Winning Awards for Marketing

James Lawrence: I now have the pleasure of introducing to the podcast Eshita Durve, who is the Head of Marketing here at Rocket Agency. Eshita, welcome. 

Eshita Durve: Thank you, James. It's fantastic to be here today. 

James Lawrence: Eshita, I believe I have it on very good authority that you've been back to India recently. Is that true? 

Eshita Durve: It is true. It was quite a trip, I might add. It was a task getting there, but it's great to be back in Sydney. Even though it's boring every single day. It's nice to get into routine. It's nice to be in the office and see all the lovely faces around. 

James Lawrence: I agree with that. It is very good to be back. So you have possibly the most difficult job in Rocket. You have to market the marketing agency and deal with an agency full of marketers telling you all the great ideas they've got, where they do things differently to you, including me, who I constantly, constantly pick on you and drive crazy. Just for the listeners, how long have you been at Rocket? What were you doing previously? How did you end up working with us? 

Eshita Durve: It has been quite a ride. And I'll second that. You have been driving me crazy. I think it's a great problem to have. 

James Lawrence: We like each other. 

Eshita Durve: I agree. Being surrounded by good marketers is a nice way to improve on the skills that you have. It sort of keeps what you're doing in check as well, so you can't really bluff your way through the role, which always keeps things interesting. So I've been with Rocket close to three years now and previously I was heading marketing at a sales training business in a consulting B2B context. It's quite different from what I'm doing now. So before I was marketing to salespeople and now I’m marketing to marketers, so it gives me a good picture of the entire growth or revenue function, if I may. So it's been quite a ride. I started off managing accounts and clients and quickly moved towards just managing Rocket as a business. 

James Lawrence: The most difficult client of all. 

Eshita Durve: You bet. You bet. And with that, I see my role as growing the agency. And I think all marketers in the world should have that view about the businesses that they work in. The second part of my role is around leading email and automation. That's a different aspect altogether. I’ve spent quite a lot of time sending emails to millions of people over the last 7 to 8 years, and I'm just bringing those skills to our clients as well. It's a two-fold role. I enjoy the marketing aspect of it the most.

James Lawrence: It is excellent to have you as a member of our team.

Eshita Durve: Thank you.

James Lawrence: Lots of different things we could talk about today. But the topic, which is of real interest to in-house marketers, are awards. How to apply for them, why apply for them, what gaining an award can mean both personally within a business but also what it can make for that business and then how to promote it. A pretty big part of your role at Rocket is to get us into industry awards, whether that's as an agency or for our client work. Warts and all, just give it out to the listeners. Give them the secret sauce. What works, what doesn't work, what it takes. But first, just to take a little bit of a step back - why apply for awards in the first place? 

Eshita Durve: Awards are a very interesting marketing strategy. They've got the longevity that a shorter campaign just doesn't have. If I had to list a few reasons why one would apply for an award. One: it gives you bragging rights. I mean, it's so straightforward. It's such a credible reason to go to the market and talk about yourself without actually sounding snobbish. When you win an award or you can get shortlisted for an award, you've got a third-party authority who's got nothing to gain from you, who's putting you on that pedestal, and you can go and talk about it. So it's a credible reason to go to the market and speak about your own business. It's a marketing tool in a sense. It's a great way to reconnect with your prospects. It's a great way to reconnect with your current clients as well, and probably send out an EDM or again, promote brand awareness through social channels or your own channels. You could even run a PR campaign associated with winning an award or being shortlisted for it. Again, there is brand awareness associated with that.

Eshita Durve: It could also be used to strengthen client relationships. If you decide to put in an application for a particular client or with another client, you get that opportunity to one: spend time with that client, build a story around what you have achieved for them. And you know, like for us. Our clients are marketers. It sort of gives them the authority to go back to their board of directors and talk about the great work that they themselves and their agency, which is Rocket, is doing for them. So that's really cool. And the one thing that people sort of miss out on or they don't think about is like winning an award is a great way to attract talent. We would very often talk about us being the best marketing agency as awarded by AMI in 2021 to attract talent, because it gives the talent that confidence that they're working with a serious business that's good at what they're doing, and they have an opportunity to learn and grow within that business. Those are the reasons why you would go and apply for awards, whether you are an agency or a business. 

James Lawrence: That's right. When you started the role with us, you were kind of like, we need to do it. We always dabbled in awards, but you were like: we need to take these seriously. It’s obvious that having awards on your website, on your social media properties is good for building credibility when people arrive. I think I'd probably underestimated the positive impact that it had on our existing clients. Where if it was a campaign which we did for them that was awarded to them, that's obviously great. It looks good for them internally, etc., for building relationships. But it's also just good to validate either our direct contacts or for them to then sell into the rest of their business that no: the agency you're using is actually really good at what they do. I think we’ve found that we've had past clients come back to Rocket based on seeing us winning awards on LinkedIn and whatever else. Something we were talking about just before we started recording today was the longevity of awards. A lot of what we do is, you know, we do a lot of content, we do SEO, we do Google ads, we do a lot of email marketing. 

