Prep for the Holidays EP7 Pitching Yourself for Holiday Gift Guides

We're up to Task #7 in our Prep for the Holidays checklist for creatives. If you want to broaden your reach and get new eyes on your work this holiday season, it might be time to pitch yourself for holiday gift guides! Like a lot of holiday season prep, this is an early bird task - in fact, you might be too late for print magazines! But there's still lots of time for on-line publications and blogs, local newspapers and online influencers - all of whom publish gift guides of must have holiday gifts!

Tune in to learn more about using this strategy to attract a broader audience during the busiest shopping season of the year!

Past episodes you may want to listen to:

EP24: Pitching Tips for Creative Businesses
EP33: Why You Need a Media Kit for Your Creative Small Business
EP26: How to Work with Influencers and Brand Ambassadors For Your Creative Small Business

This episode is brought to you by our Premium Subscriber Community on Patreon and Buzzsprout

You can find Melissa at finelimedesigns.com, finelimeillustrations.com or on Instagram @finelimedesigns.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:10

Welcome to the and she Looked Up podcast. Each week we sit down with inspiring Canadian women who create for a living. We talk about their creative journeys and their best business tips, as well as the creative and business mindset issues all creative entrepreneurs struggle with. I'm your host, melissa Hartfield, and after leaving a 20-year career in corporate retail, I've been happily self-employed for 12 years. I'm a graphic designer, an illustrator and a multi-six-figure-a-year entrepreneur in the digital content space. This podcast is for the artists, the makers and the creatives who want to find a way to make a living doing what they love. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the and she Looked Up podcast. As always, I am your host, melissa, and today we're back for another episode in our Prep for the Holidays mini-sode series. So, if you are new to this series, this is something that we are doing through the summer months and into the fall and early winter to help all our creatives artists, makers, creative service providers, content creators get themselves ready for the busy holiday selling season. So today I've kind of lost track of what episode we're on, but I'm pretty sure we're on episode number seven, and today we are going to be talking about pitching yourselves for gift guides. So a couple of weeks ago, we talked about the importance of creating mock-ups and photographs for your products, even though you might not be ready to list them and sell them yet, and one of the reasons we talked about it so early is because it is really critical, if you want to pitch yourself, to be in gift guides. So if you're not familiar with what gift guides are, let's start right there. So you have probably seen these. You know you're flipping through your favorite magazine or through a newspaper every time, every year around the holiday season, and they have gift guide ideas. So they'll have gift guides gifts for dad, gifts for mom, gifts for kids, tech gifts, the hottest fashion gifts, the top 25 gifts for people on a budget. Like there's just no end to these kinds of gift guides.

Speaker 1: 2:36

However, they're not just in your favorite magazines and they're not just in newspapers. They are also digital. A lot of your favorite publications are online and have online websites where they will also publish gift guides, and a lot of content creators out there publish gift guides. So we have a lot of content creators in our audience, so they may already be planning their gift guides for the holiday season. But when I'm talking about content creators I'm referring to bloggers and YouTubers, so and even actually short form video creators. So, like TikTok and YouTube shorts and Instagram reels, they may also create gift guides, and so essentially what they're doing is they are curating items that they feel are a good fit for their audience. It's a form of influencer marketing.

Speaker 1: 3:31

So that's getting yourselves listed in these gift guides. It's not necessarily going to guarantee you sales, but it is a great way to get yourself in front of people who might not ordinarily see you. So if you sell mainly on Etsy, this is a great way to get seen outside of Etsy. If you sell mainly at in-person markets again a great way to broaden your reach outside of your immediate physical location, and there's so many of these out there that there's really no shortage of publications to pitch yourselves to.

Speaker 1: 4:11

I mentioned in the mock-up episode that in some cases the mock-up episode that in some cases, print publications, so magazines and, to a lesser extent, newspapers, work very far in advance. So if you're looking to get your product listed in something like I don't know, like Elle or Cosmo, or First of all, there's a different set of rules for those types of publications, but they also work months in advance, like, when I'm talking months, I'm talking at least six months, and so if that is something that you are hoping to take part in, you are too late at this point. This is something, if you want to get to the point where you are selling your products wholesale, that you might want to start considering, because it's a completely different production system. If you want to sell wholesale again, a lot of small shops start purchasing for Christmas six to eight months ahead of Christmas, and so that's around the same time that a lot of magazines start planning their holiday issues. So if you want to take part in that system, you are probably already operating on a different track than those of us who focus more on things like Etsy and in-person markets. You have probably already got your Christmas product already done, your seasonal product already done. You've probably already got it well into production. You have probably got your photos and your marketing. You are already prepared, because you have had to present that to buyers and editors months ago.

