It’s exciting to enter awards. It sharpens the mind and quickens the pulse.
Whether it’s your entire company, product or service, or a team or an individual, putting yourself before judges demands focus and attention.
There’s the promise of getting shortlisted and the opportunity to book a table and attend a glitzy night out in a showy venue in a major city.
And if you win? Bonus! You get a nice shiny trophy to put on display in reception, or the boardroom, and plenty of photos for the company social media.
But entering awards goes much deeper than that, and the benefits linger long after the flashbulbs of the awards night have faded.
Define your difference
When you enter an award, you’re always trying to prove that you should win.
That involves a process of gathering information from your product, design, SEO and commercial teams among others, so you can create a convincing argument.
That process is incredibly valuable even outside of your award entry.
It encourages different departments to take stock of what they have achieved, gather results and explain why those results matter.
Growth figures, customer feedback, product improvements, successful campaigns and even employee schemes can easily become buried in day-to-day work, but an award submission brings them back into focus.
This spotlight can also remind, or reveal, which of your messages are strongest.
If you can’t explain your innovation or commercial impact clearly to a panel of judges, then your customers might struggle to understand it too.
Campaign fuel
So you’ve asked your various departments to come up with impressive material that demonstrates the strength of your game/product/innovation/company culture.
While that’s good news for your award entry, the benefits don’t have to stop there.
Because you’ve not only created an award entry, you’ve also generated material that can be repurposed across your wider marketing campaigns.
The case study you put together can be put on your website or socials. It could form the basis of a blog or a press release.
The statistics you’ve compiled about your company or product’s performance can strengthen your website – put them into percentages if you need to protect sensitive figures.
If you were interviewing colleagues, perhaps as part of an HR-focused award, then that material can produce employee profiles, social content and recruitment material.
There are all sorts of ways that the information you gather for an award can reward your business in other ways.
Appreciating everybody
The awards process also helps recognise the people whose work is not always immediately visible, either inside or outside of the business.
Preparing an entry can require input from product, sales, customer service, HR, technology and the leadership team.
Bringing those contributions together highlights how individual efforts connect to the company’s wider success.
Being shortlisted, or winning, of course, gives employees a shared achievement to celebrate.
Individual and team awards can be especially powerful for recognising people who have delivered exceptional results, supported colleagues or driven change.
That recognition will support employee engagement and help attract talent, because candidates are not only interested in what a company sells.
They also want to know whether it values its people and supports them in producing work they can be proud of.
