EP 355: Holiday Publicity Push: PR Success Tips for Jewelry and Product Businesses with Nora Wolf

2:12PM May 26, 2022

Speakers:

Tracy Matthews

Keywords:

pr

pitch

holiday gift guides

product

featured

holidays

gift

guides

business

publication

important

people

bit

client

editor

sales

question

published

years

jewelry designer

If you're an independent jewelry designer or product maker, you probably already know that getting publicity is an important part of a robust marketing strategy. You also probably know that the holiday season is one of the most important times to get exposure for your brand. And here's the thing right now is the time that you need to be leaning in to getting your products featured in holiday gift guides. And if you're not sure how to do it, well, I've got some good news for you today because my guest, Norwalk is going to walk you through with some of the best practices and things you need to be thinking about to get your products placed in holiday gift guides because the season is amongst us. Hey there, I'm Tracy Matthews. I'm the chief visionary officer of flourish and thrive Academy, the host of this podcast called Thrive by design. And I also wrote a book called The desire brand effect, stand out in a saturated market with a timeless jewelry brand. And I'm here today to talk to you about how you can get product placements and holiday gift guides. You know, it's my passion to help jewelry designers and other product makers, grow their businesses and launch and scale their businesses to six multiple six and seven figures. And today is no exception, because getting PR exposure is one of the best ways to get more eyes on your brand. And in fact, it is a long game. We're going to talk a little bit more about that on the episode today. If you haven't done so yet, make sure that you subscribe to this channel. You liked the video if you've enjoyed it after it and then share one of your key takeaways in the comments below after and then if you want to receive notifications from our channel, make sure you hit that little notification bell for more information later. All right, let's dive in to this amazing episode with more woof, PR expert and holiday gift guide aficionado.

I am so excited to have a very special guest on the show today. Her name is Nora wolf of wolf craft. Nora, thanks so much for being here today.

Thank you for having me, Tracy, I'm so excited to chat with you. I'm super

pumped because you're a PR expert. And today we're going to be talking all about holiday gift guides and building brand awareness through getting on holiday gift guides, which I think is interesting because it is May I think as this episode is going live, and it seems really early, so I'm excited to kind of dive in a little bit

more. Yeah, I know it does feel kind of strange to be talking about the holidays. But I think anyone who's kind of gone through the cycle a few times kind of knows that they have to start thinking about this now.

I know it's so it's so important. So before we dive into the meat of the episode, why don't you share a little bit about your background and why gift guides are important?

Yeah, I can give you the quick Reader's Digest version. So 1000 years ago, I went to art school for undergrad and I studied art and design. And I really thought that that was what I was going to do. But I graduated with kind of like a wacky portfolio, and I was kind of precious about it at the time. And I was like, no one's gonna hire me. They won't like my work. What do we hire 21 year olds to do, we hire them to like, get the coffee and like fill out the spreadsheet, you know, like do the kind of like crappy things that no one else wants to do. But I didn't have that perspective, because I was young and dumb. So I looked for other jobs that I thought I could be good at, in addition to fashion and video, which is what I had studied and did a little bit of PR my internships and I was like I can do PR, maybe someone will hire me. And I had no business applying for those jobs. And then the people who eventually did hire me had no business hiring me. And this has been kind of like the theme of my whole career is like, Google's my best friend. Just say yes. And like figure it out later. And you know, I think being that resourceful has really actually been a huge benefit, not just to me, but for the people that I've either been employed by or clients in the future. So yeah, that's how I started in PR. I worked for three years at one firm. And then I worked another year at a second firm. And at that point, I was still young and dumb. And so I decided to start my own business.

And I'm young and dumb. That's young and smart.

I love that. Wait, you know, I think that there's anyone can start a business at any age. And I think you do need some of that enthusiasm. And I definitely relate being 25 to having a lot of that enthusiasm. And now I have like a very different brand of enthusiasm that I think has gotten me this far. So different strokes for different life moments. And so now I'm happy to say in May I celebrated 11 years of that first company with PR and about two and a half years ago, right when everything shut down, I was like, you know, it'd be great. Let me start a second business. Yeah. And so that's how I'm talking to you. Now I started wolf craft. And the reason for that is Wolf PR is a full service retainer PR firm, we charge kind of a large retainer, and we work year round with our clients. So these, there are so many amazing designers. And that doesn't make sense for them to have expensive year round PR, like it's not a good fit for their business. And it doesn't mean that they don't have good stories, and that they're not interesting to the media, especially, we're going to get into like gift guides stuff, but especially for the holidays. So I wanted to work with this population of like, also business owners, also people who have the energy, also people who have like creative vision. And so will craft is a little bit more DIY and a little bit more like in in explaining this part of PR, so it's not so mystical and mysterious. So that's kind of the genesis and the very first thing that we did was the Holiday Gift Guide stuff. So it's something I'm pretty passionate about.