James Lawrence: But the thing that you rammed home to us when you were telling us to do more with awards, was the kind of the long-term impact and how many years of marketing and leverage you can have if you are successful? Just talk about that. That is something that is probably not thought of as much as it should be. 

Eshita Durve: Absolutely. When you think about short term marketing campaigns, right, like lead generation is probably one of the number one reasons why you even have the marketing function. Many times you just get into that rut of trying to generate leads within that particular month or within that particular quarter. And you're quite myopic in that view if you're approaching marketing in just that way. Leads are important and they need to sort of fall into your regular marketing KPI. But you need to take a long-term view if you want to increase the number of leads month on month, year on year. And awards fall into that marketing activity that gives you the marketing rights, the bragging rights.

Eshita Durve: You can run unpaid media campaigns for years on end based on an award win or being shortlisted for a particular award. Again, it depends on the authority and what you win and if your business is currently doing what you won an award for and on things like that. But you could take an award and the investment that you would make there, for example, you would spend, say, 5 to 10 thousand dollars for your own awards, right? It's just an example. You can use that as a reason to reach out to an audience for three or even five years to come. You can keep talking about an award that you won. Say, for example, in 2018 as well for a particular reason. You can do that for short-term campaigns. A particular e-book is going to be outdated sooner rather than later.  

James Lawrence: Like I think for us last year through a lot of your hard work winning Marketing Agency of the Year at the AME Awards, like it's a 2021 award. Obviously, we run that through 2022. But I- 

Eshita Durve: Big win. 

James Lawrence: I think in 5 years time, forever, we'll still have won Australian Marketing Agency of the Year. I think that is something which probably we underestimated the benefit of. And now we do have some awards from, you know, 2017, 18, 19, and we still run with them from, you know, depending on the context. I think it's a good one. Now, getting into the nitty gritty a little bit more, I think we know the value of awards. First of all, what's a good award series and what's an average one? We obviously get emails all the time saying, do you want to apply for a certain series of awards? And, you know, some are better than others. How do you identify which are the ones that are actually credible? 

Eshita Durve: You go back to basics and think about your buyer persona. Who does your bio persona consider to be a good authority? Essentially for us, the way it works in terms of our process, is we look at authorities and there are typically 4 types of authorities. You'll have your trade publications talking about your industry specifically. There are generally technology companies that work again within your industry that host certain awards. Then there are industry associations. Say for us, we won the Marketing Award from Australian Marketing Institute, right? That's an industry association. You have another industry association, say for example, if you're a fintech business or a SaaS business. And then there are international authorities that could be publications or either or. So those are the typical authorities that you would look at. And depending on who your persona considers to be a viable authority, whom they resonate with, you would go and pick those ones. 

James Lawrence: And then within it, there might be 12 different series and you decide there are 6 that we think are actually legitimate, credible and will resonate with our target market. What's your process for actually picking the categories that you want to go in on? Do you go in on everything, scattergun? Do you put multiple into one? Do you go deeper at a smaller number? What's the secret to success? 

Eshita Durve: The secret is a longer process. But if someone asked me right now what the secret for winning an award is, it's a combination of stats and a story. A combination of good statistics to back up a good story and a good story to back up good numbers. That combination gives you a higher probability of being shortlisted and then winning an award. In terms of choosing categories and processes, it's a little longer. We start by just one: finalising on the authorities that we would go for. And within those authorities they'd have like multiple categories, they’ll have 20 or 30 categories.

Eshita Durve: So we look at who's won the awards or who's been shortlisted for the awards in the previous years. We look at the winners and just consider our chances of being shortlisted or winning a particular one. We will also consider the budget associated with the award campaign. For example, some award applications can cost you over $1,000 and others can cost you a few hundred dollars. Depending on how much you want to invest in that particular authority, you'd make a choice on the number of applications you want to put in. Once we agree on those categories, we then go to our client list and try to match the stories and the stats to that particular category. Now, that's an interesting aspect because sometimes, one of the best campaigns you have may not make it to the shortlist only because your client isn’t that popular or as well-known. Again, in those cases, you look at the authority and who's won in the past to decide on whether a particular campaign needs to be put forward for that particular category for that particular authority. 

James Lawrence: What do you think matters more, the story or the data? 

