Beyond "Innovation Awards" Rethink yours to attract top buyers!

Discovering, finding, or understanding innovation is a significant reason why delegates attend their industry events. This is especially true of those who are more experienced, have important jobs, and have bigger budgets to spend. Yes, the ones paying suppliers most want to meet and network with.

So, one of the features organisers add is the Innovation Awards. As an organiser, I did them too across many of my events. And yes, I called them Innovation Awards, because I was so often immersed in that tunnel of day-to-day event planning and delivery, running from one event to the next. Time was a premium I could not afford to waste.

Fast forward 6 months and one benefit of becoming an advisor is you’ve got a new pair of glasses. You see things others don’t or don’t have the time to review. Now I’m looking up and out exploring new, effective, and productive ways to re-invent the ordinary and make it extraordinary.

So here are my three tips to make your ordinary Innovation Awards into an extraordinary feature buyers value and sponsors want to pay for.

Change the Name

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen the words Innovation Awards in the last few months. Below are a few suggestions. They are generic in concept so find time to tailor to your market and show.

• Visionary Awards: Emphasizes the future-oriented aspect of innovation.
• Game Changer Awards: Highlights the disruptive and impactful nature of innovation.
• Breakthrough Awards: Focuses on the significant advancements achieved through innovation.
• Pioneering Awards: Celebrates those who are leading the way in new directions.
• Disruptive Excellence Awards: Combines the concepts of innovation and success.
• FutureForge Awards: Evokes a sense of building a better future through innovation.
• Catalyst Awards: Emphasizes the role of innovation in sparking change and progress.
• Leapfrog Awards: Highlights the significant jumps forward achieved through innovation.
• Paradigm Shift Awards: Focuses on the transformative nature of innovation.
• Imagineer Awards: Combines the concepts of imagination and engineering, key elements of innovation.

Give your innovation awards a brand makeover.

Below are fundamentals on how to achieve this.

• Know your audience: Who are you trying to reach? What are their values, aspirations, and pain points?
• Define your goals: What do you want to achieve with the makeover? Increase brand awareness, attract new customers, or reposition your brand?
• Update your logo, colours, fonts, and imagery to reflect your new brand identity.
• Define your brand values, personality, and unique selling proposition.
• Develop a clear and consistent message that resonates with your target audience.

Dedicate time to strategy and planning.

If you want your awards to succeed as a show-stopping feature it can’t be an afterthought, that you throw together at the last minute. It has to be an integral component of commercial and audience strategies from the get-go.

As my mum says, David, you must do these things properly, or why bother?