Hi Reader,
I'd like to introduce you to Wolf Craft, an à la carte PR shop that helps brands land high-impact press without paying thousands a month for retainer PR. After 15 years securing gift guide features for their Wolf PR clients, they set out to teach eCommerce brands how to pitch holiday press themselves. Five years later, they've helped hundreds of businesses land meaningful coverage on their own.
This newsletter from the team at Wolfcraft breaks down why gift guides are still the best media opportunity of the year for product businesses.
Spoiler: you’re also invited to join their free gift guide PR workshop next week.
Is PR your next business growth lever?
If we asked *why* you want press, what would you say? Most folks would simply say, “Sales.” Which can be a good answer, but it’s a fairly incomplete answer. And it leaves a lot of impact on the table.
You’re not alone if you don't fully understand how PR works. You know media attention is “good”, but you may not know all the ways press can impact your company.
Media placements can:
- Increase traffic
- Amplify brand awareness
- Build trust and credibility
- Improve SEO ranking
- Reduce paid ad spend
- Drive up sales
The best press opportunity for ecommerce brands
If the list above sounds great, you’d probably like to know where to start. Meet holiday gift guides.
Holiday gift guides are product round-ups all about (surprise!) gifts.
From October through December, magazines, blogs, and newspapers publish a huge range of gift-giving round-ups like:
Let’s dive into why gift guides are the best media opportunity of the year for eCommerce brands.
#1: More Opportunities to Get Featured
Holiday gift guides are unlike any other kind of product PR. Once a year, publications that typically don’t publish shopping round-ups, open their pages for product coverage.
You can find gift guides in titles you normally wouldn’t be able to work with. This vastly increases your PR opportunities.
Here’s an example: men’s magazines don’t typically feature home goods, beauty products, or jewelry. However, during the holidays men are looking for gifts for their wives, girlfriends, mothers, and daughters. In order for a men’s magazine to give their readers tips on what to purchase for the “women in their life”, they feature products for women.
That’s 76 PR opportunities to get your product in front of a totally new audience. And this isn’t their only gift guide.
Consumer publications that feature products year-round, like Real Simple, publish dozens of gift guides on everything from gifts for parents, for cocktail lovers, for twentysomethings, for plant parents, for people who love beauty products, for pet owners….and that’s just a start.
Dozens of gift guides mean hundreds of potential feature spots for your product. Your odds increase with each additional gift guide.
A quick “holiday gift guide + publication name + year” search will reveal many guides from years past.
#2: The Most Straightforward Type of Product PR
PR can be hard and a lot of work.
Between figuring out what story you want to tell and what outlets would actually tell it, it can feel overwhelming and mysterious.
That’s what’s so great about holiday gift guides. There’s a set formula and the timing is the same every year. Plus, there’s no complicated messaging or story angle strategy.
To quickly determine if a gift guide is a good opportunity for what you sell, check:
- Price point. Is your product within the range of what’s featured?
- Sales platforms. Do you see items sold on brand’s websites? Or only Amazon links?
- Gift receiver. Are your products for women, foodies, pet lovers, etc?
#3: High Intent Traffic
Gift guides don’t just drive traffic—they drive motivated traffic. The people clicking on these roundups aren’t aimlessly browsing; they’re actively looking for something to buy.
They’re searching for “best gifts for dads who cook” or “gifts under $50 for coworkers” because they need to make a purchase.
When you get your product into a gift-giving roundup that aligns with your ideal client, you’re not just building brand awareness, you’re capturing people at the moment they’re ready to buy.
#4: No Pay to Play
Holiday gift guide placements ARE NOT ADVERTISEMENTS. They’re what’s called “Earned Editorial.”
While it sounds like you’re buying media coverage, Earned Editorial actually means that you are getting placed in a publication based solely on merit.
Editors decide to feature your product when they genuinely believe it’s a good fit for their audience. You do not pay for inclusion. Its placement is *earned* making it Earned Editorial coverage.
That’s great news because with a little training, you can land these kinds of features yourself, for free.
#5: Press Opportunities All Year Long
Holiday gift guides are just the beginning. The editors who work on these also write product roundups all year, think:
- Valentine’s Day
- Mother’s Day
- Back to School
- Summer Entertaining
- and many, many more
Holiday placements aren't just one-time wins. When you get these features you’re also starting a relationship with an editor who regularly covers products.
Pitching gift guides teaches you how to get into product roundups, giving you a playbook you can reuse for year-round media wins.
See what it takes to land gift guide press
If you’d like to learn more about holiday media features, and what it takes to land these coveted placements—think photography, affiliate links, price point, and more—we invite you to join our free Holiday Gift Guide PR Workshop.
In our live workshop, you’ll get proven strategies that we've used to secure hundreds of media features for our clients. These placements include top consumer publications like Real Simple, Martha Stewart, the New Yorker, Wired, the Strategist, Oprah online, and more.
The workshop also includes an open Q&A so you can bring all your product PR questions and get answers from a publicist with 20 years of experience.
