional “wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am” approach to their work, but highly successful publicists know that building long-term relationships with journalists is truly the gift that keeps on giving. Learn how to meet new journalists, and discover best practices for staying in touch, following up, and creating meaningful relationships. You’ll also discover how to become a writer’s go-to source, how to stand out when answering a writer’s call for sources (whether that’s on HARO, a FB group, Twitter, or Substack), how to avoid common writer pet peeves and more.
Press Package 101 Session
Looking to mail out samples of your clients’ products in hopes of landing coverage? Great, but there’s a list of things you should know before dropping them off at the post office — things like planning, packaging, and communications will make all the difference in your ROI. We’ll help you make your packages more enticing, while actually saving your clients money in the process. And we’ll discuss how to target the right audiences, how to handle post-delivery follow-ups, and more.
Press Trips Invites and Itineraries Session
The two most important aspects of pulling off a successful press trip are nailing your invites and itineraries. First, we’ll dive into journalist targeting and invitation etiquette do’s and don’ts. Then, you’ll learn how to build a press trip itinerary that will actually land you coverage. We’ll focus on striking the perfect blend between offering media the chance to experience a destination, while zeroing in on quality and unique experiences that can lead to coverage — and help you find that elusive balance between keeping writers entertained vs. not overbooking them.
Hosting the Perfect Virtual and/or In-Person Media Event Session
Events are efficient ways to connect with a lot of media in one setting. During these sessions, you’ll learn the ins and outs of how to create a media event that journalists will A) Want to attend B) Will stay engaged at C) Will work into coverage. We’ll teach you how to target the ideal attendees who are there for article ideas and not just the free swag. We’ll talk venues, guest lists, and what to say in your presentation, plus how to coach your clients to interact with media at events in the most beneficial way.
Your Custom Session
The above options are just a sample of topics, based on questions we get asked about most frequently. But if you have something you’d love to discuss that you don’t see on the list, we’re happy to create a custom session around it. Let’s dive deeper!
Interested in learning more or booking a November/December session? Email us at info@toptierconsulting.NET.
*Note: Our consulting sessions, workshops, Zooms and Substack newsletters are strictly educational. Signing up for anything has no bearing on landing coverage in any of our outlets. Our role is to fine-tune your approach and tactics so that you can apply these learnings when pitching other journalists.
Now onto this week’s topic: Are Your Clients Unknowingly Sabotaging Their Chances of Holiday Gide Guide Coverage?
Writers are in full swing with holiday gift guides right now. It’s major crunch time as they scramble to get them turned in. Publicists are pitching left and right trying to get their clients into these guides. But writers are also organically finding products on their own from Google searches, referrals from friends, etc.
One thing that we’re noticing this season (and hearing from colleagues) is that it’s not always easy to track down product PR information.
Some brands make it super hard to connect with someone who does their PR, which means that writers and brands aren’t connecting. This results in missed opportunities for brands to be in gift guides since writers need to get in touch with reps for a variety of reasons such as:
Requesting product samples to try out a product before including it in a gift guide
Requesting photos of the product to include with the article
Requesting affiliate information on a product
Getting additional information they need like: Where are all the places someone can someone buy this product? What is the price point? Will it be on sale for the holidays? What ages is it for? Is it in stock? When will it be back in stock? Does it come in other styles? etc.
And if writers can’t get in touch with a product’s reps, they are going to move onto a different product, which is a huge bummer for both parties.
Nicole recently experienced this with a gift guide she is working on. Beyond products that publicists pitched — she also found a bunch of cool products she wanted to feature. Here’s a look into how she went about trying to track down the publicists for these products.
She searched her inbox for the brand name to see if a publicist for the brand had pitched her before. If they had, she reached out and asked if they were still with the brand. If she got a response and it was a yes, she said she wanted to feature the product and sent over some questions.
She went to the brand’s website to see if they had any press or media contact information on their contact page.
She Googled “Brand name media contact” or “Brand name press contact”
If #3 didn’t work, she sent emails to the brand’s general info [at] email addresses listed on their website or filled out their website contact forms.
She tracked the brands down on Instagram and DMed them
What was surprising was:
How hard it was to find publicist information for so many of these brands
How hard it was to get a response back — the info [at] emails rarely wrote back, which resulted in a dead end. Some of them also bounced back.
Instagram messages got ignored and not read or were read and not followed up at first (until several nudges — and sometimes not followed up with at all with the nudges).
If she got an Instagram response, it was often directing her to apply to an affiliate program, which is not what she was asking about.
It was a giant runaround and Nicole had to work hard to find info for the brands she wanted to feature. In fact, some of them she was able to connect with only after asking colleagues or posting about it in PR forums.
Ultimately, some of them didn’t get back to her in time so she ended up replacing them in the story — even though they were products she really wanted to feature.
Hopefully this will inspire publicists to check in with their brands and see if they are making themselves hard to contact.
A few steps to take to make sure your brand is reachable:
Take inventory of the website and see what type of contact emails they have. If possible, include a specific press or media email contact. And if they don’t have a contact section at all, urge the brand to get one up there asap.
If the brand has just have one email address they want to use for all contact, make sure to educate the person who answers it about which type of emails should be forwarded to you, as the publicist.
Do the same for Instagram. A lot of writers DM brands there so make sure whoever is answering these messages knows to loop you in for certain requests.
Also makes sure the brand has someone manning their Instagram DMs and emails and that these don’t go unanswered for long — especially during important times like holiday gift guide pitching season.
It can also be helpful to have a press or media contact email address somewhere on a brand’s social media page — like in their Instagram profile.
And in general, try not to drop the momentum with a writer who reaches out to you about a product they want to include in a gift guide.
In addition to the trying to find the email addresses game, we’ve noticed that we’ve replied to publicist pitches about gift guide items, expressed interest, asked questions and then had the conversation drop on the publicist’s end.
Writers are juggling a lot of articles at once — especially right now — and if they have to work super hard to hear back from someone, it slows down the process and can result in another product being swapped in for your product.
It’s a busy busy time of the year right now and everyone wants holiday gift guide coverage. Take a quick minute to check in with your brands to make sure you’re setting them up for success this season!
And as always, happy pitching!
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Do you have any questions? Feel free to leave them in the comments below and we’ll answer them!
Thanks again for being a part of this wonderful community we’re building. If you know a colleague who could benefit from this, please share this newsletter with them. We’re putting so much time and effort into these weekly articles and are thrilled to be able to get them in front of people who are benefiting from them.
Jill & Nicole
PS: You can always email us with any questions: info@toptierconsulting.NET
Such good points!