Yeah, cuz holiday gift guides are so important. But why don't you tell us a little bit more about why the holiday season is really important for jewelry and other product and fashion brands?

Yeah, so there's a couple of reasons, one of the most important ones is that during the holidays, right? Like, why would a jewelry designer ever even think about pitching Men's Health, for example, like you wouldn't, except during the holidays, right? Because they're going to have a gift guide of like, what to get Mom or your girlfriend or you know, your boss, whatever it is. So it opens up the amount of opportunities you have available, like 5x. And kind of it goes in line with consumer spending, consumers are spending much more during the holidays. And publications know that and so they're going into support content, that trends with consumer spending. So not only are there magazines that you wouldn't normally work with that you have an opportunity to work with them. But they're putting more products on their pages. So even a publication that you would normally work with, like you know, in style, I think it's actually just folded. So yeah, let's get example.

Good for so long. I'm lucky used to be the best I remember this like back in the day.

Totally. Um, it is there's other really great things coming up, especially in digital. So we lose one thing and another thing comes. And that's like how things work in the world. So this is just a continuation of like, revenue sources change, but because I'm bad on my feet, we're gonna use in sales example. So like, you may pitch and sell year round, but during the holidays, you're gonna see opportunities, increase for product, because they want to support like gift guide things. So while they might only have 10 pieces of products on the page, in traditional, like, January through November, in December issue, they're gonna maybe have 40 pieces of product on the page, so you get more opportunities. So it's a little bit easier. There's just like more places to plug in.

Also, you mean you use the example of men's health before? Like, there's so many more opportunities? Like probably three, four times the opportunities because everyone's doing a gift guide?

Mm hmm. Absolutely. Yeah. And like, you can do really fun things like, you know, let's say you're a jewelry designer, and you have I don't know, like an ice cream cone charm necklace. Like, you can pitch that to either an eater which has like an incredible readership is going to want to talk about like food related gifts, that's not necessarily like a pie pan, like maybe they want to talk about something related. So you get to do kind of like some fun, creative things. During the holidays. Let's

just like quickly talk about that, like, what are some of the most unique pitch or gift guide ideas that you've seen out there?

Gosh, that is a good question. And you're definitely putting me on the spot. With like, we're relying on my memory two years into the pandemic. I can tell you the one that comes to the top of my head is one that I talk about a lot. We have a client who makes these like felt everything they make us out of felt and they made these tassel T Chang a really cute and you would like clip it onto your wallet or to a piece of your purse is kind of like a decorative accessory. And we pitched it to a travel editor for her gift guide. And she published it and it says that it will help you identify your luggage on the carousel. And it's like a chic way to do that. Oh my so like, we like what we're what's our client trying to create a luggage identification system? No, that was not their goal. But it works for that. It's not like we're lying about its utility. And it worked enough that that editor decided to include it in her travel gift guide and that was for Forbes, so that's like one of those examples. We have like a leather covered thermos that went into eater also a few years ago. And it was just like a very elevated version. Like you wouldn't just want to gift a normal thermos, but this one was like very Luxe and high end. So that worked really well for eater as well, because they were trying to surface something a little bit fancier. So that was kind of a fun one.

The cool thing about some of these highly trafficked blogs, though, because eater like obsessed with it, it's super disappointed that it's not as robust here in the Phoenix area, because they just usually feature restaurants in Phoenix instead of Scottsdale are the some of the other areas. But that blog is so highly trafficked. And so like you even get like the residual sales, like way down the road. It's not just like, just for holiday.

