Here are four important reasons to make time for entering B2B industry awards.
1. Employee mojo
Industry awards are an ideal platform to recognise the efforts of your team. Whatever the awards outcome, letting your team know you value their work enough to showcase it for an industry award is a terrific boost for employee confidence and motivation.
If the campaign makes the shortlist, earns a nomination or wins a category, the celebration and internal communication processes to share the good news are great ways to nurture employee motivation and raise the profile of marketing across the organisation.
2. New business
All existing and prospective customers want to work with the best brands. Industry award nominees and winners are one quick way to potentially find those brands.
Why? Because industry awards should recognise excellence in a given field. External validation of your successes through industry recognition gives a stamp of credibility to your brand which is a compelling differentiator for new business.
3. Peer benchmarking
The process of nominating your campaign for an industry award gives you a court side seat to compare what you’re doing with others in your space. Yes, comparing notes with B2B industry peers means walking a fine line between giving away the techniques that made your campaign a success and sharing enough insight that peers feel comfortable to share in return. It’s worth sharing because the chance to see the best campaigns from brand peers can provide insight to help improve.
4. Brand awareness
Being listed for an award will improve awareness of your brand. Nominations and wins are ideal to use in ongoing marketing efforts to endorse your brand’s thought leadership, talented team and marketing credibility among peers.
A word to the wise
If you’re notified by an organisation your brand won an award, but you haven’t submitted an entry, be wary of further engagement and don’t go ahead and pay for tickets to attend the awards dinner. Be cautious if you, or your peers and colleagues, have not heard of the award or the awards organisation. New awards come along every year but take care when learning about new programs to make sure you don’t inadvertently end up in a scam or participating in awards which don’t add value to your brand.
How to create a successful awards submission
Preparing outstanding industry awards submissions is a whole other story so here are just three quick tips to help you get started:
- Make a calendar. Quality submissions take time to prepare. Don’t leave it to the last minute. Map out the deadlines for each award so you and your team can fully plan and gather the supporting materials.
- Tell a story. Craft the submission as a story so the judges understand the goals that drove how the campaign formed, and what it achieved.
- Metrics. Nothing rivets attention like hard, quantifiable metrics. Proven results to back up a story are compelling data points to make sure judges take your submission seriously.
Across The Recognition Group, we’re firm believers in the value of B2B industry awards and have written successful applications for over a decade (although we are awesome at doing them for our clients we don’t generally do them for ourselves!). Contact us to talk about how we cut the complexity of creating submissions or to explore some of the industry awards we’ve helped clients enter.
