Why Enter Business Awards?

Entering business awards is a lengthy and time-consuming process. Sure, it’s nice to receive recognition for all your hard work, but is it really anything other than an PR exercise?

We’re here to argue that yes, it absolutely is!

We’ve helped transform many businesses into award-winning companies through our business improvement programme (hence the Awardaroo name!) and there are many reasons why your company should enter business awards.

Why Enter Business Awards?

It’s undeniable that entering business awards is good for PR, but it’s so much more than this. Business awards can actually help your company grow. Let’s look at how.

Increased Competitive Advantage and Differentiation From a Honed Unique Selling Proposition (USP)

You and your competitors likely already match up on price, quality and more. What’s left to compete on? What’s your USP?

Now compare yourself to your competitor if you had an industry award showing you’re the best at what you do. Who do you think your potential customers will buy from?

Winning a business award can help increase your competitive advantage as it provides social proof for customers during their journey. It can help set you apart from a crowded market and increase your profitability. 

Enhanced Social Proof and Social Influence

As we’ve just mentioned the concept, it’s worth expanding on social proof. Because it’s a big deal for businesses.

Social proof is a powerful psychological phenomenon. It’s the idea that when we see others doing things, we’re more likely to copy that behaviour. It’s why we ask friends for recommendations and look for online reviews.

Business awards are another great piece of social proof for customers and for other businesses. They increase your trustworthiness, because it’s not only you saying how great you are. The evidence is in plain sight.

Increase Recognition, Staff Motivation and Engagement

Entering business awards helps your business be recognised as the market leader it is. But it also helps recognise the incredible work your staff put in.

Especially if you attend an awards ceremony, this can be a morale boost to your employees. But even without attendance, winning a business award is a great motivator. Your staff know they’re doing a great job and they’ll be more motivated to continue to do the same going forward. 

Increase Brand Awareness and Networking Opportunities at Award Events

Entering business awards helps increase your brand awareness.

Even if you don’t win, as a minimum other businesses will become more aware of your brand’s presence in the industry. If there’s an award ceremony, you’ll also gain a valuable opportunity to network with many business owners for the evening.

The award organiser will also likely have quite a bit of publicity prior to the event, via email and social media. This can help put new eyes on your brand.

If you do win, you’ll continue to enjoy increased brand awareness long after the event.

Rare Free Marketing Opportunities to Promote Your Brand

As the saying goes, nothing in life is free. But in this instance at least, you get free marketing opportunities you wouldn’t usually.

Not only will your site be mentioned on the website of the award provider, but in all their own campaigns to promote the event.

It’s also a great opportunity for you to create your own unique content for your website and have something to talk about on social media, as well as engage with other brands and industry experts.

Increase Brand Authority and Industry Recognition as an Industry Expert

Closely linked to social proof, winning a business award makes you appear more trustworthy to customers. It establishes you as the expert in your field, which can go a long way in increasing brand authority for customers and other businesses.

Increase Customer Loyalty and be Seen as Highly Trustworthy

Customers always want to stay with businesses they perceive as being the best. 86% of customers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience.

As your business awards increase your brand authority and competitive advantage through social proof, they’re an intrinsic part of your customer experience. Customers are more likely to stick with your brand provided you maintain an excellent customer experience because you’re the safest and most trustworthy option.

Increasing customer loyalty is great news for your profitability. 60% of customers will purchase more frequently from brands they’re loyal to, while 50% of customers will make more purchases with brands they’re loyal to. 

Increase Your Profit Margins with Higher Pricing

We mentioned above, but customers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience. As an award-winning business, you can increase your price point to allow for higher profit margins, knowing your customers will still happily stick with you because you’re the best at what you do.

This increased profit can be pumped directly back into your business to help you grow. You can hire more staff to continually improve and develop your customer experience and your product or service. Ultimately, it allows you to further enhance your competitive advantage and remain a market leader in your industry.

Attract the Best Talent and Build Your own Award Winning Team

“Why do you want to work here?”

It’s a dreaded question in job interviews. Often candidates are left scrambling for an answer which isn’t the honest answer of, “I need a paycheck”.

The reality is to attract the best talent, companies need to do more than the bare bones of offering the basics like a pension and statutory holiday.

Being an award-winning business helps build up your image to potential candidates to help you attract the very best talent for your business. This can help you build award-winning teams that will continually grow your business.

Develop Strategic Alignment and Improved Internal Communications

What’s your mission? 

At times, companies can completely lose sight of their overall direction. Growth, of course, but how do you achieve it?

Entering a business award and positioning yourself in the wider marketplace can help you evaluate your overall mission and align your internal strategic direction to accompany it. As part of the award entry submission process, you’ll need to talk all about your vision for your company. Discussing and writing about this can help remind you just what it is you believe in and want to achieve for your business.

Boost Sales With Increased Industry Recognition and Exposure

Overall, winning awards can help improve your profitability through sales. 

Research suggests award-winning businesses may have a sales boost of up to 37%. 

Be an Award-Winning Business

Chances are, you won’t win awards if your business doesn’t actually reflect a business worthy of winning one.

By far the greatest benefit of business awards comes from being a business with an award-winning mentality. These businesses aren’t simply entering awards for the sake of some free publicity, but because they are led and driven by principles of continual improvement.

What we mean is, they’re great businesses not because of the awards, the awards are just a perk of being a market leader. 

How to Get Business Awards and all the Business Benefits

Now you know why enter business awards, you need to figure out how to get them. This starts by figuring out what type of business award you want to aim for.

There are many different categories of business awards. A virtually endless list in fact! 

You need to find a business award that suits your industry, mission and the size of your business to give you the best chance of winning. As there are so many business awards available, you’ll also want to vet the different business awards you look at as some are more reputable than others. 

You can start by narrowing down whether you’d like to aim for an industry-specific award or a wider business award. This will help narrow your search down considerably. You can also narrow it down further by deciding whether you’d like to enter local awards, regional awards, national awards or international awards. Much of this decision will come down to the size of your company. For example, a small local business has a much better chance of winning a local business award than an international one!

Other common categories of business awards include:

• Social impact awards

• Senior leadership awards

• Consumer product awards

• Quality marks

As we said above, because there are so many different types of business awards, to give you the best chance of winning, you’re best off choosing a business award category that aligns well with your brand and vision. 

Once you’ve decided which business award you’d like to enter for, you need to create an award-winning entry submission.

What’s the Award Entry Submission Process?

Award entry submissions vary, a lot!

Where one business award might only need a simple document filling out to enter, others will need all sorts of resources like video reels and portfolios. This means it can be an incredibly time-consuming process to win the best business awards.

That’s where we come in. We create award-winning businesses, but as part of that process, we’ve written a lot of award-winning entries to help get more UK SMEs recognised as the productivity powerhouses they are!

We handle every part of the award entry writing process for you. We’ll get to know your brand, tell your story and gather any resources needed for your award entry submission. You can find out more about our award entry writers on our site.