Over the years, Bold! has encouraged and assisted many clients to enter business awards. After all, there is nothing quite like winning an award that recognises your expertise and commitment to your craft to boost new business enquiry.
Award applications take time, quite a bit in fact, but not as much as they used to. Award organisers are keen to attract, rather than deter time poor business owners from nominating. Most business award applications ask just a handful of questions requiring word count limited answers.
The awards application process can be cathartic and confronting in equal measures. On one hand, it allows you to celebrate achievements; on the other, it can expose holes in your processes or brand messaging.
Award applications usually involve three or four questions with specific criteria and just enough scope for unique characteristics or specialisations to be explained.
Impressing the judges
Depending on the award, once your written application progresses, there can be interviews. These are often conducted by a panel of business leaders who will ask you to articulate what you do and the secrets to your success.
Having a well-prepared quick pitch and concise description of your business framework will help you to succinctly explain your expertise to a panel of judges. Even more important will be your actual business approach, which you are hopefully already actively promoting through your marketing communication to attract ideal clients and win new business.
It’s not enough to simply imply you’re an expert – judges want evidence. As in business, customer testimonials, 5-star Google reviews and case studies will build an evidence-based case for choosing your business over your competitors.
Leveraging your award
For award winners, there is precisely 12 months to make the most of the title and to secure a spot as a leader in their chosen field.
For the more proactive, this can lead to greater involvement and exposure in your business community and, of course, an extra level of credibility that differentiates you from your competitors.
Certainly, there is quite a bit of work involved in preparing an award application. However, for all the finalists and winners that we’ve helped to take out a business leadership gong over the years, they’ll tell you it is well worth it. The pay-off in terms of enhanced personal branding is priceless, along with the doors that open to present opportunities that translate directly to business development and growth.
Nominating for a business award often provides the catalyst you need to refresh your approach, re-clarify your pitch and enhance your marketing communication to those you most want to do business with.
Walking the talk
We’ve recently taken our own advice and as we write this article, we are among the Marketing Consultant of the Year Finalists for the 2022 ifa Business Excellence Awards.
Whether we win or not, the application process has been highly rewarding, as we’ve taken the time to carefully scrutinise what we do, who we do it for, how we do it and why and we’re pretty happy with ourselves. So, now I guess it’s a matter of watch this space. The winners are announced in November.
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At Bold! we specialise in helping professionals and business owners to use marketing to grow and be successful. Over the past 25 years we have fine-tuned what we call our ‘Do-able Marketing’ model. It is underpinned by a 7-Step Do-It-For-Me (DIFM) Marketing framework that overcomes the THREE key issues that professionals and business owners have told us prevent them from marketing their businesses: Time, Affordability and Accountability.
