Are you an award-winning marketer? Winning a B2B marketing award can be one of the most empowering moments of your career and for your company can help attract the best talent and even prospects. To increase your chances of winning, it’s important to understand the judging process and what will make your submission stand out. As a veteran judge of B2B awards, here are five tips to get you noticed.
1. Know your audience
It’s important to understand what motivates your audience – the judges. If you understand the who, why, how of judging you’ll have a better chance of getting those judges to view you favorably. Ask for a profile of the judges, review their relative experience and focus areas, and consider what would engage them.
In my experience, the majority of judges are heads of departments or on the leadership teams in their respective companies. This means that they will be motivated by value delivered to the business. So your submission needs to talk in value driver terms like – ROI, and impact on the P&L, as well as showcasing innovation.
For this reason, it is important to take your entry seriously and define its outline and measures of success with a senior member of your team. Leaving your entry to the junior team member, is only likely to result in wasted time and budget. Your CMO, is likely the best person to review your final submission, to confirm if it resonates.
2. Understand how your response will be measured
Read the category brief for your submission carefully. It will tell you how your entry is being measured. Read the brief. Then read it again. Make sure your entry touches on all the criteria you have been asked to submit. Any omissions will detract from your submission.
Believe me, a surprising number of those who enter miss the mark entirely, simply because they didn’t answer the category main questions or core issues properly.
What’s more, every year I see companies submitting the ‘exact same’ award submission for several different award categories. It does you, your team and your brand no favours whatsoever and will more than likely hold you back when you deserve credit because we’ve already read your words two categories ago.
If you are really serious about standing out in the awards I suggest you create your own response scorecard, based on the review criteria laid out. And ask a senior member of your team to score and constructively critique your submission. Many pairs of eyes will improve your submission and chances.
Smart marketers will even consider which of their campaigns or projects will be award worthy, before they even launch the work – so they can fully capture all the metrics that will deliver a winning entry.
3. Give yourself the time to create a quality entry
You know the old 7P’s adage… Proper Planning and Preparation Prevents Piss Poor Performance.
From the perspective of the judging table it becomes abundantly clear who has “taken it seriously” and therefore show they understand (and respect) the expense, time, effort that all the judges and awards organisers put into the entire process.
It’s also usually pretty obvious who’s had someone not close to the project or the junior member of the team fill out the awards submission and not optimized it properly prior to hitting enter.
Take your time, plan it out, resource it accordingly and commit to the best reflection of the work you can submit. Judges see it and we appreciate it accordingly in our scores.
Some B2B Awards to consider:
Now that you know what it takes to create a winning entry, here are a few of the more prestigious B2B marketing awards that you can enter:
– B2B Marketing Awards
– The Drum Awards B2B
– Performance Marketing Awards
– Content Marketing Awards
– Cannes Lions Awards
In my experience, it’s not all about the big brands and their big budgets or resourcing. More often than not, smaller, more fiscally restricted campaigns come up with amazingly creative and award-winning work.
Good luck! But then by following these tips, you don’t need it!