Articles Tagged with Awards

A Year of Award Submissions – A Freelancer’s Experience

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Award statue imageIn the three years I’ve been running MOM, one of the things I’m proudest of is the fact that I’ve spent very little on marketing. As the majority of enquiries come to me via SEO (fittingly!), social media and word-of-mouth, I don’t spend any money on advertising, except for business cards and Cardiff SEO Meet (which I run and pay for all myself, but put MOM as an event sponsor in return).

The only other exception? Award submissions.

Over the past year I submitted an SEO/content campaign that I created last year to multiple awards organisations. All of them operate a ‘pay-to-enter’ type model, so none of them were free to submit to. This is fine for fancypants agencies who can quite readily and easily splurge, but for a li’l solo consultant like me, it’s a heck of a business expense – especially if it doesn’t end up paying off.

In this post I talk about where I submitted the campaign, how much it all cost, what it amounted to in the end, where I went right/wrong, and whether it’s put me off or encouraged me to do this all again…

Awards of every type…

I was darn proud of CR 25. In the process of putting it all together, I thought to myself “ooo, this could be award-worthy” as it showcased lots of different types and styles of content, ranging from expert roundups and infographics to interactive timelines and multiple-choice quizzes. And we did it all really cheaply, too.

Once the dust settled, I eyed up all the potential awards that were applicable:

  • Canmol Wales Marketing Awards 2015
  • UK Search Awards 2015
  • Recruiter Awards 2016
  • EU Search Awards 2016
  • The Drum Search Awards 2016

There were two others as well (Content Marketing Awards 2015 and The Drum Content Awards 2016), but I eventually decided against them.

As you can see above, the list of organisations was a nice mix of local (Wales-focused), industry-specific for the client (recruitment), and industry-specific for me (SEO).

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Tactics for a Successful Public Vote Strategy – How I Became a UK Blog Awards Finalist

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VOTE imageI’m excited to be a finalist in the UK Blog Awards for the second year running, this time in the Digital & Technology category. The first phase was a public vote, and although I put a fair bit of effort into it, I’m certainly no expert – proof of that is the fact that I only made it to the finals in one of the two categories that I entered, suggesting that the competition this year is a lot more fierce than previous years…

I wanted to share my tactics on how I put the word out asking people to vote for me. This is by no means an exhaustive list, and some of them may be really obvious, but who knows… you might try different things next year and it might make all the difference.

Blog-related

Blog about it

UKBA16 badge exampleFirst things first… Blog about it! I wrote a post about it (“Vote for SEOno in the UK Blog Awards 2016!”) containing the ‘vote now’ image, which linked to my dedicated entry page.

Add a site-wide ‘vote now’ button

You can take this further by added a site-wide ‘vote now’ button. I put mine in my blog’s site-wide left-hand column. This is handy in case someone doesn’t see the dedicated blog post on the subject and instead visits another section (such as the homepage, the About page, the Contact page or a random post).

Social media-related

Twitter

Twitter is a no-brainer, and I reckon the biggest ‘pull’ of votes in my case.

I wouldn’t hesitate to tweet multiple times. I tweeted every 2-3 days during the voting period, varying the times and days. Use something like TweetDeck or Buffer to schedule your tweets (so you can get them all ready in bulk, instead of having to worry about remembering to manually do them yourself), and something like Followerwonk to find out the best time(s) of day to tweet based on your followers’ activity.

Followerwonk example screenshot
UKBA16 tweets imageAnother way to vary your tweets on the subject: RT other people’s tweets about it. So if someone else tweets saying that you’ve entered (@mentioning you in the process) then you could consider retweeting that instead of doing a standalone tweet from your own account.

I also tended to vary whether or not it contained an image (either no image, or the screenshot from the entry page, or the one provided by UKBA themselves), and also varied the landing page (mostly the entry page itself, but sometimes I drove people to the blog post instead).

Oh and lastly… Consider pinning one of the tweets on your profile – ideally one with an image (such as the ‘vote now’ image that UKBA provided, in my case). For people who randomly stumble across your Twitter profile, they’ll see it – and even if they don’t end up voting, it still looks good to show off.

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Have We Reached Awards Event Overkill?

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Disclaimer: This post isn’t intended as a dig at any awards event organiser, whether mentioned in this post or not. On the contrary, I’m a fan of awards events and have submitted (and will continue to submit) campaigns to them, now and in the future, on behalf of myself and my clients. This post is simply an observation on the current status of the awards industry as a whole.

Trophies imageRecently I’ve been submitting one of the campaigns that I created for a client to various SEO/marketing awards events – the first time I have ever done so. While we sadly didn’t get through to the finals of Canmol 2015 (the Wales Marketing Awards), we were shortlisted in two categories in the UK Search Awards 2015, which took place in London last week. I also have my sights set on a few awards events taking place in 2016 – we’ve submitted the campaign to one of them (shortlist TBC) and there are at least two or maybe three others that I’m considering in the New Year.

One thing I’ve noticed though? I thought that there would be only one or two awards applicable to me. With this campaign alone, I have found at least half a dozen. And it seems that – in South Wales at least – a few more have sprung up really recently, only in the last year or so.

It has me a little concerned… Are we reaching a point of ‘peak’ awards do? Are there too many of them out there, which are in turn devaluing the status that a person obtains when he/she wins an award and becomes “award-winning?” Honestly, I don’t know – I don’t have the answer, but I thought that I’d air my views and potentially start a discussion on the topic…

The “new car” phenomenon in play?

I’ll happily admit that the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon could be in play here. You know when you buy a new car, and then you notice other people driving the same make/model more often than you did previously – maybe even in the same colour? As mentioned above, this was my first time submitting something to awards shows, so it makes sense that I’m simply more aware of them now. Let’s also not ignore the fact that many of my fellow Welsh ICE members have been up for awards recently, with multiple members shortlisted in the Caerphilly Business Awards 2015. Many of them were tweeting about it, so it could be the case that I’m seeing more tweets about awards, leading me to believe that there are more awards out there than there actually are…

Then again… New awards in just the last few months include the Entrepreneur Wales Awards, the Cardiff Business Awards, The Regional Awards (which includes Cardiff), the Cardiff Music Awards, and various offerings from The Drum, including The Drum Content Marketing Awards (in fact you can see the full list of The Drum’s different awards events here). And while I deliberated about writing this post over the weekend, I was casually browsing Twitter and noticed that the Business Growth Awards South Wales had just been announced. That’s a lot of new awards events all of a sudden – especially those originatining from and/or having a focus on the Cardiff/South Wales region.

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