7 Steps to Winning Your Next Business Award
Wriiten by Cassie Bray, The Bray Partnership
Are you looking to raise the profile of your business and gain credibility in your industry?
Winning awards is a sure fire way of putting the spotlight onto your business and driving new sales. Do you often wonder why once a business has won an award they seem to go on to win more and more? It is almost as if they have a magic formula!
Whilst it is impossible to guarantee you will win, using the right strategy to write your application can definitely make a huge difference to your outcome.
Here is my 7-step guide to writing your best awards application:
Ideas
Probably the most simple step, and yet the one most businesses miss off! Before you begin writing your application, grab your team, a flip chart and some post-it notes and take an hour out to talk through the questions. Having an ideas gathering session like this, ensures you don’t miss out on vital pieces of information in your application. Go through each question and ask your team to write down the key points to include in each answer.
Your teams are like a memory bank of all those mini case studies and examples of why your business is the best. Believe me, if you sit down and do this bit on your own you will only gather about 50% of the information you could do as a team. This will probably be the difference between winning and losing. Don’t skip this part!
Order
Once you have all of those ideas, you need to formulate them into some sort of logical order. So, for example, if one of your questions is about the business’s top 3 achievements and you have a list of 10, see if there is any way you can identify any similarities between them. You might have a great PR story, development of a new website and a regular customer email.
All of these activities helped you raise your business profile, so that is your achievement and the activities are how you did it. Do this for each section, it will really add some meat to the bones of your application.
Don't leave any gaps
Most awards applications will tell you exactly what they want you to cover. If they give you a set of bullet points explaining what they are looking for in an answer, this is your crib sheet. Generally, the marking scheme will follow these points, so be sure to have an answer for each one. If there is something you are struggling with, don’t ignore it! Talk about it and why you are choosing not to do it or how you are planning to do it in the future.
Keep It Simple
Remember the people reading your awards application may not be experts in your field. Unless your awards category is industry-specific, you are likely to be going up against all different types of businesses from a range of industries, and your judges are having to try and understand each of them.
When writing your application try and bring everything back to basic business terms that are universal across all industries. Don’t confuse judges by using acronyms, or industry-specific terminology, it will only make your application harder to understand and therefore harder to judge.
Facts & Figures
Adding in facts and figures really brings light to your application form. It shows that you really know your business and you measure and monitor things. Converting things into percentages is a good strategy, so for example talk about the percentage growth in your income, customers, marketing audience and any trends that you spot.
Layout
Have you ever sat down to sift through a bunch of CV’s to try and pick the best candidate? Sometimes it is so easy to pick out the relevant information and other times it is painful trying to extract the relevant skills and experience. The same goes for awards applications. Think about your layout; bullet points, capital letters and spacing are your new best friend. Divide your information up so it is easy on the eye. Make it simple for the judge to extract what they are looking for. Don’t risk dropping a mark because the judges just couldn’t find the answers they were looking for.
Read It
Read it out aloud to yourself. Does it make sense? Does it flow? Have you used the same word multiple times? When you are happy with it, ask a friend from a totally different industry to read it. Is there anything they don’t understand and are they left with any questions? This is a great way to spot if you have missed anything and go back and edit it.
