Business Awards Season is such an exciting time in your life, journey and path to career success. Being nominated for an award confirms and builds your confidence of what you get out of bed to do each day. It’s exciting!
The benefits of participating in awards season is constant. You have the ability to leverage awards for years to come!
I’ve won significant awards throughout my career and made it to Finalist shortlists in others. I still reference these milestones – or leverage them – as they provide excellent social proof of your skill set and business capabilities.
The truth is people don’t get nominated for awards, become a Finalist or Win awards without first doing the work. Although it seems many people reap the benefits – they didn’t submit a piece of paper and get a piece of crystal for nothing.
If you’re one of the people who’s name appears on a shortlist right now – congratulations! Congratulations on submitting an application or for your nomination (or both). You deserve it. You should be proud. But most of all, you should be letting the world know about it.
For those of you who are savvy enough to have had help with writing your applications, I also applaud you for making that investment. You are likely to understand what a wonderful marketing/PR opportunity a Business Award can be for your career and the business.
Once your name gets printed on the ballot paper, so to speak, there’s a list of other actions you should do to support the nomination. After all, the judges are not likely to have heard of you before reviewing your submission. Depending on the Award system, there will be further steps the judges will take.
They’ll like do their research. Complete their due diligence. Look for project evidence or social proof. Particularly for Awards presented by Industry Bodies, Professional Associations or a National level. These trophies aren’t given out like lollies! A submission is not always going to be the only contributing factor in the decision process.
Business Awards with public voting, have a certain level of randomness. Not only is it important you nominate for the right category, but you’ll need to communicate to your community your participation to help get people to cast votes for you.
A lot of people won’t do any – or very little – research before voting for the popular categories. Yet you can put effort into checking off my tips below to turn random selection into educated votes. If you’re participating in one of the popular vote Awards programs like Ausmumprenuer you can help yourself get those Votes in!
Plus, you want to make sure judges are seeing how wonderful you are as they decide who gets their vote. This is on top of those random community casting votes with the categories they don’t have anyone they know listed.
Show us and share with us the proof your application isn’t a fluke – turn up online!
Below are 8 top tips of just some of the many I follow/do myself. Make sure your digital footprint has your best foot forward:
When was the last time you updated your About page or Media section on your website? Keeping these pages up to date with the very latest details is important. With your website potentially being the hub for judges to confirm what they’ve read about you, it’s important.
Be sure to reference projects you may have featured in award nominations. Having a client area, gallery or blog to promote this information, is great way to show this off. By adding this type of detail you can show off #allthethings you do that impress others.
Speaking with a judge from the International Stevie Awards, I was reminded that nomination can have as little as 3-5 minutes judging time. What this means is, if you don’t include further evidence of why you should be a successful nominee that’s all the time you’ll be given. Including an evidence document listing the points where further information can be reviewed is key. And your website is the obvious place for that to be stored.
Highlight your capacity for good and problem solving with your service/product information on your website. With new interest in you and your business, this is a great time to expand the details of your business. Remember new visitors or Followers aren’t aware of your history or how you help others. Share this information as though you’re talking to a brand new audience – because this is what is happening for you.
Have you written any blogs from your own experience or expertise? Do you have some half-written articles, sitting unpublished or as a draft?
A blog is an excellent way to support or highlight your activities. It also serves to educate your community if you’re writing simple helpful information. Which is a great service alone. Engage a copywriter if you need help to polish it off.
Hint: we have an excellent copywriter who can assist you! Get in Touch with us about that.
Give your personal profiles a thorough Audit. Including the social media profiles you keep private.
Review memes and funny questionnaires on your social media feed. Look through who’s tagged you on shared posts, as well as checking privacy settings of mobile uploads and photo albums. You can delete any of these items or consider opening business related posts from private to “Public”.
Social media profiles with cover photos are a good spot to use business branding without being sales oriented. And it doesn’t annoying your private connections with too much work chatter. Use an image that aligns with your branding,business name, services or products.
Choose a fabulous smiling profile photo of YOU on your personal profile is important. Even if you aren’t a fan of showing your face on private social media profiles. During the awards season – if not always, is easy enough. I recommend a great smiling photo all the time! But if you are only going to use an image of your face during this period of time, make it a great one.
People feel connected to you, and can you by looking at your profile photos. When judges are looking for evidence of your work, they can look in all sorts of places. Put your best foot forward by looking good all over the place!
Write engaging content that has branded imagery is going to show your business off well too. Forget mass-produced memes and quotes. Create them yourself, or get help from a graphic designer!
Use your work, services or products as the base to create your own social media artwork. You can do this easily by adding branded font to your photos. Or take your own quotes, catch-phrases or business language and make your own #quoteoftheday.
Hint: we have an excellent designer who can assist you! Check our design services here.
Think about what samples you mentioned in the nomination process. Talk about these and others that are similar throughout the period of judging in your content strategy. Discussing those examples that are relative to the categories you’re nominated for is clever. The trick is not to mention the awards connection at the same time in these posts. Put them into your posting schedule as though you were due to talk about them.
The fact you’re up for an award is great and you should be talking about it. But specific posts talking about award nominations is another type of post (see next tip). Leaving out mentions of your award participation can be as clever as including it.
Talk about those Awards! Use promotional material from the Awards like the logo, event listings and use them yourself. Add photos to share how blessed and excited you are! Also mention the work you’ve been doing to get to this point of success. When you share your wins, or how it feels to take part, or how humbled you are to share the stage, people get engaged in your journey. Especially if/when you make it to the shortlist or Finalist list.
Give us #allthefeels about you in this Awards program.
As you draw closer to the business awards announcement day, put in place a new social media campaign. This should be all about promoting your inclusion in the awards line-up. If you aren’t feeling confident in how to create a specialised campaign, book in for a social media workshop with our team to help you.
Good luck to all our friends, clients and connections who are currently nominated. I’ll vote for you where possible – and look forward to seeing how you go for the rest of the year.
