82.4% of buyers are going to choose Award winners. So how can you enter to win?

Hello and welcome to this episode of the Speak PR Podcast. My name is Jim James, and I'm delighted to welcome Chris Robinson today, who's the Managing Director of Boost Awards, and we're going to talk about the importance of entering awards and actually that it's really possible to enter and to win an award and can have a massive impact. Now, Chris, tell us, why is it worthwhile for a company to enter an award?

Okay, well, when we ask that question of people, often in awards planning, sessions, there are 2 answers that come up every single time, and, and a 3rd that comes up occasionally. The most important reason by far is it helps them win more work. And we did some research of our own. We asked 400 buyers, business buyers, and B2B is a particular specialty of yours. And it turned out that when buying business services, 82% 0.4% of them said that it affected their buying decision when you got 2 comparable quotes, maybe the same price or similar service, an award would influence them. And in fact, about a quarter of all the people we surveyed, they actually admitted that it substantially influenced their decision. So it's a very inexpensive way of making quite a significant impact on someone's likelihood of buying off you. And then the second one is morale. There's no doubt that if you're on a winning team, you're part of a company that wins a prestigious award, definitely is a boost for morale. The third one is it impresses investors, and different types of awards would work on this agenda. But yeah, it helps you get investment or buyers or exit a business successfully.

Chris, tell us about Boost Awards, because most people believe that entering an award is really hard work, they're not likely to win, and it's a bit of a lottery. How can you change that for business owners?

Okay, well, the company itself, and just going back to the very beginning, it started in 2006 when I made the decision to break away from a company I worked for. And yeah, I found no one was doing it. No one out there was helping people enter awards, and it was something that I really enjoyed. And discovering that there was a hole in the otherwise saturated marketing industry was very exciting. And yeah, and what initially most people would engage with a company like us as a panic, they've got a deadline looming, and their first engagement with us is quick, get me over the line. But then what I would say to any other company interested in awards is it's much better to take a more strategic approach, and awards are definitely winnable, to pick up on your point there, and anyone can win an award. The question is which award, and that's got 2 elements to the question: which award is suitable for my business, There's no point in just entering nonsense awards out there, which you can. There are some pay-to-win awards out there. I wouldn't recommend any of them. And then which awards are suitable for my story? So it's a bit of a matchmaking exercise. You as a business could value from an award about offering a great customer service or being the best in the industry, but you have to have an appropriate story that'll win it. So you've got to marry up those 2 sides of that equation. And so part of our job is to, do that matchmaking exercise. So what awards would you like to win? And no one's going to be able to name them. I mean, there's certain industry awards that everyone wants to win, you know, be the best agency in search, or be the best content management company, or be the best telephony provider, you name it. Everyone wants to be officially best according to their main trade publication. But actually, um, we've got over 4,000 awards in our database. And picking your fights carefully means that you can win awards that are credible and winnable. And when you do a review of your stories, you can find that actually you could win a really credible award that's going to add a ton of value that's far from obvious. And there's awards out there that will look fantastic on your marketing material, on your website, that you might never have heard of. And okay, your target audience might not have heard of it. It might not be the Queen's Award for Enterprise, but actually they make sense. And if you do Google it and visit the website, they are a credible scheme. They might just be run in America, for example. So a lot of companies go for their local award schemes and win best business in the Dorset Business Awards or something, but actually it might be 20 times easier to win the best estate management company in the International Business Awards run from America. And it can be literally 20 times easier.

If you were to work with a client, can you just walk us through how a typical engagement works? If a company's thinking about using an award, how would you help them go about that?

