There’s more to awards than just trophies. Winning business and marketing awards provides high-profile public relations (PR) exposure and allows your team to get recognition for all of their hard work. Yep, winning is great. But what if you don’t win? Or worse, what if you didn’t even submit a nomination because you didn’t think you’d win?

1. No Losers. Only Winners.
There’s more to awards than just trophies.
Winning business and marketing awards provides high-profile public relations (PR)
exposure and allows your team to get recognition for all of their hard work. Yep,
winning is great. But what if you don’t win? Or worse, what if you didn’t even submit a
nomination because you didn’t think you’d win?
In the heated awards arena, I have heard many, many times
that “we only want to enter if we are going to win.” The
general thinking here is that only winners benefit from
awards and if you’re not going to win, what’s the point of
entering?
This thinking couldn’t be more wrong. In fact, recent surveys
have demonstrated that more than 80% of senior business
people (and more than 70% of consumers) admit to being
influenced by awards when buying products and services.
With numbers like that, why wouldn’t you put pen to paper, so to speak, and draft an
award nomination? The potential business benefit can be immeasurable.
Types of Awards
A blog on Smarta.com details the three main types of awards (national, regional and
industry) and the type of media and PR coverage you can reasonably expect to see
from each.
National Awards: These awards often have a media partner, so you can assume
you’ll receive some PR coverage as a finalist and even more as a winner.
National media coverage may be limited, but local papers are the ones who’ll
really pick you up. Make the most of sponsors’ websites which most likely will
have a section dedicated to the awards. This can provide a great SEO boost to
your website by linking to/from the award site to your own website.
Regional Awards: Don’t expect national media attention, but local coverage is
feasible, especially if you proactively pitch the media outlets.
Industry Awards: These accolades from within your industry can fast-track
your reputation and provide you with a valuable sales tool that can help to set
you apart from your competitors. Similar to regional awards, you shouldn’t
expect much national exposure from industry awards, but local and industry
publication coverage is definitely possible.
Business Benefits
Outside of PR, these are also plenty of other business benefits to submitting award
nominations in the hopes of winning, including:

2. Giving you an opportunity to focus on your business by identifying your core
strengths and competitive advantages. Completing award nominations requires
that you look objectively at your service/solution offerings and processes. In
the end, this can help to further refine existing or add new services/solutions
to your current offerings.
Making you regularly review your business strategy and target audience
Differentiating your business from your competitors
Building a reputation for excellence within your industry
Securing third-party endorsements which add credibility (a very powerful sales
tool)
Helping you to generate new content for your website. From a SEO standpoint,
you can blog about your award entry or post a press release about either a
finalists placement or a win. You can also take the award entry and turn it into
a case study for use in the sales process, on your website.
Providing employees with a sense of pride, team culture and company loyalty
Helping to attract talent to your business (smart employees want to work for
the companies they see as being the best)
Have you overlooked awards as a marketing tool to promote your business? If you
haven’t considered putting your business forward for award nomination you may be
missing out on a lot more than just a win.