Eshita Durve: It depends on the authority, again. For us in terms of the authorities that we go for, Semrush is one authority. It's a highly technical authority. It's one of the most important tools that marketers use when it comes to digital marketing. Almost everyone in marketing knows about it. They prefer a technically led application. If you don't have screenshots from Google ads, if you don't have screenshots of your analytics platform and your data platform, etc., etc., no matter how good the story is, you don't have enough data to back it up. And that's already like that. You would need strong stats. That's more important than the story. But for other trade publication applications, the story matters more. If they are trade publications, right? At the end of the day, they're like newspapers. They are looking for a good story, something that can make headlines. You'd have to consider those things when you put certain companies forward for certain awards. 

James Lawrence: That's a very practical takeaway. Which is to look at the award series, look at the publisher and then get into the mindset of whether they are likely to be more narrative-driven or more data-driven.

Eshita Durve: Correct. When you're looking at the audience, your audience for an award submission is a judge. As you said, James, you need to get into the mindset of what the judging authority would be thinking before putting in that application.  

James Lawrence: Now, I think this is of interest to people. Last year, Rocket won three Apex Search Awards, one Search Engine Land Award, which is a global one, three SEMRush awards, two AME Awards. That's about nine or ten. In terms of a funnel, where do you go from wins to being nominated as a finalist in your applications? If you're happy to give away the secret sauce.

Eshita Durve: For this one, we didn't expect to win so many awards. I’ll start there. And so we really just tried our best. We put our best foot forward. Our team is actually very talented, and I take a lot of pride in our team. We had good stories to tell. We had good stats to back up those stories. The combination of both of those put us in a good position to actually put in applications. We submitted over 50 applications. We were finalists for over 30 of them, still that’s- 

James Lawrence: That's just over half. 

Eshita Durve: Yeah, close to 60% in terms of being finalists. In the olden days, we used to take a finalist position and then market it to the core. We really took that as our main story, being finalists. Then we ended up winning so many awards in 2021. We took 9 titles. That's about a 20% hit. 

James Lawrence: Yeah.

Eshita Durve:  We didn't expect as many awards. Now we know after having submitted so many applications and learning about what it takes to be shortlisted and what it takes to win an award, we have a better idea of how to approach this. 

James Lawrence: And I think it took us a long time to get that formula. I guess you're looking at it as for every award you win, you probably need to be a finalist three times. And for each of those, you need to probably be 50% for when you become a finalist for each application. 

Eshita Durve: I would recommend not applying for an award if you feel like you're not going to win or be shortlisted. Be smart about it. At the end of the day, they are marketing dollars. If you don't have a good story to tell, you'd rather take that money and put it towards another campaign. But if you do have good stories, then I would say apply for good awards. In terms of time investment, it's a very time-heavy investment. The soft cost of awards is actually quite, quite high when you consider the number of people involved in putting the application together. The design that may be associated, the process itself, the admin process. Consider all of those things. 

James LAwrence: How long? You say soft costs and as a business owner, I think that's a hard cost. It's still people's time and labour and wages. You mentioned a couple of hundred bucks, up to $1,000 potentially for an application. What would you estimate for each individual application you're putting in? How much company time is being spent on that? 

Eshita Durrve: I would say about 20 to 30 hours per application. It depends. We sent out over 50 applications but many, many of them, many of these award applications could be duplicated or tweaked for other applications. If you spend 20 hours on one application, then the next one is just going to be an hour’s work or a couple hour’s work max, just to tidy things up. Eventually, it does pay off. To put your initial application together, I would say 20 hours start to finish including admin time, speaking to the client, getting testimonials - probably even doing a video if you're very ambitious, but you get a higher chance of being shortlisted. To do all of those things, around 20 hours per application to start with. 

James Lawrence: That was going to be my next question. I know that it will depend on the award series and format they want the award submission to be in. But generally speaking, what are the characteristics of a good award submission? You mentioned case study, testimonial video. What are some other practical things that listeners can think of in terms of including in their applications? 

Eshita Durve: The way I would approach an award and my recommendation to anyone who is applying for one is to think of it as a university assignment. It’s an old-school way- 

James Lawrence: That sounds boring, Eshita. 

Eshita Durve: I know, it’s an old school way, doesn't sound sexy, but that's the thing that works. With most of what authority they would give you what's called an entry format. An entry form that has very clear instructions on what are the questions they are asking in terms of the outcomes or the benchmarks that you have set for your client, how you approached it, what's your strategy around that particular campaign, how you executed that strategy, what are the nuances of the different tactics that you applied, images and screenshots of what's been done, testimonials, results. Then to tie all of those things together, you may have some additional information or supporting documents. That's usually the format for different award applications.

