The Autumn season is known for its plethora of industry award ceremonies. This means that as June comes to a close, the rush to get entries in on time, and to a high standard, becomes a major focus for marketers and PRs across all sectors.
With a track record for successful award entries for our clients – here’s a case study example for those interested - we thought we’d share a few tips to help you in your planning for next year.
1. Try to build your case study portfolio throughout the year so you have a selection of well written and already approved customer stories that you can potentially enter.
2. Speaking to your customers about entering awards well in advance gives them a chance to organise themselves and appropriate approvals in good time – this will help with the last minute sign-off.
3. Make sure that there is tangible evidence for project/contract success and that your customer is happy for you to include quantifiable outcomes – this will be the key to whether you are short-listed or not!
4. Tell a story – an awards entry is not a sales tool or piece of collateral. If you treat it as such, you will only end up alienating the judges. The entry needs to give the judges a real idea of what your organisation has done to deserve this award and why. So you should look to build a picture of the original customer pain, aims or goals, solution implementation and benefits. Just copying and pasting from an existing piece of material isn’t good enough.
5. Read the entry criteria – you don’t want to waste time writing up a great entry which may not qualify.
In short, drafting successful award entries requires a fine balance between persuasiveness without being salesy or pushy. Knowledge and experience of tailoring content to different audiences is vital if you’re to have a chance of being short-listed.
I wonder if there’s an Award out there for writing award entries? Perhaps that’s one for PR Week …