Tech and Telecom industry awards can be a quick way to raise your profile and gain recognition for exceptional work over the past year. Even if you’re just shortlisted, you’re still being recognised by judging panels and singled as a leader in the industry.
The challenge can be getting started and engaged with an awards programme. You enter the same one or two awards every year but there are a lot of awards that tech and telecoms companies are eligible to win.
At Ilex, we have organised a number of awards schedules for our clients to ensure that the company is entering the appropriate awards and to stop crucial deadlines from being missed. Over the years, we have helped our clients win hundreds across the globe, from Asia to the Middle East, Europe and the Americas. The key has been to develop an awards programme, maintain it and write exceptional entries.
Here are the steps we take to build a winning awards programme:
Step 1: Research Awards
We look at a whole range of award types such as innovation and industry specific awards. We also consider looking at young talent, HR, CSR programmes and Customer Service awards.
This gives our clients a greater opportunity for their product and services to stand out and differentiate them from their competitors.
Step 2: Shortlist Awards
From the research we always find there are a variety of awards to choose from, but it will be incredibly time intensive and costly to apply to all of them.
We review the list of awards found and shortlist the awards according to whether the categories meet the objectives of the company.
Once shortlisted on to a schedule, we can then look at each award in more depth for example the deadlines, locations and even research the past winners.
Step 3: Creating the Narrative
Reviewing our client’s news, milestones achievements over the last 12 months will be key to use when supporting their points within the awards entry.
Information is collected by desk research, gathering materials, interview executives, press releases and milestones. Behind the scenes achievements are sometimes included as awards are not usually public so there’s an opportunity to share information that hasn’t been formally announced.
Step 4: Writing Simple but Powerful Submissions
Entries should have a strong message to start and finish each section. The language we use is simple with short sentences. Short paragraphs are used so that it is easy to read if someone was to read the entry quickly.
There is no use for internal jargon or marketing speak. No matter what the questions are the story should always carry on from one question to the other.
Step 5: Maintaining Your Calendar
We continually update, watch deadlines and look at the types of entries that are winning an award and being shortlisted. This is to help keep entries evolving throughout the programme.
Step 6: Reviewing, Critiquing and Takeaways
At the end of the year, we look at what worked, what didn’t work, what could we have done better and then set up new objectives for next year’s awards programme.
It’s very useful to be tracking for success and looking at internal responses and feedback to see how we can improve on the next award programme. Quote from a client that said “I’ve never worked at a company that gets recognised and wins award. This is amazing!”. This helps our client’s internal teams excited about their work and supports their company’s overall momentum.
If you’d like to learn more about our approaches to awards programmes or writing awards entries, please get in touch