What to do when you win a Cheese Award?
“The Cheese Awards reflect what is happening in the fine food halls, delicatessens and farm shops throughout the UK”
An award is recognition for a food producer that their produce is of the highest quality thanks to independent judging. The prestige of winning and being able to show off a cheese award is a powerful tool to help grow businesses in the speciality food sector. Industry recognition however is useless without good promotion. In order to maximise the impact of winning a Cheese Award, your business needs to promote your result and build awareness in your target market. In this document we will discuss how to maximise attention to your business using traditional methods as well as digital marketing practices such as content marketing, SEO and social media.
Promoting food awards
Why shouldn’t I just use my normal advertising to promote my award?
Modern consumers (including B2B consumers) are over-saturated with marketing messages, (an estimated 5 million a day!) have led to western audiences developing extraordinary filtering powers that make us immune to 90% of advertising, or any content with a commercial slant. Think how quickly you scroll past or find that ‘skip’ button. Overt marketing messages can be filtered out completely.
A food award such as a cheese award is an independent distinction that will validate your current customers choice to buy your products and also build interest in customers entering your sphere of influence. Using this marketing plan will increase interest in your business and generate more sales, because you are promoting content that satisfies a marketing message but does not appear to be commercially led. You should be using your normal advertising to support this marketing campaign, but only after you have implemented the tactics in this document.
Identify your target audience
Before you do any sort of marketing activity you should understand who you are targeting (in as much detail as possible) as this will inform many decisions you make during this process, such as the channels you use for promotion and the type of content you use to promote your Cheese Award. Take a look at our cheese audiences for more info.
Where to Promote your Win
After identifying your target market you need to choose the most likely place that this market segment will see your promotion. We have listed some places you should definitely use to draw awareness to your Cheese Award win but take some time to think about other relevant places you might be able to hook your audience into finding out more.
Your Website homepage
Your website is going to be one of the easiest places to promote your Cheese Award. Starting with your homepage or landing pages you should make a big deal of drawing attention to the awards, including promotion of the event, your participation in it, and also after winning, you can publicise the award that you won. If you use a slider or news area on your homepage you should devote the whole area to promotion of winning this award for at least three months then reduce it to one slide or news area for the next 9 months. When creating this home page item, include a large image of your product and the award image too. You might also add a comment from one of the award judges.
Website Footer
Your website footer is a good area of your website to promote your award win. Since it will feature on very page it will be difficult for your customers not to be aware of it. Add images of your product and the award to your footer with a little description about what it means.
Example footer description: [Your organisation] is pleased to announce a [X] win at the Cheese Awards, meaning our products are of the very best quality.
Blog
You should have started talking about the awards on your blog 3 months before you got it, the preparation, the excitement, getting the product ready and sending it across, etc. Although this can make coming home empty handed that harder to swallow, it is still a useful marketing exercise. Interesting blog articles will include talking about the awards, which products you are entering, the opinions of your customers & staff, talking about awards you have won previously.
Example blog post themes:
- What’s all this about Cheese awards? (basic introduction)
- Which products should we enter (excuse to talk up your products)
- Preparation to send products (a peek behind the curtain of your organisation, good chance
- to give your staff some of the spotlight)
- Award win (how good is your product)
Newsletter
Newsletters are a part of normal business correspondence, and should have a reasonable level of readership attention. Newsletters represent an ideal opportunity to build awareness of your Cheese Award, by sharing the win with your customers, don’t just share the news involve them and thank them too, for their support. You should dedicate the main feature of your newsletter to any awards you win then have a permanent feature of your award logo somewhere in your newsletter such as in the footer, add it to the newsletter footer (as in the website footer above).
Website Links
When promoting your win you will inevitably want to direct people to your website. It seem like directing them to your homepage is the best idea, but consider pointing website links at the page specifically talking about your win. It will be a more relevant landing page for your audience and help your website rank in search engines.
Social Media
Using Social media to publicise your win is a very good idea. Your current followers and other award winners will even help you spread marketing messages about your win (assuming you do it right). The normal rules for social media apply – so include a picture whenever possible, link back to your home page in posts, include #tags specific for your industry, tweet at optimal times and try and start or join in conversations.
Who to include?
You should be including the award organiser in messages on social channels. Ways to do this include mentioning them when sending in your entries or thanking them when the awards are announced, or using the award hashtag.
