22.6.23

‘Award winning’ is a powerful statement, and being shortlisted or nominated for a prestigious accolade brings public recognition of your organisation’s hard work and expertise.

Participating in industry awards is a valuable marketing opportunity for your organisation – helping you to connect with other key industry players, benchmarking your achievements against others and upgrading your peer-to-peer status via a third-party public endorsement.

In many cases, a well-executed award strategy can even elevate industry awareness, strengthen relationships and boost credibility – whether you actually win or not.

Here are some of the key benefits of entering your organisation into industry awards:

Persuading the panel

Most businesses are ‘in it to win it’, entering awards because they want to take home the top prize. But winning isn’t always about how hard you worked, as much as how persuasively you told your story to the panel of judges.

Costly, complex and often requiring screeds of information related to specific categories, award entries require significant time and skill. So, unless storytelling is your strong point, it’s worth bringing experienced support onboard to craft a relatable, emotive and inspiring submission that will significantly increase your chances of winning. Similarly, many awards also allow visual elements to be included, like graphics and photographs. Bringing an experienced design team into the equation will help you create an eye-catching entry that grabs the full attention of the judges.

Marketing along the road to success

If you’re a viable candidate, you’ve already done all the hard work. Once you’ve brought external marketeers onboard, make sure you share all the details of your project with them – including anecdotes, resources, facts and figures. From here, they’ll work with you to carefully analyse the criteria and find where your efforts best fit, selecting your best candidates and categories.

After this, they’ll conduct interviews and research to build a bigger picture of the nominated individuals or pieces of work. Building a compelling case will be about uncovering powerful human-interest stories, impressive figures or stats and showcasing the unique details that make an entry stand out from the crowd.

Maximising the timeline

While it’s tempting to sit back and relax once you’ve submitted an entry you’re proud of, there’s still plenty of work to get on with. Working with your marketing partner, there’s a wealth of traction to be gained from capitalising on key opportunities during an award timeline, starting with the shortlist releases and moving towards the final ceremony.

Use a carefully coordinated programme of strategic marketing to capitalise on prime moments, show off your brand and gain maximum attention. For example, shout about your shortlist on social media, use your nomination to promote a related case study or discuss the project you’ve entered in a blog post. Videos, web banners, newsletter entries, press releases and other content can all be used to highlight your participation, qualifying accomplishments and successful milestones in the competition. While the ultimate goal is to win, use the entire award process as a springboard to create a positive focus on your brand.

Congratulations, you’ve won

Of course, this mileage extends considerably further if you win. Winning an award is a lightning rod for positive attention. Your prospects and clients will be looking to you, so use this  to outline the solutions and people that helped you win how support  and  other services or products that  relevant outstanding feedback from the judges or awarding body

And as soon as possible after the announcement, start notifying partners, customers and potential new leads about your success. This will help with the process of transforming your win into new revenue streams and income. Something as simple as including the award logo underneath your email signature is a subtle way to keep reinforcing your brand’s credibility long after the occasion.   

Put your entries into safe hands

We have twenty years’ experience crafting award-winning entries for our clients. Whatever the industry and award criteria, we know how to gather the unique stories, impressive stats and strong testimonials to develop submissions that succeed. And while we’re proud of our impressive success rate, we also know it’s not all about winning.

Once the entries are in, we can help you seize this golden opportunity to coordinate organisation-wide marketing efforts that maximise the benefits for your brand and garner positive attention from clients and prospects.

If you’d like to find out more about how we could create award-winning entries for your organisation, please get in touch.

25.5.23

No business is an island - especially not in B2B.

Very few B2B organisations would survive without a network of collaborators, strategic alliances and supply chain partnerships. These successful relationships are one of your business’ strengths, but many organisations are missing a trick by failing to share them with their target market.

Strategic partner marketing is a growth area in the B2B space. Whether celebrating distribution channels, resellers or new collaborative products and services, many organisations recognise that combining their marketing efforts offers a range of mutual benefits, including:

Key considerations for partnership campaigns

Delivering a successful and cohesive partner marketing campaign requires considerable communication and understanding. Before embarking on a partner campaign, there are some critical areas to establish:

1. Find your partnership story

Why did your partnership come about? The most effective B2B partnership campaigns have an engaging origin story like a pressing challenge or shared customer pain point. From here, you can use your marketing to illustrate how, together, you were able to successfully solve the problem before explaining how it brings benefits to both sets of customers.

