How to get your book or other product into Target

If you sell a book or other product that’s a good fit with customers who shop at Target, you have a lot of work to do.

For starters, you should be pitching a story to the Minneapolis Star Tribune that ties into what you’re selling. That’s because most buyers for Target live in Minneapolis, where the chain is headquartered, and most of them read the local daily newspaper.

Let’s say the Star Tribune prints a story.  The long, arduous job of winning coveted shelf space in Target is just beginning and could take a year or more.

It will require a formal presentation to a buyer.  At that meeting, you must provide details for your advertising and publicity campaigns, as well as your plans for marketing, merchandising, in-store demos, point-of-sale displays, giveaways, promotion with credit cards, special events and more.

Unless you’re a huge household name, Target is unlikely to include you in their circulars or advertising, so you will have to help sell your products at Target through your own efforts and use every trick up your Publicity Hound sleeve.

Margie Zable Fisher, president of Zable Fisher Public Relations in Boca Raton, Florida, may well be one of the foremost experts on getting your books and other products into Target stores.

When a potential client asked Margie for help getting her products into Target, Margie could barely find any information.  She spent hours researching the topic and talked to current and former Target buyers, manufacturers and distributors, licensing companies, sales rep companies and more.  Most of them asked her to use the information anonymously.

The result of her research is the special report “Skyrocket Your Sales by Getting Your Product in Target.”  It shows you, step-by-step, how to do it, even if you’re a small business.

I love Target, and I found the report fascinating. The next time I shop there, I’ll be looking at the merchandise a whole new way. She even teaches you how to search the shelves for valuable clues about the kinds of products Target loves.

Even Guy Kawasaki, Entrepreneur magazine’s “Wise Guy” columnist, endorses the report.

It’s only $49, a real deal considering that the initial order for Target stores is often 9,000 products or more.

What? You say you’d rather sell to Wal-Mart? Buy the report and you’ll get 7 tips on how to sell to Wal-Mart.

By the way, if Target, Wal-Mart or any of the other big box stores accepts your product, that’s a terrific story for your trade journals and business publications.