@Yourbusiness: Here’s a photo of our staff preparing our stilton for the #CheeseAwards
@Yourbusiness: Thanks to @cheeseawards – Judges awarded our Shire Blue cheese two stars! #cheese
You can monitor the social feeds of judges for mentions of the awards, you could favourite and retweet the message, or if you’re feeling bold you could join in the conversation, be polite though and remember they are judges and have a responsibility to be impartial.
@FoodJudge: A great day judging entries at the #CheeseAwards
@Yourbusiness: We hope you enjoyed tasting the best speciality cheeses!
When the awards are announced there will be a flurry of excitement on social media, for best results be part of conversations rather than just broadcasting your own award. It is a good idea to look for prominent social media users who have a lot of followers and reply to messages, wait for them to post about their award first and then congratulate them.
@Cheesebusiness: Judges awarded our Shire Blue cheese two stars! #cheese
@Yourbusiness: Congratulations on your two stars win @Cheesebusiness
Don’t forget that industry critics and reporters will also be talking about the awards. You should be monitoring all communication that mentions the subject and look out for opportunities for engagement.
Types of Social Media promotional posts
- Twitter – post regular updates about your GTA story and awards
- LinkedIn – Post about your award on your company page, and share the success with employee posts too
- Instagram – A great place for images of your products and awards with more in-depth explanation
- Tiktok / YouTube – post videos showing your product being prepared for, or conduct your own interview after your award win
PR
Involving the press in your award win will help generate awareness to your business. At the very least your industry specific or Niche publications (on and offline) will be interested in hearing all about your win. If you are a small food producer that sources local produce you may find success in your local or regional publications. If you have a really good story to tell you may find even bigger publications are interested in publishing you. You should contact these organisations and offer written PR. Remember to include your website address in your PR.
Guest posts
Your website should be the first place you promote your Cheese Award, but promoting it on somebody else’s website adds value and credibility to your win. You can offer to write content for someone else’s website called a “guest post” and if you include a link to your website, you will drive referral traffic of potential customers to your own website (good for your SEO!).
Listen out for conversations about you
The cheese award organiser won’t be the only ones talking about your business, you need to setup a listening station to monitor online conversations for your product and brand. At the very least you should have a Google Alerts set up to monitor any content published about you. You should also be monitoring social media in case you miss a conversation too, you can find free tools to do this.
How to Promote your Cheese Award
Ok now we have discussed the channels available to promote your Cheese Award, let’s talk about the themes you could use and the type of content that will add value to your award promotional activity and increase the chances of your campaign reaching the most amount of interested people.
There are many different types of content that could be produced to promote your win at the Cheese Awards. Some of them can be made very easily, some of them use technology you will have on a desktop computer or your mobile phone. Some of them may require free tools you can find on the internet. You might even decide to spend some of your marketing budget on getting some help to produce some more complex types of content.
Whatever you decide to do remember it’s the value that the piece adds to the experience of your audience which is the highest priority rather than just the slickest looking piece. Also keep in mind that content like this has value in more than in one format and can often be broken down into many smaller chunks that can act as a way to hook people in on channels where a smaller piece of content is more acceptable such as social media sites like twitter.
For example you can tweet a picture of a member of staff sticking an award sticker on your product and say “So pleased with our Cheese Award, see more photos on our blog here” and link to a blog post with more details.
Award Content marketing timeline
The marketing starts a long time before you win an award. Let’s look at an example timeline for marketing content before and after the awards are dished out:
Before awards
- Sign up
- Preparation
- Excitement building
- Sending your product
- Judging
- Networking
After awards
- Awards announced
- Celebrating your win
- Congratulating others
- Thanking Organisers and Judges
- More Celebrating
- Debrief
- Following up and networking
- Promotion
- Overall winners announced
- Congratulations
- Thanking Organisers and Judges (again)
- Sharing your own success
- More Promotion
- Customer reaction
- Cheese markets – sign up to calendar of markets at discounted rates
- Thoughts for next year
Award Marketing Content Themes
OK, Let’s look at some content themes you can use in the marketing of your award:
Your story
This type of content is easy and probably readily available all ready to you. Your company story is your history, how you started, grown, etc. You can adapt it easily to incorporate your cheese award win ( and any other accolades you have received).
How we did it
It isn’t likely you started your business with an award winning product. There must have been a journey to describe and similar to “your story” above, your audience will be interested in “how” you developed an award winning product.
Award Story
How did you first become aware of the Cheese Awards? Describing the process that led from your awareness of it to deciding to send some of your products is a nice piece of content, you can go further by describing the process of sending your entry. Does your product have a limited life span, need to be shipped securely or quickly? If this is an interesting story that you can spice up with photos you may find this is content your potential audience will find interesting.
