Winning awards is a compelling way to attract and retain clients. Award-winning work turns heads, brings recognition to your team and draws in great people who want to work with you and for you.
Here are our top five tips for giving your entry the greatest possible chance of a thumbs-up from the judging panel:
1. Know the difference between objectives, strategy, tactics
This feels a bit like PR 101, but it still seems to get muddled. The objective is the goal or intent; the strategy is the action plan created to meet that goal or intent; the tactics are the actual things you do/tools in your toolbox to get the job done and meet your objectives. Make these really clear in your entry form.
2. Integrated Comms v PR/publicity
A campaign should demonstrate integrated thinking and execution across the relevant paid, earned, owned, and shared channels and integrated too, in terms of stakeholder audiences.
3. Show transparency on data and budgets
All entries require data to be included, whether it be total budget or split out by agency fee/out-of-pocket, etc. ROI results should also be included.
Be careful with how you represent numbers. If you’re talking about a percentage increase, we want to know off what base it was – don’t just say, ‘Sales increased 200%!’ – because a 200% increase in selling 1 apple is selling 3 apples!
The detail and context matter; the data needs to tell the story of the impact the work has had.
4. It needs to be well written
Dedicate time to writing the entries; don’t just cut and paste from another entry you did with different award criteria (copy a bit of it with pride, but not all of it!), and put your best writer on them.
5. Follow the entry guidelines
Don’t provide 372 supporting documents; no judge will read them! The entry kit provided by PRmoment is comprehensive, so download it and give it a read. It contains top tips from the judges but more importantly it contains a transparent breakdown of the category criteria and scoring.
This top tips feature has been adapted from a piece by Lenovo's Charlotte West.