Making a List and Checking it Twice: The Perfect Christmas Launch
The party season is in full swing, decorations are going up and retailers are already pushing seasonal deals – it must mean one thing, Christmas. With the nation hunting down the perfect product to gift their loved ones this festive season, it’s a fight for brands to stand out. From a PR perspective, the festive season begins long before the chilly nights of December, so here’s our advice on how to make the best impact for a Christmas product launch.
Failing to Plan is Planning to Fail – Why timing matters
It’s 30 degrees on the Bakerloo line, and we are surrounded by ice creams and sun cream. Summertime isn’t a natural time of the year to be thinking about festive frills and gifting but it’s when the media world experience a preview into Christmas that year. With brands across the globe vying for media buy-in to their latest products, this is the time where the must-have gifting list is decided. If you are planning on launching a product at Christmas, or securing major seasonal sales, you will need to have a pre-launch for the media ‘Christmas in July’. Everything from samples to high-res imagery, stockists and pricing should be finalised and ready to go. That’s not to say there aren’t some opportunities a little later in the year. The world of influencers and online blogs/media outlets get festive at around late September or early October time. With top buy listicles galore, there’s a great opportunity to get a product listed – and more importantly a link back to a product page/stockist – a fab sprinkling of SEO fairy dust!
Christmas Cheer for all to Hear – Why methods matter
A bit like Oxford Street on the week before Christmas, it can be difficult to get cut-through with other brands competing for a voice – so how can you get creative cut-through at this time of year? If you are selling a high-end luxury product, doing a consumer-wide roadshow event for commuters is unlikely to get you the results you need. However, an exclusive buying event promoted by top-tier media could be just the ticket. There’s a lot of scope to find a creative outlet to promote your product. From sensory pop-ups to front-page grabbing stunts, there’s great opportunity to make an impact. If you are looking smaller scale, starting off with media gifting and exclusive press days is the perfect way to kick-start activity. What’s great is that getting creative is a brilliant way to bring your brand to life. Often the simplest of ideas make the biggest impact – as long as it’s directly talking to the right target audience.
Product Perfection – Why details matter
Everything from beauty to interior and technology has grown in availability – creating more choice that ever before thanks to global online retailers. Whereas before we may have had a choice of three or four items, now there’s hundreds. Thanks to this increase in choice, product descriptions and SEO have become vital to helping a product stand out. From a product description perspective, short, sharp and succinct rule the day. Always tell the audience why your product is better than competitors – really sell those USPs, and how the product will benefit consumers. From an SEO perspective, make sure your descriptions and website content matches what people will be searching for. If you don’t feature under the right search term that people are using for your product category, then you are unlikely to get found which can impact product sales. Moreover, making sure your outbound communications via social, email marketing and PR all use your keywords/phrases, so you can a totally coherent approach.
If you are looking for support for your next product launch or want to get the best out of annual seasonal moments, then look no further than your PR ‘elves’ at Cherish PR – get in touch info@cherishpr.com
Written by Holly Forrest, Cherish PR