How do I get into Holiday Gift Guides?

You see them come out every year, the holiday gift guides, a coveted spot for any consumer product to be included in. Especially the top consumer guides that include media like GQ, Huffington Post, Today.com. USA Today and more. Maybe you didn’t have anything new last year or maybe you just weren’t ready for the barrage of holiday sales. Well…are you ready to submit your product?

Let’s start with a quick reality check! You may already be too late for your favorite outlet. Sorry! However, if you’re lucky, they will produce more than one guide and you’ll get another chance. And unfortunately enough, if the outlet hasn’t already reviewed your product during the year, now is usually not the best time to expect that kind of attention as the holidays make reviewing products quite overwhelming.

To help you navigate the gift guides in 2019, we put together some quick tips that can get you in the same playing field as the pros. Read carefully and take notes ;).

1) Research editorial calendars – Have you ever heard of an editorial calendar? If not, its because they are pretty much going out of style. With the fast consumption of today’s digital news environment, editorial calendars are quickly becoming a thing of the past. But if you’re still dreaming f getting into that glossy magazine, you may have a chance. Editorial calendars typically live in the marketing kit of the website. For online stories, you’ll find deadlines to be about 3-6 weeks out, for print it can be anywhere from 4 weeks to 3 months ahead. Don’t get discouraged though, the web versions are almost always flexible in content and they typically launch supplementary material to cater to various audiences.

2) Subscribe to HARO – If you haven’t heard of HARO before, Help A Reporter Out (aka HARO) was launched a long time ago and in more recent years purchased by Cision. It is a free resource where you can sign up to get emails on quick turnaround requests from journalists. To make sure you’ve considered when you submit, take a quick peek at our How to Pitch Haro blog.

3) Google 2018 Holiday Gift Guides – In addition to what has been mentioned above, there is no need to reinvent the wheel. A good way to get a gage on the outlets that may be producing gift guides and the writers who will work on them is to research last year’s gift guides, in this case you can literally Google search “2018 Holiday Gift Guides” and start jotting down who comes up. Look up their email or Twitter profile to see if you can gauge their interest in Holiday Gift Guides this year.

4) Ask your favorite journalists – Hopefully, this isn’t your first time reaching out to journalists because this time of year it is very difficult to grab their attention. Reach out to journalists that you have worked with before (even if they aren’t the right gift guide contact) and ask them. While some journalists may want to punch me for putting more emails in their inbox, others are quite nice and will point you in the right direction if they can. Hey, you may get lucky too. Often times, Holiday Gift Guide articles are all hands on deck and is a collaboration between the editorial staff.

5) Just send out your product pitch – Send out your pitch to journalists that you admire and hope for the best. The more specific you can be in your pitch the better. Take a quick look at our interview with Techcrunch or Engadget to learn the best methods for pitching your company/product.

These 5 tips will put you well on your way to getting to the media that you want to get to. Have the answers to the following questions ready if they say and pre-emptively let them know what you can provide them to help them build their stories.

• Do you have review samples?
• Do you have quality hi-res images (300 dpi) of the product only and lifestyle images?
• Do you have the product spec sheet?
• Do you have an FAQ (if applicable)?
• Is there anything unique and/or special that the reporter should know? Any holiday deals? Is it limited? etc.

That should give you a good start. If you have any other questions about holiday gift guides or you need help this holiday season to get featured, feel free to reach out The Silver Telegram at Ronjini (at) thesilvertelegram (dot)com and we’d be happy to help!