When an entrepreneur or small business launches a new product, it can be a tough job to gain awareness and interest quickly to drive sales. With so many new products on the market, how do you ensure your target audiences know about your brand or product and how do you get them to add to basket, especially over the key Christmas shopping season? This is where a specialist media relations agency can help.

Christmas gift guides: How to integrate them into your PR campaign

Product pages and gift guides are a great place to showcase new items and can often position you alongside other leading brands, as well as new products. Editors are usually swamped with product samples and press releases in the run up to Christmas so it’s important to make sure you take a strategic approach to securing press coverage.

This year, we’ve been working with the Careless Collection – a luxury range of chocolate bars created by Masterchef finalist David Crichton, with beautiful packaging designed by Creative Wilderness. David launched the range earlier in 2019 and was keen to position the chocolates as a desirable Christmas treat or gift for foodies, vegans and those who enjoy unusual taste combinations.

The brief was to secure product coverage in food and drink titles, raise David’s profile in the North West region and within the grocery trade media, and encourage editors to include the range in Christmas gift guides.

The PR toolkit for achieving gift guide success

Whether you’ve got a product you’re hoping to promote in gift guides at Christmas or any other time of the year (Valentine’s Day, Easter, wedding season, summer holidays, back to school, Halloween – the list could go on!), what can you do to give your PR and media relations activity a push? As a media relations agency, we focus on a few key areas:

• Strong images: High resolution, cut outs on a white or transparent background, as well as lifestyle shots, help to show off the products and are essential for securing media coverage.
• Positioning: Decide on your positioning, target audience and key messages to ensure you are targeting the right media outlets to get in front of your ideal customers.
• One size doesn’t fit all: You need to tailor your press material depending what the product is and which media outlets you’re targeting.
• Get your timings right: Remember many consumer magazines work up to five or six months in advance so you need to start planning your Christmas PR activity in the summer.
• Samples: Have plenty of samples available for journalists to review and send them promptly if you have any requests.

It’s also important to tell the story behind the brand and to put a face to the range by taking part in interviews and profile pieces in trade, consumer and regional media. We helped to raise David’s profile in the Manchester and Cheshire business and lifestyle press, which led to an interview on BBC Radio Manchester.

The proof is in the (Christmas) pudding

PR and media relations should help to raise awareness of products and brands, which in time should help to contribute to sales and enquiries. In the case of the Careless Collection, the build up of ongoing media coverage teamed with a couple of big hits in nationals directly converted into sales.

Early in December, the Careless Collection sold out following fantastic festive coverage in The Observer, Guardian and the Financial Times. Thankfully there was enough time to make a new batch in time for Christmas!

Here’s a selection of just some of the media coverage we’ve secured this year.