by Gail Oliver, Online Marketing Consultant
August is upon us, and if you are looking to get your products featured in holiday gift guides, for print magazines, you need to be pitching NOW and to blogs by mid September.
My 2020 Etsy Holiday Sales Planner has a list of more than 85 of the top gift guides, as well as other tips for success.
Here are just a couple of the tips to find success pitching your products this year:
1. Desire to Support Local
Whether it is your city, your state or your country, the movement to support local businesses due to COVID-19 is greater this year than ever before. Therefore, make sure you indicate this when pitching i.e. “If you were planning any holiday gift guides to support Portland small businesses / Oregon small businesses / American small businesses” (pick one) and so forth. At very least, you are putting the idea in their head and they might do a separate category just for this.
2. Desire to Support Minorities
If you are a black-owned business, this is your time (not to mention the fact that August is National Black Business Month). In the last two months, every major publication and blog has had some sort of editorial with a list of black owned businesses to support (Google it), so this will carry into the holiday season as well.
3. Comfort Gifts
The quarantine situation has definitely caused stress for many, so you will find that gift guides this year will want to feature products for isolating, comfort gifts, self-care gifts, mental health gifts, and stress relief gifts.
4. Small Gifts
Small gifts and inexpensive gifts will have a good editorial opportunity this year as most people will be on a tighter budget, plus the top holiday gift searches always include White Elephant gifts, Secret Santa gifts, gift basket fillers, advent calendar fillers and stocking stuffers.
5. What Else the Media Likes
For your best success, magazines and blogs tend to like to feature products that are:
- Best sellers
- Inexpensive luxury finds
- Personalized & monogrammed
- Gift sets, boxes & kits
- Monthly subscriptions
- Plush
- Latest tech
- Zodiac-related
- Funny / whimsical / quirky
My 28-Page Etsy Holiday Sales Planner has 86 of the top holiday gift guides to submit to (complete with email addresses, saving you a ton of time), not to mention other advice, over 200 of the top holiday search phrases, and various planner pages.
Other Things To Know This Week
- Men on Pinterest have increased almost 50% in the last year, so if they’re your target market, reconsider this social media site.
- Here is what jewellers said sold the best in June.
- Etsy helped to sell $346 million dollars worth of face masks. That being said, face masks were still not as big sellers as home decor and jewelry was during Etsy’s Q2.
- Amazon is taking advantage of quarantine by launching their Home Essentials storefront.
