2017 has been our most successful year for award wins yet and it’s not just us benefiting from this international recognition. Award wins can be incredibly valuable for the organisation we produce the work for, so we want to show you why you should be challenging your teams to aim high for industry recognition in some of the world’s leading content marketing competitions.
We enter into awards programmes to qualify the effectiveness of our content and actively seek out external recognition that proves it does what we say it will. Submission processes often involve working with clients to understand the true value of the results they’ve seen – which is a valuable reflective exercise for both sides.
Video content is an investment, and it’s becoming more and more common for clients to include award recognition as one of the objectives set out in their brief. It’s not just about the glory of winning, it’s about benchmarking your content against your competitors. Of course you’ll ask your team to stand out amongst the crowd – so why not challenge them to prove it?
Northumberland Domestic Abuse Services’ (NDAS) campaign, Control, has already been screened at 4 award ceremonies, 2 international conferences and countless best practice workshops since it’s launch on Valentine’s Day this year. Due to it’s success, the regional charity has benefited from local online and offline media coverage and invited to appear at local events and film festivals across Northumberland. The charity’s social media following has also tripled and other domestic abuse charities have helped to spread the message by sharing the campaign on their behalf.
All of this has been achieved with no distribution budget and few internal resources. Instead, a strong value proposition, a clever seeding strategy and a bundle of ambition is what helped this campaign reach over 888,000 people on Facebook alone.
The first rule of content marketing is repurpose, recycle, reuse and good, well-thought out content can be used across functions again and again. Case studies in particular are a great example of high-standard, evergreen content as stories that highlight the outcome of your work can benefit sales, fundraising, events, internal comms and recruitment teams. The award-winning Lorrainne’s story by Marie Curie UK is a great example of how a simple case study produced for a particular fundraising campaign can also be a valuable, long-lasting asset for other means.
