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Gift guides are helping marketing and sales teams build awareness for products – ultimately driving revenue.
Gift guides are one of the most tangible and easily measured components of the PR mix.
At the most simplistic level a gift guide is a themed or calendar-driven product round-up.
As the name suggests, gift guides appear at the most opportune times – when consumers are anxiously looking for the perfect “gift” for a friend, co-worker or family member.
Gift guides appear throughout the year in conjunction with major holidays and annual milestones:
- Valentine’s Day
- Mother’s Day
- Graduation
- Father’s Day
- Grandparents’ Day
- Back-to-school
The biggest gift guide push being the December holidays which, for a PR team, begins six months prior in June.
A great benefit of gift guides from a sales perspective is in the range of media outlets that offer them, because varied audiences can be precisely targeted.
Thousands of gift guides appear in newspapers, lifestyle magazines, trade publications, TV and radio shows, and online publications and blogs each year.
What is the Value to Sales and Marketing?
For a company with a consumer-oriented product to sell, this is important to know because it is an economical way to get in front of its targeted demographic without spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on advertising.
Gift guides present products to potential buyers with the same objective positioning as traditional editorial. Best, gift guides provide a level of credibility – and prestige – you can’t communicate through advertising.
How Do I Get My Product in a Gift Guide?
Gift guide slots are “won” through a number of variables beyond simply having a great product. A successful gift guide program relies upon an experienced and creative PR team that:
- Knows the company being represented
- Knows and understands the company’s target market
- Knows the product being pitched
- Knows the competitive products and product differentiators
- Knows the editors and media outlets being pitched
- Knows and understands the media’s audience
The Hoffman Agency has designed and executed successful gift guide programs for clients like Plantronics, Sony, Altec Lansing and Skinit, among others.
We maintain an extensive database of media contacts that includes details on how to pitch and approach specific gift guide outlets based upon years of experience and relationship-building – information that cannot be purchased from a book.
Hoffman Labs, a dedicated test facility at our Silicon Valley headquarters, also serves as an invaluable resource to our gift guide clients and efforts.
Before pitching a client’s product, we believe it is essential to have an intimate knowledge of that product as well as competitive offerings.
Hoffman Labs is staffed with experts steeped in a full range of products and technologies who test our gift guide products. Our gift guide team works with the lab to ensure it has the broadest knowledge possible to aid in positioning and differentiating products for maximum placement results.
We hope that you will take a look at some of our gift guide placement successes and consider taking this same very tangible, results-oriented approach for the marketing of your own product or service.
Just imagine for example, if your company’s product is chosen by the editorial staff at O, the Oprah Winfrey magazine, and is featured in the O List of the December issue, there’s a strong chance that you will sell out of the product within just hours of the magazine being published.
Getting Started ...
Please contact Susan Baldwin at The Hoffman Agency for more information at (408) 483-0699 or sbaldwin@hoffman.com. |