You can do it too
There may be a number of producers who are looking for more information about entering Cheese awards themselves. You could put together a piece of content encouraging this. Building on your award story you could highlight, in hindsight what you would do differently, or any advice. This is a legitimate way of positioning your brand more professionally to build your reputation amongst the specialist food producing industry.
Lists
A list is a very easy piece of content to produce. Simply list your products and the awards they have won. Add detailed descriptions about them, maybe include serving suggestions, etc. You could also rank this list by the awards they received.
Another option for lists is to list (or rank) your favourite choices of other Entrants/ winners to the awards. If your product works well with a meat or cheese, you could list the winners and detail their suitability as accompaniments with your own products.
Judges’ Comments
After the awards are announced you may have access to the awards judges comments, all of these positive testimonials can be easily turned into good useful content. Simply adding the text and the award image to a winning product photo makes it a great piece of visual content that is clear, concise and easy to share, these types of content do very well on social media.
Another option is to use each judges comment as a talking point. Use it as a springboard to highlight USPs about your award winning product. This could turn into a large piece of content that could be broken down further into smaller pieces.
Publish all winners
Could be a blog post or as part of your own promotion, you could just put a link to the awards website where they will find the winners or you could publish a full list yourself. This content can draw attention away from your business so use carefully. Publish any vertical customers and Industry partners first. Don’t post your competition if you can avoid it (especially if they won a better award).
Get customers involved
A good way to boost your website authority is to use the awards as an opportunity to encourage your customers to write a product ratings or review. This works as a marketing campaign because people love “adding their 2p”. Consider adding an auto responding email campaign that draws awareness to your award win and asks for reviews of your products (make this process as simple for them as possible).
How can our customers use it
If your produce is being distributed by other businesses a great promotional content piece could be advice on how they can draw attention to your products award. Since they want to sell more products too, the more help you can provide to them the better.
Some examples include:
Using POS material they can add to the deli counter, or other high foot traffic area.
Competition – giving away a Cheese hamper competitions are a really good way of getting other people to do your promotion for you. Why not gather the products of a few other award winners and run a competition to give it away. Make the competition entry something that is useful to you and likely to have the biggest impact.
Suggested competition entries
- Like on Facebook
- Write a review on your website
- Write a blog post and link to your website
Award Marketing Content Types
Interviews
Interviews are popular content pieces and are easy to read. If you can contact organisers, judges or other winners and offer to do an interview. Alternatively ask a member of staff to interview you the business owner. You can publish this interview in a written post or you could record a video or audio to publish on Youtube or Tiktok.
Images and Video
With the rise of mobile technology, the power to create good quality digital images is available to everyone. Document your Cheese Award with as many pictures as possible, as pictures heavily increase any content you produce and make it more likely to be shared. With your mobile phone or tablet and the right lighting, you can get perfectly good Video quality for streaming on the web.
Photo album
A photo album of images is a useful resource to have and can be easily shared. Consider using social photo sharing sites like: flickr, imgur, photobucket to host your images to keep your website bandwidth down.
Infographics
An infographic is a way of presenting information visually and is very popular among visual learners. There are some free online infographic makers like infogram.com, all you need to have is some interesting information to illustrate. If you have any staff capable of producing design work, you can create something from scratch that will be themed to your business.
Graphs
Similar to infographics but generally only contain one piece of information. Graphs are easy to produce, you can make graphs using office software on your computer. They are easy to share on social media.
Slideshows
Slideshows are easy to produce and share and work quite well for delivery key messages. Because they are interactive a slideshow can hold an audience’s attention for longer.
Maps
It’s easy to create maps online or customise map software like Google maps or Pinterest maps. They are also easy to share. Can you map the history of your product or supply chain, this content could be interesting to potential customers.
Quiz
Easy to create and fun to make, writing a good quiz may take a little time and inspiration, but the rewards of this type of interactive content are huge. Why not ask a customer what they know about the history or health benefits of your product. Use a quiz to dispel myths or promote different tastes or even health benefits of your product following a “did you know” / “True or false” type of question and answer quiz
Going Above & Beyond
Maximise your Networking – Connect, connect, connect
There are many networking opportunities that as award winners are uniquely placed to take advantage of. You should already know, or be able to find out the judges who are relevant, local, or amenable to you. You can easily watch social media or subscribe to PR channels to find other businesses you should be networking with.