2. Consistency is key

Alongside getting your stories straight, your brand values and messaging must be aligned, too. It’s vital both organisations are clear and consistent about what they want to mutually achieve, how they’ll work together to achieve it and how the relationship will evolve from there. Clear aims will keep your marketing on track and ensure every piece of content is used strategically to further your partnership goals.

3. Keep messaging simple

Cobranding can be complex. Ensure that both teams start out on the same page and have a thorough understanding of each other’s brand guidelines, target audience, preferred content and tone of voice. This might mean creating shared brand visuals and examining each other’s house style to prevent clashes over things like logo placement.

Throughout the partner campaign, both parties will need to stick closely to these agreed rules to avoid overcomplicated or off-brand content. Simplicity is key to ensuring consistency and continuity across both organisations’ marketing teams.

4. Recognise your combined strength

At the heart of your joint marketing efforts there must be a clear message: how your partnership benefits customers. Outline what each organisation brings to the table and how your different experiences, solutions and services complement each other and add value for your target audience.

5. Understand your new audience

Partner marketing campaigns should expand each brand’s audience by offering access to each other’s customers and followers. Carefully consider which sector of your partner’s audience you want to reach and devise a clear strategy to target them. If possible, consult your partner for support – they should know their audience well.

6. Integrate your campaigns

To generate the most value, be strategic and plan the marketing materials you’ll jointly create and share. There’s a wealth of potential for collaborative thought leadership - think guest expert articles / blog posts, video interviews, joint webinars, co-hosted events, even combined whitepapers and case studies.

Celebrate your partnerships

The benefits are clear but there’s a lot to consider before setting out on a partner marketing journey. An expert steer can help. We have plenty of experience creating content marketing that celebrates our clients’ valuable partnerships and strategic alliances – helping them to illustrate to their customers the value of their partnerships while attracting new audiences in the process.

If you’d like to find out more about our strategic partner marketing strategies and what we could do for your organisation, please get in contact.

27.8.22

As a B2B content commissioner, a prime part of your role is to make sure internally and externally produced content speaks with your brand’s tone of voice – but what does that mean in practice?

All too often, corporate brand guidelines focus on a list of aspirational statements and are light on detail – the specifics of what you should be looking for when you review blog posts, whitepapers, brochures and eBooks. Vague, subjective pointers like ‘be inspirational’ aren’t always the type of practical guidance you need.

We’ve been interpreting and implementing global organisations’ tone of voice guidelines for over 16 years now, so here’s a brief rundown of our top tips…

1. Look beyond the aspirational aims

Use any tone descriptors to give you a flavour of how a brand aims to sound, but don’t get too hung up on trying to interpret them into concrete examples. They’re usually included to paint a word picture, rather than to provide hard-and-fast rules. Remember, too, that these descriptors are highly subjective: what’s ‘visionary’ for one person could well be exaggeration for another.

2. Take your guidance from the examples

Good tone of voice guidelines will include plenty of examples, usually demonstrating before and after scenarios. This is where you can really get to grips with the mechanics of tone, seeing it in action and understanding how it varies between different content types. Often you learn as much from what the brand team doesn’t want than from what it does.

3. Remember the constants of any brand voice

The brand voice may go through many updates, but the fundamentals of tone will remain the same:

• communicate clearly and directly, leading with the benefits for the target audience
• get to the point – take out any sentences that don’t add value
• cut the jargon
• beware of over claiming – it’ll devalue your message
• use an appropriate level of explanation – don’t assume and don’t patronise
• be led by your audience – the tonal shade that works for CEOs might not be right for colleague communications.

4. Get a second pair of eyes on it

Particularly in the early days of a brand voice update, it’s often useful to get a marketing colleague to review the tone of a piece of content. This way your team will quickly build up a shared view how your brand voice should be brought to life and will be ready to give constructive feedback to content creators.

5. Connect with your brand team

Your brand team have invested huge amounts of time into developing the tone of voice guidelines and they know them better than anyone else, so use your brand colleagues. It’s never helpful when marketing departments see brand as a hindrance to getting content out. Instead, see the brand team as a resource you can tap into for clarification and guidance. Bringing brand in on your first few content reviews, or on any tricky issues, is always a good idea and will deepen your tonal knowledge for the future.

We are experts at creating B2B content in your brand voice. Get in touch if you’d like to find out more about working together.