Winning awards is a compelling way to build recognition for your career. Award-winning work turns heads, brings recognition to you and your team and draws in great people who want to work with you and for you.
Here are our top seven tips for giving your entry the greatest possible chance of a thumbs-up from the judging panel:
Select the right campaign to highlight your milestones. Focus on topical, creative, innovative, challenging work with a big, bold idea at its heart.
Read the criteria. Follow the criteria. Stick to the rules. Meet the deadline. Don’t underestimate how long it takes to pull together an entry. Start early. Factor in time for internal approval.
Focus on writing. Tell the judges a great story. Watch spelling and grammar. Avoid exclamation marks and marketing jargon. Proof, proof and proof again for typos.
Create a clear, concise story. Judges have many entries to review. Make sure yours really spells out why it has the X-factor: don’t expect them to read between the lines. Include enough market/industry/real-world context to help them understand why you should win.
State measurable business and communications objectives. Ensure the impact section proves your achievements. Include as much evaluation data and evidence of the impact of the campaign on the client business or organisation as possible, from an increase in sales to higher levels of engagement with audiences.
Engage judges with the human or emotional angle. There is one in every campaign if you look hard enough. Who cares whether the campaign was a success? What did it really mean? To whom did it make a difference? Whose lives did it affect? A huge proportion of winning entries elicit some kind of emotional reaction – some stories are even told powerfully enough to prompt tears.
Remember the magic formula: clear objectives, matched to proven results, plus great storytelling, equals your best chance of winning. Assuming your campaign was brilliantly conceived and executed in the first place.