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Getting your products featured in every single national magazine per month means great coverage and exposure across the country or internationally. This can be a dream come true for a brand, but it doesn’t come at the click of a finger.
If you’re looking for regular product features for your brand, take a look at our list of tricks and hacks to getting them:
Make a List of Publications and Journalists
Gather a list of all the publications and journalists you think you would match with to pitch your products to. You would do this by finding magazines that appeal to your audience, then find the sections that are most likely to feature products like yours and create a contact list of journalists who make the decisions about which products make the cut.
Check out PR Calendars
Search Google for PR calendars related to each publication you’re interested in. On Press Loft, we send monthly PR newsletters with tips with what to focus on. These calendars will show you all of the big dates planned into the magazine’s yearly schedule. Asking journalists to send you their editorial calendars can also be a big help, sometimes journalist have their year planned with key trends and dates they are working on. You can also check out key dates for the year ahead websites so that you are organised for the year ahead and pitching your products to journalists at appropriate times. You will find holidays, key trends, awareness days and so on.
Look at Past Gift Guides
Looking at past gift guides and past features from your dream publications can be a huge help. If you know exactly what they feature and how the feature them then you will be prepared with the correct images when pitching to a journalist.
Being able to pitch your gifts according to the formats already laid out by magazines makes a journalist’s life much easier. This makes your chances of having your products featured in those all important nationals a lot higher.
Build Relationships With Journalists
Building relationships with journalists is so important for them to remember you for the next feature they are working on. If you have a good relationship with a particular journalist, you’ll be first in the queue when they send their call outs. Don’t worry too much if you don’t have a list of journalists that you talk to on the regular. You can start building those relationships in a different way. Using social media platforms like instagram and twitter is a great example. Many journalists actually post some of what they are working on on twitter, so make sure you are always in the loop and not missing out on those important leads! You can also send the journalists a friendly message on instagram introducing yourself and get chatting to them that way. When you contact a journalist for the first time, talk in terms of what you can do for them, rather than vice versa. You can also join PR networks specialised in your sector – like Press Loft.
Pitch at the Right Time
Pitching at the right time can determine whether the journalist will file you for consideration or not. It is hard to know exactly what journalists are working on and when all the time but there are lead times that you can follow. Magazines – particularly quarterlies – often have long lead times. This means you need to get in touch with journalists well in advance of their publication date. Search online, call up – do whatever you have to in order to determine deadlines for product submissions.
In general, long leads and short leads go as below:
- Long Lead: Mainly print magazines. Quarterly, bi-monthly and monthly glossy magazines normally work between 2 and 6 months in advance. Have high res images available for journalists to download as far as 6 months in advance.
- Short Lead: Short lead outlets are daily/weekly newspapers & magazines, news websites, and blogs. To target the short leads, we recommend having your content ready between 1 to 2 months prior to the season/event.
Pitch in the Right Way
Make life easy for the journalists you contact. Journalists prefer emails rather than calling. They also like when you include an accurate and snappy subject line. Try and include the barest minimum of information about your products, whilst conveying as much about them as possible (easier said than done, we know). And last but not least, make sure to include some low res images, as these will speak louder than words.
What is Press Loft?
Press Loft www.pressloft.com is a PR platform specialising in the home, gift, and lifestyle sectors that helps thousands of brands to get their products into the press.
Their PR tools allow companies to easily secure press coverage and quality backlinks for SEO by connecting with their network of 20,000+ journalists, bloggers, and influencers.
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