How to Get Press Coverage for Your Products
Don’t want to watch the 30 minutes video? Here’s the summary.
Getting Your Products Featured in Press isn’t a PR Strategy
There are tonnes of reasons you might want your favourite magazine talking about your product. We’ll look at those later. But let’s be clear… simply pitching your products to press round ups alone isn’t the same thing as a rounded PR strategy.
This is a tactical guide designed for those who have no PR experience, no PR team and are not in a position to hire an agency. This is a way for someone who has never spoken to a journalist in their lives to start getting their products in the publications that matter to them.
Types of Coverage
There are loads of ways in which the press talk about products. The ones I feel are really accessible for anyone, regardless of PR experience, are:
- Gift Guides
- Best {product type}
These are constantly being published on big media outlets globally.
Some examples of such round ups we’ve had our own clients placed in:
- https://www.topsante.co.uk/womens-health/balancing-your-blood-sugar-with-help-from-supplements/
- https://www.itv.com/thismorning/articles/this-years-must-have-christmas-advent-calendars
- https://www.hellomagazine.com/homes/20211216129064/best-subscription-gifts/
Benefits of Press Coverage for your Products
There are a whole host of benefits to securing press coverage of your products. Those are not limited to, but include:
- Links: I’m an SEO specialist so this is important to me. Links back to your product pages from popular sites in content relevant to your product can have a phenomenal impact on your SEO. Caveat here: if you’re having large scale SEO issues on site, have technical problems or duplicate content issues, then link building is unlikely to fix your issues. But if you’ve identified links as an area lacking, then product placement work can help build those
- Sales: Honestly, my favourite kind of link is one that users click on, come through your site from and the make a purchase. Yep, sales are the ultimately metric for most of us marketing ecommerce sites.
- Brand: Harder to measure and sometimes considered a “fluffier” metric, but it’s a fair assumption that seeing your brand and your products mentioned in high profile press outlets in a positive context can only have a positive impact on your brand recognition and sentiment, right?
- Trust and Credibility: You’ve almost certainly been on ecommerce websites where they have a section titled “As Seen In….” followed by logos of well trusted press outlets. This can help build credibility. Anecdotally, we’ve seen ourselves and heard of cases where this also have a positive influence on conversion rate to sale, particularly on websites of lesser known brands. But the only data that matters here is the impact it has on your site. So this could be one to test for yourself.
- Short cut rankings in search: Go off to Google and type in “best candles” and you’re going to find a top 10 filled with editorial pieces like Cosmo and the Independent. That’s because Google has determined that the search intent of users looking for “best” variants of products in many cases is to find information and an objective comparison. As such, we often see queries with “best” in that return just editorial and no ecommerce category pages in the top 10. So maybe you can’t rank for those queries on your own site, maybe your own site doesn’t rank for much yet. But by getting featured in these big publication round ups, you can at least be mentioned on the the page that does rank, even if it isn’t your site itself
Can we talk about relationships?
Ok. Let me try not to rant here. But if you’ve ever been told by a PR specialist that the secret to landing product coverage is “relationships,” then you’re one of many who’s heard that.
And honestly, it is utter bull.
Yes, having worked with journalists directly for years will do you no harm. But firstly, if the only journalists that PRs can get coverage from are the ones they’ve worked with before, then that’s very limiting for them. Journalists move jobs like plenty of people do. And just hammering the same writer over and over again isn’t likely to be as beneficial as broadening the scope of your coverage and working with new journalists writing for publications you’ve never been in before.
But also, let me be clear…
You do not need to have to relationships with journalists today to get your products covered in press tomorrow.
In fact, this can also be a really great way to build some early working relationships.
Another little rant… “relationships” is a phenomenally overused term in this context. “Professional acquaintanceship,” would probably be more suitable. After all, does a couple of emails and an article or two constitute a relationship?!
But anyway – that’s my personal view. Let’s crack on.
How do you get your products covered in big publications?
There are a whole host of ways to do this. The free training video at the top covers much more detail but here’s a summary.
Media Enquiry Services
Media enquiry services connect journalists who are looking for an expert, a product or someone within a specific type of business to talk to with the people who can provide it. Some to check out (with more details of each included in the free guide above):
One I do specifically want to talk about a little more here though is PressLoft. I want to talk about that one in more detail as that’s really relevant to ecommerce brands.
It’s a platform that focusses specifically on very visual products (think home interiors and so forth).