Everyone wants to have a more strategic approach, which we would advocate, but you don't want to be strategic and accidentally miss a deadline. So when people start talking to us, the first thing to do is check the horizon, check that they're not going to miss a crucial deadline. by taking a strategic approach, and hopefully we can find NOVA isn't the most important award for you 3 weeks away, and then we can take our time. And it's about asking certain questions. We've got about 20 questions, and it helps them think about why are they entering award, what are they trying to say, who are they trying to say it to, and come up with these keywords. Because at the end of the day, when you've got a database like ours, The free version of the site, which is just a list by date order, you can just browse. But we've got obviously the backend access so we can keyword search. So it's helping people say, well, actually what I want to say is I'm a great place to work, and that alludes to various keywords— workplace, employer stuff. Or they might want to say that we offer a great customer service, so it might be about customer experience or customer satisfaction or customer contact. Maybe sales as a phrasing if they're in real estate, for example. So helping them understand the words that they want, because the chances are whichever award they enter, they might not have heard of before, and the client might not have heard of before, or their employees. And there are only like a handful of awards that people really recognize a brand for. So you've got to find an award that actually says the right things. So a lot of it is to get those keywords out, and then we come up with a long list of awards, and they'll log into our cloud-based platform and there's like 30, 40 awards that meet their brief. They've got the right words, they've got the right phrasing, like they could be in high finance, it could be the Wealth Management Excellence Awards, and it just says the right thing about their business. But it might be that that is a category. So it's a bit of an exercise in matchmaking every now and again that someone has— excuse the expression— but all their ducks in a row. So along comes an award. Ideally, it's because it's in their plan, and we've whittled it down to the 5 awards that they want, or the 10 awards, whatever their budget or their attention span can cope with. And they've pre-prepared for it, and they know it's coming on the horizon. And fortunately, every photograph, diagram, infographic, testimonial, survey report, every piece of evidence that they need for their entry is there in a folder on their computer. But as you can probably guess, that's pretty rare. So the process, ideally as far ahead as possible, if you've got a plan, you can plan 12 months in advance and work out which stories are going into which categories of which awards. So first step is to get your ducks in a row. It's to get the information necessary later. Most people start award entries with writing. They open the entry form and they start with question 1. I would not advocate that. It's necessary from time to time, but in an ideal world, you're going to start gathering evidence first. Make sure that your objectives and your outcomes marry up. Whatever you set out to achieve, you've got evidence to prove you achieved it. I mean, there's nowhere more the case for that than things like HR awards, like training and employee benefits, and also things like marketing awards or customer engagement awards. But the most extreme one is HR, because that as a function tends not to do a lot of evaluating. And so often we'll set up surveys, we'll do market research, competitor analysis, start taking photographs and get all the information together, and the sooner the better. It might be that they need some really good case studies, so we'll start interviewing employees or some testimonials. So it's It's that information gathering. It's like going into a court of law, only the judges here are awards judges rather than people in grey wigs. And you need the evidence base. And once you've got the evidence base and you can see, like, join-the-dot exercises, you can see how it connects together. We've quantified the scale of the problem. We got the clear SMART objectives at the beginning. We know how it was wow and challenging and exciting. We've got the data to prove tactical results, strategic impact, impact on society and the environment, whatever the story is. we got it all. Now we can tell the story because we can join the dots with clever narrative, rather than the classic journalistic approach, which is you interview someone and you just tell the story with unsubstantiated assertions from start to finish. And often, if you tell it in a linear way like that, you find that the ending doesn't marry up with the beginning, and it has to be symmetrical. So there's a whole planning, not just planning the awards, but you plan the story, you gather the assets, and then you can write it at the end. You don't start with writing and gather stuff as you go along. You ideally, if time allows, gather your evidence, your assets, and only when you know what you've got can you tell a story that joins those dots and they flow and they, and they are symmetrical in terms of objectives and outcomes. And that's the dream situation. Rather than the worst-case scenario, which is someone says, I've written an entry, can you tighten it up for us? And they send us a draft and it's hopeless. And we have to then put that to one side and start the process again. But I would always urge people, plan your award strategy and then plan your storytelling and plan, plan, plan. It all pays off in the end. So step 1 is planning.

And should a company enter awards in sort of multiple areas of the business? So maybe a product category, an HR category, a service category, is that— would you advocate kind of a multi-entry strategy or just go for one hero event per year?

Well, that's a good question, and it should go back to the original plan when you say, what do you need to say as a business? So, you know, from a PR perspective, what are your core messages? Things that beginning with award-winning would actually add value. We offer our employees an award-winning package of salary, or we provide award-winning content because we're a content agency. So it does go back to those original discussions. If you're going to enter 5 awards, you say, I've got the budget and the capacity to enter 5 awards, you've got to pick very carefully if you're going to start entering every single department. So in terms of hero entries, most SMEs Especially, I mean, B2B is your area, you'd know this. Most companies have their hero service offering for B2B, and they want one project that is their flagship project. They've got— it's a wow project. It was exciting. It was— it doesn't have to be innovative as in they invented something new, but it, it could have been, you know, there was one where there's unified communications and it won tons of awards because it was implemented in bin lorries. And it just made it a really interesting story. And there was another which was a hospital, and it rolled out some tech, and other hospitals said, actually, that's cost-neutral, we need that. So it actually was nothing pioneering about it, but they created a pricing model that made it cost-neutral. So if there's something about your story that others can learn from and others look at and go, that is genius, I want a bit of that, then you've got the basis of a winning story. So find your hero project and go for project awards, of which there are always loads. Most awards that a B2B company will enter will be project awards. Then you get your other hero story, which is your company story, and that could be how we improve customer service, how we embrace the latest in artificial intelligence. So there's some narrative around it where the judge can read it and say, why should they win this year? Ah. I get it, because in the last 12 months they've deployed something ingenious, groundbreaking. They've grown a lot, they've rolled out some new tech. So you tend to have, as an SME, 2 hero stories: a project story and a company whole story. And answering the question, what is that story, isn't at all easy. What makes a project story a potential winner has— there's a number of components. It has to be innovative, it has to be clear results, and you have to have a cooperative client. Trying to drag a client kicking and screaming through an awards process is not going to improve your customer relationship or have a good outcome. And also, your business story has to have something, whether you're entering Provider of the Year, Vendor of the Year, Agency of the Year, or Growth Company of the Year in a generic business award. There has to be a really clear narrative there, and often people say, well, we've delivered a better service, And then when you say prove it, they've got no data to back it up. So they'll each have some kind of evaluation exercise to get the data to prove mission accomplished.

