The awards season is here - don't miss out!


It’s awards season again in B2B land. Awards are, of course, a great way to reinforce your brand values, establish you as a thought leader in your industry and give you that all important credibility to your products and services.

The truth is it’s also a lot of work to pull an awards submission together and that’s why companies ask for our help!  By working with Dragonfly PR, our awards team can take away the burden of writing award entries and our skill and expertise in this area gives you a high chance of success!

Here are our top five reasons why it’s worth entering awards:

  1. Gives you a chance to take stock…and reveal your successes!

Awards submissions make you take stock of what you’ve actually achieved. The application process for entering a business award forces you to be honest about what projects have come to fruition and how you stack up against the competition.  Often you will be asked for growth figures for the past 12 months, or three years, and it will help to highlight some of the successes and milestones along the way.  It can be a big job to pull figures and data about products and markets together from the past couple of years for an awards submission but it can provide fantastic content for so many future articles, blogs and web content! The content that we generate through the awards submission can be redrafted as a press release, highlighting your business successes in the past 12 months.  Many regional business papers are looking for stories of this type, so getting this information together in a newspaper-friendly style can help you make the headlines too.

Top tip:  Be prepared to dig for information, the rewards will be there!

  1. Improves morale and motivation

Awards recognise the success of your employees as well as your business. To be shortlisted for an award is extremely motivating for your employees.  Attending an awards event can be a great social and networking opportunity for your staff too, helping them to feel recognised for their achievements.

Top tip: Build any good news from award submissions in to your internal communications strategy so all staff get to hear about it.

  1. Positions you as an expert

There’s a lot of talk about thought leadership, everyone wants to be known as the authority or the ‘go to’ organisation. Winning a business award rubber stamps your status as a leader in your field.

Top tip: make your annual awards submissions process strategic. What are you known for? What do you want to be known for? Do those aspirations match?

  1. They're usually free to enter!

If you were offered free advertising you’d take it wouldn’t you? Entering awards is usually free and just being shortlisted will provide you with lots of additional marketing tools like web banners, email signatures and online PR to enhance your profile.  The value of winning an award in terms of being able to add ‘award-winning’ to your company e-signature, letterhead, business cards and website, is extremely high – in fact, with achievements such as the Queen’s Awards, it can lead to worldwide recognition.

Top tip: Make sure you’ve planned for all the business awards you want to attend and set a budget for buying at least a couple of tickets to the awards event.

  1. Awards give you endless PR opportunities afterwards

Winning an award can give you a number of PR opportunities; not only for announcements when you are shortlisted and when the winners are revealed, but there are numerous opportunities where you can maximise interest in your company afterwards.  Working with an experienced awards PR agency like Dragonfly PR means that we can plan a whole campaign for at least 6-12 months with opportunities, including trade and regional editor visits, regional press interviews, company profile features, blogs, thought leadership articles, press releases, events and social media activities, all geared up to raise aware of your company and its successes.

Top tip: Ask your PR agency to plan a campaign specifically around winning an award, to ensure no opportunities are missed!

Winning awards is great, for all the above reasons and more. If you are considering being entered for some awards this season whether they are construction sector, manufacturing, regional business, national business or the Queens Awards, why not get in touch with our awards team for a free, no-obligation consultation.

Dragonfly PR specialises in creative PR, social media and awards campaigns for the construction and manufacturing sectors.

For a free no-obligation review of your requirements, email hello@dragonflypr.co.uk or call: 01709 300130 to find out more.

 

Call us on: 0114 349 5341