It has a lot of features including the usual press release distribution and so forth. But what is really great is the fact that you can simply upload your product info and imagery to PressLoft and journalists looking for inspiration can (and do) browse, download images and sometimes talk about your products without even contacting you. Sometimes they might get in touch asking questions or about samples.
Either way, this is a method of placing products that requires absolutely no “cold” outreach or pitch emails.
Emails like this are a great thing to open your inbox to:
Check out the opportunities for product placements within media enquiry services and potentially even the #journorequest hashtag on Twitter.
The video guide goes through this in more detail.
Seasonal Product Pitching
Find the writers who created last year’s guides and pitch them for this year’s!
Lots of journalists write product guides for every single gifting occasion. Some publications publish multiple such guides every time. So if you have a product that makes an excellent gift, this is potentially very lucrative.
These round ups often rank in search:
And sometimes they even take pride of place as news listings above organis results. The one below here is a screenshot of the Google UK results for “mother’s day gifts” around a month before Mother’s Day 2022 here in the UK.
So having your products featured in these round ups has clear potential.
Here’s one of the ways we approach this:
First, we go to Google and we search for gifts specific to the occasion we’re interested in. So, for example, we might go and search “mother’s day gifts.”
And then – important – we want to switch to the Google News tab. So now we’re seeing all news results relating to Mother’s Day gifts.
Then we need to filter some more. So we’re going to go to the “tools” option highlighted below and then to “recent.”
This will open up a date selector box that looks like this:
This lets you choose to show results only from a certain timeframe.
In this case, we want to select a custom range.
So, for Mother’s Day 2021, (which was 14th March in the UK) we might look at this date range:
And now we see lots of news publication Mother’s Day gift guide round ups from last year:
Next it’s a case of going through these and, for each one that is relevant to your product(s), pulling the following information:
- Headline
- URL
- Journalist
- Publication Date
You can use various scrapers or automation tools to help here (I like ScrapeStorm).
Ideally, get to a point where you have a list like this:
Now, if you are interested in the big gifting occasion round ups from the UK publications in 2021, you can find that list above here: https://bit.ly/gift-round-ups.
But this really is a useful and straightforward process to carry out.
Once you’ve got this information, you need to get some contact details (generally an email address) for the author.
Again, you have a few options here. You can use a media database like one of these:
- Roxhill
- Vuelio
- Agility PR
- Cision
These will often cost several thousand pounds per year but will save you a ton of time.
Alternatively, you can use email address finders like the following:
- RocketReach
- Hunter.io
- Kaspr
- SignalHire
I find those slightly less reliable than the media databases but significantly lower cost too.
You could also just Google the journalist’s name along with words like “email address.” It is surprising how frequently that will yield results.
And finally consider checking their Twitter bios.
Some journalists include their email addresses there or have published it in previous Tweets.
Some even specify that their DMs are open. In this case, that’s arguably an invitation to contact by DM.
Once you have contact information, it’s time to pitch.
Our Most Successful Pitch Emails…
Your pitch email will depend on what you are pitching, to who, for what occasion, when you’re pitching, your product, your natural tone or voice and plenty of other factors too.
What I am saying is that I don’t believe there is a perfect one-size-fits-all formula to pitch emails. We’re pitching humans, after all.
But a few things that our most successful pitch emails in these situations include are:
Reason we’re in touch (why we’ve chosen that journalist – in this case because it looks like they were tasked with the job of these round ups last year)
Who we want to introduce (which client) and which products we think would be a good fit
- Price of the products (which is often an overlooked factor, I find)
- Sample reference – we tell them we can have a sample with them within 72 hours as we find many journalists like to (quite rightly) try it out themselves before recommending a product
- Google Drive Folder link with additional imagery, information and other things that might be useful
Pitch well in advance for each seasonal event. When you pull last year’s guides out from Google News, you’ll see some for Christmas start being published as soon as September. But in reality, some were planned before August even started.
Start early.
There are late guides, for sure. So you don’t need to stop weeks and weeks out. But it’s better to be a tad early and have to re-pitch later than to be late and be told you’ve missed the opportunity.
Non-Seasonal Gifting Guides
Not all gifting occasions happen on a set date. Think:
- Housewarming gifts
- New baby gifts
- Wedding gifts
- Retirement gifts
- Birthday gifts
And so many more.
These can happen any time of year and if you’ve got a product that’s a perfect fit, you probably want to be featured in these too.