Eshita Durve: And it may be different for different industries. I'm just speaking from a marketing context, for marketing awards. But say for a new business award going for the fastest growing company, you will have a similar format. Answer the question is what I would say. Don't be wishy-washy. If they've asked you for benchmarks, give them hard numbers in terms of benchmarks. If you hadn't set any benchmarks, then have a chat with your client and then agree on what they would have considered to be a good result and that can be your benchmark. What would they have been happy with? Give hard numbers, answer the questions, give good screenshots. Don't add too many additional documents because at the end of the day, they'll be humans who will review your application. If you overwhelm them with too much information, they're not going to grasp anything. You’d rather be succinct. Answer the question, give good numbers. And if you really, really want to put in that effort, a good video would be a strong addition to your application. 

James Lawrence: It builds credibility, it builds trust, cuts through very quickly. I think that's a good point, because depending on the series, the judges are going to be very time-poor. They may be being paid, they may not be being paid. They're going through dozens of applications, potentially more. Don't waffle. Don't put things in that are superfluous. Answer the question. Answer it clearly. And respect their time, right? 

Eshita Durve: Correct. And early entries give you cheaper award submissions. You may want to plan ahead. When you start a campaign, you may want to consider it. Consider capturing those case studies and those award applications throughout the year rather than doing it six weeks before you get started. 

James Lawrence: It's not cramming for the university exam. 

Eshita Durve: You bet. 

James Lawrence: So we win an award. We know they're valuable if the right people see them. What are your tips in terms of what to do if you win one? How do you promote it? How do you amplify it? 

Eshita Durve: There are some basic things that you would do with an award win. We would definitely run an organic social campaign around this one. Posting about the award win on your organic social channels, not to forget to tag the award authorities so that they can amplify to their network as well, which is really awesome. There's that. You could also send it to your clients so they can amplify it on their social channels. Get your team members who are involved within that award application to talk about it as well. It's a great way to promote a positive culture within your team as well. You may want to throw a party or have a get-together within your business, maybe invite a few clients. When you win that award, you can do a PR push as well. Get your public relations team to write up a media release about that award, talking about that campaign. It's a great opportunity to win brownie points from your clients as well. Then send an EDM out to your prospecting database, send it out to your client database, talking about the win.

Eshita Durve: Also include it within the job ads that you put up for when you want to recruit. These are just a few ways by which you can promote your awards. Obviously adding it to your website and things like that. Website email signatures. The avenues are multiple. Adding it to your sales proposals. There are so many ways wherein you can just plug that single line of award-winning authority or award-winning agency, award-winning business. It gives you so much credibility and third-party approval. Just putting this stamp of approval is a fantastic way to gain respect within the industry. 

James Lawrence: I'd add to that that often we can get a little bit bored of talking about a particular award, particularly after a year or two years or three years. But I think first impressions count and if it is someone whose first interaction with your business is on a website or an email signature, just cause you're tired of talking about winning, you know, Apex Search Awards in 2019, doesn't mean that the prospect is tired of it as well. I think having it in, as you said, website, email signatures, sales decks, job ads for basically forever, is definitely a way of maximising the lifetime ROI. There’s some pretty good practical takeaways there, in terms of obviously why to apply for an award, but also which ones should we apply for, if we do what are the characteristics of a good submission, what are our chances of winning and what to do if we do win. A bit left of field, but what advice would you give to someone whose dream job was your role? 

Eshita Durve: Interesting question. My number one piece of advice for anyone who wants to build a career in marketing is to get a grasp of sales. If you don't understand how the sales pipeline works, if you don't understand what it takes for a salesperson or a frontline person to actually close the deal, and if you are in e-commerce or in online sales, if you don't understand that side of the buyer's journey, what happens after the bot is a product of what it takes for them to produce a particular product, you're probably not approaching marketing in the right way. You're not taking into account the buyers and the end part of the buyer's journey, which is what you want to drive. You want to grow the business. You want to grow revenue. Sales is a function of marketing. Get a grasp of sales and you’ll become a better marketer. 

James Lawrence: I love it. That is music to the ears of business owners, C-suite, and senior salespeople as well. I think it is so important that the two hands work together on sales and marketing. 

Eshita Durve: I spend way too much time with salespeople to forget this part. 

James Lawrence: Eshita, thank you so much for your time on the Smarter Marketer podcast. 

Eshita Durve: My pleasure, James. It was lovely chatting with you about the awards. 

James Lawrence: Thanks for listening to The Smarter Marketer podcast. Stay up to date about new episodes on LinkedIn and Instagram by searching for Smarter Marketer podcast. You can purchase your own copy of Smarter Marketer via the Amazon website. And if you want a second opinion about your business's approach to digital marketing, send me an email at jamesl@rocketagency.com.au or visit the rocketagency.com.au website. Thanks for your time.