Trade awards provide valuable marketing opportunities, and the benefits go beyond just winning. Simply entering or being shortlisted for an award can boost brand visibility and attract new customers.

Leveraging PR opportunities around trade awards – through enhanced logos, websites, social media, email signatures and email campaigns – increases your brand’s exposure and serves as a compelling sales pitch.

Recognition for your achievements signals quality to both current and prospective customers, making award participation an essential consideration for any business.

Select the right awards
Review awards in your industry and your customer verticals for appropriate categories. The latter will be particularly effective for raising your profile.

Select the categories which fit best, but don’t be too narrow in your selection, as entries in several categories will multiply your chances of success.

Matching initiatives to categories
Either before, or while you are investigating potential awards to enter, you should be speaking with colleagues to identify the initiative(s) that offer the best chance of success and gathering information you need to back it up.

Make note of the instructions
All awards have small print and conditions, which you must comply with, or risk disqualification.

Note instructions for word counts or submission formats and make sure you hit the deadline!

Understand judging criteria
Read and understand the judging criteria, make sure you meet all the requirements and cover these in your entry.

Grab the judges’ attention
The judges will have many entries to go through, possibly over several days, so they will appreciate it if your entry is concise and easy to read.

Some award conditions will constrain your ability to stand out, by restricting submissions to text answers to questions on-line.

Your immediate focus is for judges to identify your entry as the one they should pick up, by preparing an attractive cover sheet, engaging introduction or executive summary, that grabs their attention.

Preparing content
In almost every case you will want to:

• Outline the situation
• Highlight the clients need, or situation to be resolved
• Explain the process for arriving at a solution
• Solution implementation
• Benefits received and delivered – these must be quantified, to be credible*
• Measurable impact for client(s)
• Compare and contrast the before and after (figures again are desirable)
• Next steps and legacy

*It’s not enough to say that thing improved. You will need to present facts and figures. These can be constrained to percentages, if there are commercial concerns.

Use photos and graphics as much as possible to reinforce claims (i.e by showing it in action and illustrating any numbers)

You should keep the judges at the heart of your thinking as you prepare the entry, as it is they who choose the winners.

Use clients
Customer participation will give more depth and credibility to your entry. Use their views, figures and testimonials. Use own people, and your customer’s people to bring  the story to life.

Keep it brief
Even if no word count is specified, keep your submission as concise as possible.

Use bullet points and lists to reinforce key points. If you have the opportunity, use space to separate content, but stay focused on communicating your information simply and efficiently.

Minimising the number of pages in your entry, particularly in appendices, could be very important. If the judge are reviewing entries independently, they won’t want reams of back-up information to carry.

Remember to include testimonials and visuals to back up claims in your entry; a statistic that illustrates success will be much more powerful and credible than a generic comment.

In summary:

• Select the right awards
• Look for awards in customer verticals
• Match projects and categories
• Read and comply with entry requirements
• Get client buy-in and participation
• Obsessively match content to judging criteria
• Detail; situation – need – resolution – result
• Be comprehensive, but keep it concise
• Quantify benefits delivered; compare and contrast
• Use testimonials and visuals