The process is very similar to the process for pitching seasonally in terms of:
- Find the people writing about them
- Pitch
The complexity here though:
- You can’t easily predict when such guides will be released. With Christmas, it happens at the same time every year, but non seasonal isn’t as predictable
So our approach here is to find the publications that run lots of guides like these all the time. A really solid example is Good Housekeeping (which is absolutely nailing it on the gift guides front).
So head to Google and type in some non seasonal gifting queries like “housewarming gifts,” just to find out who is puhlishing.
And your next step then is to find out how often they publish non seasonal guides.
You can do this by heading to Google and typing in something like this:
This will show you all results from goodhousekeeping.com within Google that are about gifts, essentially.
In this case we see there are a lot of them:
So we know they write gift round ups for all sorts of occasions all year round.
List them.
- Look at dates
- Grab journalist names
- Start contacting to simply ask if they’ve got any other gift round ups in the pipeline
Again, I don’t believe there’s a perfect single one size fits all formula to the emails here, but our most successful ones generally include:
Reason we’re in touch – we’ve seen the writer is frequently tasked with gift guide round ups and we’ve got some products we think could be a great fit for future ones
Who we want to introduce (which client) and which products we think would be a good fit – who they’re a fit for
- Price of the products
- Sample reference – we tell them we can have a sample with them within 72 hours (where we know this is possible for our client)
- Google Drive Folder link with additional imagery, information and other things that might be useful
Product Round Up Pitching
It’s not just gifting that gets covered. Many publications have their own dedicated sections all about shopping guides! Some examples:
No seasonal gifting angle, no specific time of year… product and buying guides happen all year round.
The thing to be most aware of here is this:
If a publisher has just run a round up of the best luxury bedding last week, they’re not likely to be running another one any time soon.
That would be repetitive. Some time would probably need to pass before things had changed enough to warrant another.
But someone who has just run a round up of luxury bedding might well be doing other homeware related ones soon.
So, I’d suggest starting to list products that are similar to yours. If you were a luxury bedding retailer, I’d suggest going about it this way:
Looking at products that are similar to yours insofar as journalists tasked with writing buying guides for one are potentially the same people tasked with writing them for the others too.
So in this case, we’ve gone off to Google, typed in “best towels,” and we can see loads of magazine websites who’ve run round ups:
We adopt the same process as for the gifting occasions and go through to find:
- Journalist names
- Email addresses
Then it’s just a case of getting in touch!
I’m a fan of a short and sweet introduction here. Here’s an example of one of ours:
- Some journalists don’t reply. And that’s ok!
- Some reply and tell us they’re not planning anything similar at the moment. That’s ok too.
Some reply to tell us they’re not planning anything but give us a list of what they are planning! This makes me happy
Some even decide they will do something on the basis of our email! This is a win!
- Sometimes we get incredibly lucky with our timing. But don’t count on that! It’s rare…
But ultimately, the thing to bear in mind here is that generally the worst thing that will happen is that you may not get a reply. We’ve never had an angry response to this sort of pitch before.
Speculative Introductions to Shopping Writers
LOTS of publications have entirely dedicated to buying guides like the ones mentioned above. Some examples:
There are often writers whose job it is to write for these segments (sometimes freelancers, sometimes staff writers). Part of their job is finding the right products to include.
The premise of this is simple.
Find the publications relevant to you, find the journalists and writers who cover the sector most relevant to you and just find out what they’ve got coming up!
So that’s just a simple Google Search or peruse through the shopping segments of the publications most important to you to find the names of the writers responsible for the content. Then it’s a pitch email!
For me, these are very short, simple emails including:
- Why I’m in touch (straight to the point)
- What I can supply
- Request for any lists of forthcoming pre-planned such round ups
In some cases, the content here is planned really far in advance and we’ve had a lot of success with getting lists of what’s coming, helping us to pitch the right clients/brand/project/product at the right time.
We’ve also found that working with these writers and providing what they need, when they need it and reliably, means we often find ourselves working with them more than one (either for the same publication or for a different publication if they writer for multiple).
This helps to begin building some of those professional acquaintanceships.
Key Things to Bear in Mind
This is intended as a very introductory guide to some quick tactics to help land some product coverage.
It’s not intended to replace a full PR strategy. This is just scratching the surface of what’s possible and is by no means a strategic PR campaign.
The Single Most Important Thing…
Is that none of this will work unless you’ve got good products.
Life is too short for marketing cra* products anyway.