Celebrate
If you ever needed an excuse to party this is it, and you can also make a lot of promotional collateral out of it. Invite other winners, judges, current and potential customers, niche businesses, industry press, etc, to a celebration party. Take plenty of pictures and video, fun occasions like these are very popular among your potential audience.
Educate
A Cheese Award is testament that you and your business are experts in your niche. You can feel legitimised that you have the knowledge other people would benefit from. The first people who could benefit from your knowledge are your staff, try and train them to be experts in your product and business and watch them grow your business.
There are many ways you can support and educate other businesses and you can use your industry and business experience combined with any knowledge on your product history to become an ambassador for your niche sector. Perhaps you should be judging products? you can apply to the Cheese Award organiser to be a judge yourself or start a little lower down the chain at a local fete or market.
If you are a good orator perhaps you should be giving professional talks. If you have a local food festival you could apply for a spot to speak there. If you don’t have a local food festival you should start one. There are likely plenty of local social groups, who will be interested in hearing from you. Local producers and other businesses groups may also be interested in hearing your award story.
Perhaps you would prefer to write than talk, if that’s the case you should be making the use of your blog. Write a whitepaper or guide which could be disseminated on your promotional channels. Describe what it is that makes your business different, talk about your values, and offer advice to others who may try to win a Cheese Award. If you have got a novel in you go ahead and write it. Ebooks are surprisingly easy to publish or you may find someone who would be interested in printing it.
Creating award branded Stationary
Your Cheese award branding looks professional, and wherever possible to do so you should use the highest resolution images in your own promotion, you can download digital images of your awards from the “winners downloads” page.
When deciding where and how to promote your Cheese Award consider any element that may be seen by your customers, the press, stakeholders and even your competition. These should be professional, coherent designs that entice your potential customers into finding out more.
Email signatures are an easy option for award promotion, since almost all businesses will use this method of electronic communication. Simply edit your email signature with the awards full name, product that it was awarded to and the year it was won. For added benefit add a link to the page on your website or blog where you talk about the award. You could also add award images to your email signature, to draw more attention to it, some email clients may have images turned off however.
Auto responders are automatic correspondence and easy to forget about. Take the time to add award promotion to your auto responding emails as you have done in your email signature or newsletter (depending on auto responder format).
Newsletters are a part of daily business correspondence and while award promotion will be the main focus. Add the award logo to your own logo so it appears prominently on the newsletter email.
Social Media profiles
Your social media profiles are a perfect place to promote an award win, since most social profiles are square or circle shaped, you could quickly and easily draw attention to your win by swapping your usual avatar with the Cheese Award image. This will mean every time your profile or post is viewed online you will be generating more awareness to your award win and the reach of the awareness will be linked to your social media reach.
If you have more resources available, the preferred option is to add the Cheese Award image to your current avatar, profile header, timeline, etc and will be more unique to your company. This type of design change will be easier for your audience to understand, or query for more information which should generate a lot of awareness to you and your winning products.
Invoices
Invoices are an accepted communication from business and a good place to publish your award win. Although you are talking to potentially established customers you can use your award win to reinforce the quality of your products. Add the awards full name, product that it was awarded to and the year it was won. For added benefit add a link to the page on your website or blog where you talk about the award.
Promotional items
It’s not all about online marketing. When you win a Cheese Award, consider adding it to all your promotional items such as show banner, or the point of sale displays, etc, which you send to your distributors, to show off the quality of your product. You can also get bunting as well as aprons which can be used as a visual reminder your product is award winning.
Packaging
If you use branded packaging to transport your produce to customers this may be a good place to highlight your Cheese Award win. You could use the award stickers on your packaging or print new packaging that features the award on the box or on a slip attached to the invoice.
POS
If you offer POS material to your customers, such as product cards or posters, don’t forget to have your award added to this material so customers can see it at point of purchase.
Summary
Marketing your business using a Cheese Award will be successful in a scalable process, but it does involve you putting in the work. The old phrase that “you will get out what you put in” is very true here.
Using this guide you will see some good results, the more you can go above and beyond this guide though, the more success you will find using the awards as a marketing vehicle. There are many ideas and concept steps in this guide including; how to build awareness using branding, where to talk about winning an award on the marketing channels available to you, and how to maximise customer reach (customers who will see it), Leveraging the channels of other award winners to capitalise on their own reach, how to use the awards as a vehicle to engage with industry influencers who you may not have had a legitimate reason to interact with before. Doing these activities and more will increase your business reach and generate more sales.