Winning is good for business. It gets you noticed by the press, your peers, your customers and prospects and gives a huge morale boost to everyone who has worked on the successful entry.
Debra Nightingale, director of communications at P&MM, says, Winning a prestigious industry award in the B2B arena is not dissimilar to winning an Oscar or BAFTA. Yet as with any other piece of marketing, choosing which awards to go for and putting together a successful entry needs careful planning.
In their broadest sense, awards fall into one of three categories: Competitive awards run by trade associations or trade publications; industry/company rankings; or best practice standards.
The first focus on particular sectors and are usually judged by experts within the area who examine specialised events and activities. The remaining two recognise and encourage efficient practices or operational ethics across sectors; businesses are compared generically and tend to be judged by skills specialists rather than sector specialists. Susanna Simpson, managing director of Limelight Public Relations, says, Trade awards provide an excellent endorsement of your product/service; business ones are much harder but emphasise your excellence in that area.
Rachel Hawkes, account director at Elemental Communications, adds, Look also to environmental and community awards; demonstrating that your company is aligned with society values is almost priceless.
A company choosing an awards programme in which to enter needs to consider whether it’s relevant to its business, product, service or clients. Ask if the awards programme is established and respected, or whether it will be beneficial to win.
Peter Young, managing partner of Communication Solutions, says, Most marketing agencies are aware of the leading awards programmes aligned to their field of specialism.
Awards offered by trade bodies or magazines are most obvious, but there are also other awards reflecting entrepreneurship, innovation or management leadership which are not specific to particular industries.
Heather Westgate, managing director of TDA says: Awards which take the bigger picture into account are more worth winning; the DMA awards are some of the best as they cover all sectors and all industries. The recent B2B Marketing awards are also important as they looked at the total marketing package not just the creative.
How to enter varies according to the type of award; in some cases companies don’t enter at all. The Sunday Times Fast Track 100, for example, recognises Britain’s fastest-growing private companies. The Sunday Times team monitors growth, interviews company personnel and then decides who should be listed. LBM was the fastest growing marketing company in the UK and is one of five shortlisted for best management team. As Andrew Colwell, marketing director at LBM says: It’s particularly rewarding that the awarding body in this case the Sunday Times noticed us and recognised our excellence without us putting our company forward.
Awards which recognise good practice are not won by competition but granted on achieving certain standards. Investors in People (IIP) is probably the best known of the business standards and aims to help employers improve their performance through effective management and development of the people they employ. Companies are evaluated by independent assessors, arranged through Regional Quality Centres, or IIP Corporate Solutions if the organisation has more than 1,000 employees. Those organisations reaching the required standard are designated recognised employers; if the organisation is unsuccessful, the assessor summarises the actions needed to improve.
Few competitive awards are able to demonstrate quite such tangible benefits for companies attaining them, but there is little doubt that entering raises the company’s profile within their industry. Simpson of Limelight, says, I’ve had direct feedback from clients who say that they came to me because they’d seen I’d won things like PR Week’s Young PR Professional of the Year.
Winning brings prestige; companies are seen to be outstanding and to be setting the benchmark for their peer group. As Nightingale of P&MM says, potential clients can gauge the quality of your work, the areas in
- Read the documentation thoroughly and comply with every instruction.
- Understand what the judges are looking for.
- Only submit an entry if it fits within the specified criteria.
- Don’t force a ‘square peg into a round hole’.
- Stick to the facts and write clear, concise and interesting copy; avoid hyperbole, jargon and too much technical language.
- Don’t submit the same entry word-for-word into several categories; adjust the text to address the category.
- Lots of entries mean judges have to decide quickly who to shortlist; make it easy for them to access the information they need.
- If the brief allows, use images and clear diagrams to support the text.
- Include clear evidence of measurable success (possibly the single most often fudged part of an award entry).
- Trust the judges to keep commercial details confidential.
- Become a judge and gain greater insight into how to win awards.