And something that I talk about a lot is like looking at it just for like a one to one sales moment is not the best way to think about PR, because it's not marketing. It's like storytelling. But what are you getting, you're getting a logo for your website, and your newsletter, you're getting incredible backlinks you're getting, like if you decide to pursue investor opportunities later, you get like a Press page for your presentation deck. So it's like, yes, if you look at it through sales, like you're gonna get from sales, but it's gonna be so much more valuable in like ways that are kind of hard to really measure out. Exactly. So

you want to think of PR as a long game. It's not necessarily just a sales opportunity. What do you think that gift guides still do promote sales for a brand? Or is that kind of an outdated way to think about it right now.

So we have a pretty hard and fast rule with our clients where we won't talk about the sales too much, because it's not a sales tool. And they will share that information with us sometimes. And it was very exciting to hear about, like, oh, we grew our, like, we had one placement that doubled our clients mailing list because it does so well. And like, you know, that's because they sold X amount of product. But like, it's a practice, like we you know, when Oprah Magazine existed, we have the same client featured in there twice. I think, like within a year and a half, they're in there twice, which is pretty high frequency that was rough. And like the first placement didn't move any products and the second placement like sold out of the product. And like I don't you just don't know, you don't know. But Oprah is a very good one to get into.

Exactly.

It's a practice. It's a practice, for sure. I

know it sounds it's interesting, because I remember when I had a lot of product placement, PR, it's like some of the hits would crush it with sales. And then the other ones nothing like I remember I was like I was supposed to be featured on the today will actually was featured on The Today Show there was B roll and all this stuff. But they ran at a time. And so they didn't get a chance to actually talk about my stuff like live on the show. And this was years ago, this was like, very early 2000s. And back in the day when like, the website and stuff wasn't even that big of a thing. They rolled the credits. And then I do think that they had a website and there was something on the website, my phone because I didn't have a website was ringing off the hook. And we sold out of that product. And they didn't even have a chance to necessarily talk talk about it. It was just like one of the featured products in the whole segment. Yeah, it's sold out, like within like a day. I was just like, it was like so incredible. And so you just really never know. You know, it's like when something's going to work. And then I had like a, like, literally like a product feature and InStyle once and it I sold maybe five pieces. Yeah. And that was like disappointing.

But like you never know what will or won't work. But then you get this clipping from InStyle. And especially now that we have so much control over like our own personal media channels, right? We know that people need a couple of looks at a thing. I think it's like they have to be hit over the head seven times before they like are going to be moved into purchasing. So like okay, maybe they seen the publication. Maybe they see it in your stories. Maybe a month later, they see it in like a paid ad somewhere that you've taken out. And then it's on your posts and in your newsletter. So it gives you like Content Leverage, and it's a validation that's not a user or customer testimonial. It's like this third party that we've really validated as a society so I think it's Yeah, I'm with you on that. Like, yeah, you can't look at it through just like a salesman. Yeah, you're gonna be frustrated. It's a long game.

I always tell people this and it but it is so important to do in fact, like, I've been so busy right now for myself. I have not been pitched we have not been pitching as a company like to get me on podcast and I was just thinking before this episode like I I need to start pitching myself to get on podcasts because you know that the residual effect of what it has when people keep seeing your name over and over again, is so powerful. Yeah. And it's the same thing with the gift guides is the same thing with ongoing PR strategy, which I think is really important. I didn't mean to get like, super off topic there, but it is no, no, no, I think I'm just trying to reinforce like the importance of it. You just never know.

I think what you said was right on. So yeah.

Okay, cool. So what are some of the things to keep in mind when you're pitching for the holidays? And like, what are some of the different types of publicity that people can get outside of just gift guides?

So we talk about gift guides? Because I love that question, because it's a little bit of a Trojan horse into talking about pitching product in general. So the major difference between holiday gift guides and like any other kind of product, Roundup, and especially, especially like other holidays, like Mother's Day, Father's Day, back to school, you know, summer entertaining, which are kind of regular product roundups as well, the only difference really is lead time and the amount of exposure, right like, again, Men's Health maybe isn't doing like a father's love, they might do Father's Day, but they might not do like a back to school or like summer entertaining. But so it does narrow a little bit for the rest of the year. But the ideas are identical. So if you're figuring out how to like, package your product and talk about it in a way that's palatable to the media, and you have the right images, and you're supplying the correct information, and you have the correct contact, which you will establish by doing the research initially, like the person who writes about products during Christmas, is the same person that's worried about product during summer. So you can use this across the year. So that's kind of why we picked Holiday Gift Guide is like it's the most comprehensive, but it's it's a little sneaky. We wanted, we wanted to educate further kind of year round. So that's, that's the first way I would answer your question. And then the second thing I would also say is, if they want to do a bigger story about your company down the line, having previously worked with them, and shown that you're good at supplying images that you get back in time that you give good length that you're you have like a grown up company and a grown up business, you've established a working relationship. And so maybe they do product features on the beginning of the book. And in the middle of the book, they do like a studio tour every month, or they do you know, meet the small business owner, whatever it is. So like you have pitched them a few times, and you've worked with them. And now you can kind of like knock on their door for something bigger.