But what if you enter and you're only a finalist or a semifinalist? Is that worth the effort then, Chris? Because not everyone's a winner.

Well, interesting you say the line everyone's a winner. We actually did in training, a magazine there actually did an article that we researched called Everyone's a Winner. And it's not literal that everyone who enters an award gets something out of it, but actually you do get something out of the simple act of entering an award. For instance, if you say to— if you're bidding for a B2B project and you put in the proposal, we believe this will be so effective, so groundbreaking, that we're going to enter it into awards at the end, then that— you haven't even started the project and you've just increased your likelihood of winning by showing this energy and passion towards not just settling for delivering the brief. but doing something extraordinary. And you can say it to, to your colleagues or your sponsors internally, we are going to invest the money in something so good we believe it's going to win awards. So that simple articulation of a vision of winning awards has value. And then what happens when people enter awards is you find it raises people's bar, raises their game. In training, the commonest thing that people said is the simple act of entering awards is that this was— over a quarter of the people surveyed said it improved our evaluation practice, which in training is a really big thing because the training industry is pretty hopeless at evaluating the return on investment. And it actually raised the bar, so people learned and benefited. And only by putting your stories under a microscope and giving it the Simon Cowell treatment Do you actually realise that you could be better? And a very common exercise when someone engages us to enter an award is that we have to run a survey for them. We have a subsidiary called Boost Evaluation, it's won an award, plenty, actually quite a few awards for its research and thought leadership and evaluation, and the act of doing a survey is beneficial on many levels, not just for findings, but when you say to your employees, Tell us how we're doing. And then you respond after the survey with, right, you said, we listened, we're going to do things differently. That adds value to the business. And the same with customers, showing that you're listening to customers, not just by surveying them, but doing a follow-up communication saying, you said, we did. And these things, the awards encourage better practice, not just best practice, but even people who are already the best, everyone gets better. By really allowing themselves, exposing themselves to being judged, which feels painful, but it makes people better. So yes, the act of entering awards will deliver value in its own right. If you do a decent job, you should get shortlisted. But yeah, I've done loads of awards judging. I know lots of people— everyone at Boost that we employ has to be an awards judge as part of their induction. You get to see what 90% of the awards applications But don't— and they're the 90% that don't shortlist, and they are truly terrible. And you can read them and think they deserve an award, the project's clearly good, but it's just so badly written, badly evidenced, badly presented. I can see why the judge just, just out of desperation just put them in the nope pile. So you should be shortlisted, and if you do a good job, you should win. So, and then you've got all the joys of funky logos, even if you're just shortlisted.

And what about then, Chris, if someone wants to actually enter to win, what would it cost to hire the services of Boost, for example?

It's a tricky one to answer because some awards are, you know, just 500 words and a logo, especially in America, and sometimes the burden of proof is quite light. And, you know, you could be looking at £1,500. The easiest one to do is an individual award, like entering a person into Rising Star or stuff. You enter, you know, it's a few interviews, maybe a survey, possibly not, and they're generally the quickest ones to do. Other companies, like if you get a large corporate enterprise that wants to enter the entire company into a Bank of the Year or go for the Queen's Award for Enterprise, which is this huge, huge document, then you're looking at many, many days, 10 days of our time, and you're looking at 5, 6, 7, 8 grand. But that's basically a company audit. But what I would say is that if you just go for one story for one award and stop there, it's gonna feel expensive. If you have a plan and you have, as you were saying in your question earlier about how many stories you enter, you have 2 hero stories, but you repurpose and you don't just go for one category at a time. So you would go for a Company of the Year, but make sure it's the same award scheme that has a Project of the Year. So each— and maybe there's 2 Project of the Year categories you could enter it. So each award you go for, you have 2 or 3 chances of winning. And it's very rare that you'll come away without a shortlisting. And actually, I mean, our win rate's nearly 40%. So if you enter 2 or 3, categories, chances are you're going to walk away with something. And so you, you have a plan that makes sure you, you go for awards where you have a good chance of winning and multiple categories, uh, you can enter. And, and so yeah, then it works. Sorry, just the reason I was just explaining that process is at the end of that, when you add up how much did it cost to enter each award, the figure plummets because rewriting and repurposing content You know, you're looking at, you know, £700, £1,000, worst-case scenario £1,500 per entry. But if you just go for one story into one category of one award, it's going to feel expensive because all that research has to be done. But ideally, you have a plan, we price up the whole year's plan, divide it up by month, and it'll end up being less than you're paying for any other retainer.

There we go, talking there to Chris Robinson, the Managing Director of Boost Marketing, and you can find them at boost-marketing.co.uk. You can also find Chris Robinson on LinkedIn. So thank you so much for listening to this episode of Speak PR, and until we meet again, I wish you the best of health, a profitable business, and that you enter some awards. And good luck, and let us know when you win.