Pitching with the seasons: get featured for Father’s Day

The day of socks and fragrance gift sets will soon be upon us, which means it is time to start pitching for Father’s Day and getting creative with being featured in the press. While June may seem far off, the media, particularly long-lead print titles, are already working on their content. Get ready to showcase your hero products - all with that one particular man in mind.

Seasonal pitching for calendar events, national days, and holidays, is a great way to secure product features and gift guide mentions for eCommerce brands. The brand gets to capitalise on an already established holiday or event, alongside other brands that boost credibility and notoriety. You know that people are actively looking for seasonal gifts, and by being in the guides, you’re easier to find and ultimately buy from.

Whether it’s Father’s Day, Valentine’s Day, or any other seasonal event, these tips will help you get a brand featured in the guides time and time again.

Let’s start with some myth busting around some misconceptions that come with these kinds of features. 

The first thing is that there is a huge difference between a feature and an advertorial. Features (gift guides) are chosen by the editor and curated to present a story or a selection of products that are in keeping with the publication and theme - these features are free to be a part of. Advertorials are paid features that are packaged together by the sales team and sit in a different part of the publication. This isn’t PR, it is advertising, and should be marked as so in the publication. If you want to pay for an advert for a brand, we won’t stop you, but we will say that it is nowhere near as powerful or impactful as securing earned media. 

Another misconception is that print is dead, and the only way to get good features is by focussing efforts on digital PR. While there is a huge rise in digital publications, as well as online guides, there is still a magic to print and people are still buying physical publications. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket, and spread your efforts across print and digital.  

Remember, you’re targeting the person buying the gift, not the person receiving the gift.

So, if you want to secure seasonal features and placements, here are some tips to maximise coverage opportunities.

Plan ahead of time

Start doing the work now. Not only do you need to be pitching to get the brand you work for or with featured, but your planning work needs to be on its A Game, too. There’s nothing worse than scrambling for publications to pitch to when you should be sending the pitches, so get organised and start planning the publications that are in alignment with the products you have in your line up. Use our quarterly PR calendar within the membership, which shows what the press is working on complete with key themes and national days. You can use the coverage tracker within the PR Dispatch database to start your planning, or a Google Sheet will do the trick if you’re not yet a member but want to start jotting them down.

Go with the Hero

Not the best-seller, not a product that did really well for another seasonal event, you need to run with the hero for this particular season. Father’s Day, as an example, will have a different hero product to Valentine’s day and so on. Choose a product that can stand on its own and will be a clear winner; it means it photographs well, is a decent price point for the audience you’re speaking to in the publication, and that will look the part in a line-up of other products.

Think outside the box

Keep the audience in mind - for the publication, not the brand, but don’t be afraid to think outside the box. We see the same sort of products being featured year in year out, and while they are classics for a reason, there is no harm in trying a different angle or pitching a slightly edgier product to a publication if that’s what is in the brand’s product offering. 

Make a decision on gifting

For some publications, gifting will be worth it. Others, perhaps not. The product you are PRing might need to be sampled and tried, but otherwise, consider which publications you would be willing to gift to, and whether you want or need to receive those products back post-campaign. There’s not a right or wrong here, but the bottom line and cost of product does need to be considered and whether it is relative to the size or substance of the potential feature - which may not be the case if it is for a seasonal gift guide as opposed to a wider piece or review. 

Shout it out louder

If you secure a feature for the brand you work for, think about how you can shout it out louder cross-platform. Often PR is seen as a solo tactic, when it should be embedded into the sales and marketing strategies. Features like this can even inform social ads if the publication holds enough weight, so consider the wider impact the feature could have and how the brand can capitalise on it.  

If you’d like support wth PR, our top-tier press database has thousands of contacts and an upskilling community of in-house PRs. Access a demo of the database and see how you can start taking PR into your own hands, saving thousands of pounds per month in agency fees. PR isn’t rocket science, but we reckon you could do that too.