Unlock the marketing benefits of industry awards

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.