Yep. Which I think I just you know, who came to mind when you were talking about all this is like a friend of mine from back in the day, Maya Brenner, she is that girl has so much publicity, I think because she was like living in LA and had like, all these connections to some of the public like to editors and stuff like that. And she just just kept on it. And I think that she would always get these on, like, how do you get all these features about you? And I think that's the cool part. It's like when you build these relationships, and they're used to featuring you, it's really easy to eventually like they think of you the next time they want to do like a brand feature, which I think is awesome.

Yeah, I mean, this is like a little out there. But like even that scene from now I'm dating myself Devil Wears Prada, where I forget who the designer is. But they're showing the collection to Anna Wintour or fake Anna Wintour, Meryl Streep, before anyone else, like that is so important. That designer needs the approval of Vogue to have a successful business. And so they're developing those relationships by having like, an invite to the Atelier, and here's your like champagne and strawberries while you're looking at our new stuff. So not that small businesses need to do that. Nor could they but like, do your version of that with the media. And you'll kind of maintain those relationships and grow them.

It's so good. So how do you like I know what everyone wants to know is like, how do I know? How do I find all these contacts? And who do I know to pitch like, what's your process for that?

That's a great question. So small plug if you come to the workshop are doing with you. We're gonna do like a deeper dive into that, but I can give you like some top level ideas. So we'll craft Kiersten and I hear so my business partner and I studied design. And we really centered the business around design thinking methodology, which like, is basically the scientific method for design and there are a couple of phases of it. And empathy is one and a big one is research. And so in order to know who you shouldn't pitch you have to research and we research at Wolf PR, like every day almost and not that small businesses have the time or should they be doing the same amount of research that a PR firm do As you should dedicate some time if you're going to be pitching to see like, does this publication include pieces at my price point? Does this publication? Only do Etsy or only do websites or only do Amazon? Because if I'm not doing Amazon, it's not the right place for me to dedicate time to? Does his publication do like really wacky, like polymer clay stuff? Or are they doing like really refined, like, fine jewelry. So kind of like looking at what those editors are doing is the very first thing, because publications are also like a design and art point of view, like they know what their readership wants from them. And they cater to that. So if you're just being like, I want to be in vogue. But your work is not Vogue, it's more real simple, great, you should go where your audience is. And where I'd like the editors who have that point of view and share the point of view of your work are. So that's the first thing is to research very deeply into, like what the point of view of those publications are, and then dedicate time to looking at the byline of those product features, writing that person's name down. And then there's a lot of different ways to figure out the email addresses a lot of the time, it's a quick Google away. But yeah, we deep dive into it. I could spend like an hour talking about all the Crafty ways I've I've found them. And there's a lot of information online about how to like stock an email address also. So I won't bore you with it. But I think the most important thing is like understanding the point of view of who you're pitching.

I love that. So what makes up a good pitch?

Great question. So going back to empathy as one of the big phases. If we think about, especially editors during giftcard season, they're getting no joke, up to 500 emails a day. So and they're not paid very well. And the budgets are getting slashed, so they're not doing photo shoots. So we know that they need good photos, they know, we know that they need to kind of know what the thing that you're sending them looks like in the email, because they're not going to download anything, they're not going to click on a link, they need to have that immediately. They don't want to know how much it would help you. If you got published, they want to know how you giving them stuff. And like then surfacing that cool stuff to their audience is helpful to their audience. So kind of like keeping it brief. And getting really to the point about like, I think this would be good for your GIF guy because you publish stuff like this. And here is a picture of the thing that I think you'd be interested in. And it's low res. So it's not clogging up your inbox. And here's a link to my website. And here's a link to my Instagram, and I'll follow up with you, if I don't hear back and like thank you for your time. Perfect, you're in service of that editor, and you're empathizing with the needs that they have a short amount of time, and they have a big project to do. So that would be like, the best way to do a pitch.