Speaker 1: 5:55

So for the rest of us, who may not be quite so prepared or operating on that kind of scale or that kind of production timeline, we are looking at looking into things like local newspapers, smaller publications, online publications and, as I mentioned earlier, bloggers and content creators. Having said that, those people still work in advance. Very few of them are doing these at the last minute. They are already starting to curate the items that they might like to have in their gift guides. So if you want to potentially take part in those, you are going to need to pitch these people. They are not going to come to you. That's not entirely true. On some occasions they may come to you, but the vast majority of the time they're not going to.

Speaker 1: 6:50

So it's important for you to get your product out in front of them, and there's a lot of different ways to do this, but what it comes down to is the fact that you're going to have to make a pitch. You're going to have to approach them. You are going to have to give them an idea of what your product is. You're going to need to give them some visuals. You're going to need to give them all your pertinent details about where the product will be sold, how people can buy it, the sizing of it, what colors it comes in, what the cost of it is, and send that off, along with photographs or even short video clips that the content creators can use in their gift guides. So you need to start pulling all of that stuff together right now.

Speaker 1: 7:35

If you're going to do that and you might even want to start on this earlier next year the first step is going to be figuring out who the right people are to pitch your product to. So if you make handmade dog bandanas, you're going to want to look for content creators out there who are really into pets. There are loads and loads of dog accounts on Instagram and TikTok that you could approach and ask them if they're doing any kind of gift guide or if they would be interested in showcasing your product. Please keep in mind that some of these people will charge a fee, so it should be. If that is something that you're really into and there's a specific influencer or content creator that you want to work with, be aware that you are probably going to have to provide free product at the bare minimum, and you may need to pay a fee on top of that. Um, content creators don't do the work they do for for for free. It's a lot of work. Um, having been one myself, it is. It is just as much work as painting a painting or creating jewelry. It is, um, yeah, it's a lot of work and they need to be compensated for that time. So there is definitely a possibility that you will be asked to pay and you need to factor that into your marketing budget.

Speaker 1: 9:06

So we have done several episodes on the podcast about working with influencers, about pitching your work. If you are a creative services provider, you're probably already very familiar with pitching yourself. You've probably done it many times. It's the same principle, it's just for a different outcome. Um, so you are probably, like I said, comfortable with pitching. But if you're a maker or an artist, um, you may not be comfortable with pitching, and so we've got lots of resources in our archives for pitching. I will put links to those in the show notes or in the video description on YouTube that you can check out. And, as I said, same with influencer marketing. The thing with all of this, and basically with this entire series that we've been doing, is that once you start to break all these tasks down, you realize how far in advance you really need to start working, and it's it's time always moves much faster than we think it does, and we always have less time than we think we have, so the earlier that you can get on top of these types of things.

Speaker 1: 10:13

If you want to participate in something like a gift guide, the better, and this is where I mentioned in a previous episode. I do things like I have a Google drive where I store photos that I can send a link to anybody who's interested so they can take a look, they can choose the photos they want to use, things like that Anything you can do to make the life of the person you're pitching easier. You might want to create a small lookbook of some of your products. You may even want to offer up products for a giveaway if they're included in a gift guide. That's something that a lot of content creators will look for. If you are going to do that, be prepared to be the one that is shipping out to the winner. A lot of content creators will not do the actual shipping That'll be on you, so that is something out to the winner. A lot of content creators will not do the actual shipping that'll be on you, so that is something you will need to factor in as well as part of your marketing budget when you are doing these types of things.

Speaker 1: 11:09

When it comes to magazines and print, some will charge, some will not. It really depends, but basically this is not it really depends, but basically this is it's a marketing, it's marketing, it's paid marketing, it's not free marketing. My kind of rule of thumb is if somebody approaches me wanting to use my product, I don't expect to be charged, but if I'm approaching them, I do expect to be charged. So it doesn't always work that way, but that's kind of the way I look at it. So that's something to keep in mind. Anyway, if that is something that you want to take part in this year, now is the time to start getting yourself prepared and, as I said, we'll leave lots of links to help you out in the show notes so that you can dive a little bit deeper into how to go about pitching yourself. So that is it for this week.

Speaker 1: 12:01

We'll be back next week with another new tip, and we are also getting very close to the start of season six of the. I was going to call it the true podcast, I don't know if that's the right word, but we're getting close to season six of the full length episodes that we normally do for the show. So we'll be continuing to run these in tandem when season six launches. But yeah, we're getting close, so it's not far away. That's it for this week. Talk to you all soon.

Speaker 1: 12:40

Thank you so much for joining us for the and she Looked Up Creative Hour. If you're looking for links or resources mentioned in this episode, you can find detailed show notes on our website at andshelookedupcom. While you're there, be sure to sign up for our newsletter for more business tips, profiles of inspiring Canadian creative women and so much more. If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to subscribe to the show via your podcast app of choice so you never miss an episode. We always love to hear from you, so we'd love it if you'd leave us a review through iTunes or Apple Podcasts. Drop us a note via our website at andshelookedupcom or come say hi on Instagram at andshelookedup. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next week.