And let's talk about pictures. Just super briefly, what is your take on a good picture? What does that mean?

So a good picture really could be anything. And I don't have a strong point of view. Personally, what we need to think about is what is the industry standard? What is the media actually publishing, so we can have very beautiful lifestyle images. And sometimes the media will publish those, but we have to look at like, what do those look like, and if they're like way too artsy fartsy and it doesn't fit with like anyone's publication point of view, use those for your lookbook for your marketing for your social media, but probably not for the media. For gift guides. In particular, you're often going to see like those ecommerce siloed, against white, and they're like clean, they're crisp, very few shadows, and you just understand the product really well.

And that way they can cut it and like just plop it anywhere.

You know, they can plop it anywhere. And it looks like everything else on the page. You're not like this weird outlier, who's like in black and white with like a grainy filter over? It's like, they don't want that. We can't use that.

So I just have one more like question about this for you like in our pre kind of conversations and stuff, you mentioned that it was really important to start watching your peers and kind of in your competition and see what they're doing. Why is this important to do through a PR lens?

Yeah, so we always when we get a new client, we don't just monitor for their press, we monitor for their competitors and peers press. Like, if I'm jealous of designer X. Like, I don't have to be jealous. I can use their successes, my cheat sheet. So like if they're getting published in this magazine. Oh my goodness. Now I'm going to see who that editor is. They're going on my media list and I'm going to pitch them next time I have a new product. So why are they doing so well? What did the photos look like? Maybe my photos can look a little bit more like that and it's not copying. That's not at all what I'm saying. It's understanding What good business practices that they're employing? Are they participating in certain trade shows should I be participating in those are they like traveling to New York every, you know, twice a year because there's, you know, an activity, a trade activity that I should be involved with. So whatever they're doing for their business that works for them, I want a cheat sheet that for me, so we always say look at like maybe one or two people that are more than five years ahead. But keeping it within three to five years ahead of you is a pretty good way to start roadmapping your way forward.

That's awesome. This was such a great interview, and I'm so excited to that that I had you on. But before we go, are hosting you and a holiday PR class, why don't you tell us a little bit more about that.

So all the great questions you asked will be answered. More in depth, we talk about kind of more about why holidays are a good time to go and pitch gift guides, we go really in depth into photography, we go in depth into merchandising, it's kind of like, I think a little bit revealing, like pulling back the curtain a little bit more than what we were able to talk about in our short amount of time. And we do a q&a at the end, which is my favorite part. People usually have really good questions, they keep me on my toes. And we kind of collaborate on like how they might find success. So we only do it until the end of June. And then we don't do it again. Because we want people to be successful. And we start early. So that way you can get the whole pitching season available to you.

Yeah, so we're having class with you guys on June 7, I believe it is, there's so make sure that you attend the live class, you can find out all the information over at flourish, thrive academy.com forward slash holiday PR. And we'll also have a link in the show notes and all the things but if you're thinking about doing this, make sure that you sign up in real time. Because if you don't, you're not going to have access to the class and I'm excited because it's going to be a really good class based on what I hope so I

think it's gonna be great. People love it. So I you know, we packed it with a lot of information, something that we're really passionate about, it's like not doing like fluffy stuff. So we tried to like every slide should hopefully give some good nugget of information. Amazing. Well, Nora,

thank you so much for being here.

Thank you for having me Tracy. Great questions.

Thank you so much for watching this episode of Thrive by design. I hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you're game and all ready to pitch those holiday gift guides, make sure that you join us for Norris class over at Wolf craft you can head on over to flourish thrive academy.com forward slash holiday PR to register for free today. Sign up, show up live and make sure that you get your notebook ready and start taking some notes because she's ready to drop some more amazing value and in depth conversations about getting your own publicity without having to pay those expensive publicity retainers that most publicist charge. So we're gonna get all into how to DIY and get yourself placements in those gift guides. Once again, head on over to flourish thrive academy.com forward slash holiday PR