Over the past seven years of running Top Rated awards at TrustRadius, we’ve seen three distinct levels of vendor promotion:

1. Some vendors go above and beyond to promote awards and get engagement
2. Some vendors do the bare minimum to promote their awards
3. Some vendors do nothing at all

Obviously, companies who participate at the top of this list get the most engagement from their awards. This drives more interest in the market for their product, increases the brand halo effect, and ultimately fills their pipeline with more high-quality leads. 

This is why promoting your awards matters. The best practices below will help you get the most out of the awards you earn from TrustRadius. 

10 Best Practices for Promoting Your TrustRadius Awards

We’ve been running software awards at TrustRadius for a long time, so we know how it’s done. 

Here are the best practices we give our vendors every year:

1. Avoid Vanity Awards.

Don’t waste your money on pay-to-play vanity awards. The TrustRadius Top Rated distinction carries a lot of weight because buyers understand that this award has to be earned. TrustRadius is 100% neutral. We don’t use ads, paid leads, or paid placements for awards. Every award winner is verified with stringent fraud protection by our research team. Vanity awards flat out do not work, so don’t waste your resources on promoting them. You can save time for your entire marketing team by only promoting the awards that actually have to be earned. 

2. Prepare to Win.

Plan far enough ahead so you can win high-quality awards. It takes work to be Top Rated at TrustRadius, and you have to start driving reviews early in the year to qualify. Do your research early, find out what it takes to win, and get to work well ahead of your award deadlines. You don’t want to miss out on winning an award this year because you waited too long to do the work to qualify.

3. Plan to Promote.

Most awards programs allow extra time for vendors to prepare promotional materials ahead of the public award winning announcement. Use this time to your advantage. Get your team started on prepping press releases, social posts, and email campaigns, so that when the awards are officially announced, you can launch on the same day. This is especially important for companies whose direct competitors are also winning awards—you don’t want to be the last one to the promotion party.

4. Follow the Rules.

Awards programs are designed to be widely promoted. They’re usually pretty open-ended as far as what you can do with your own promotion plan. But most awards do include citation policies that you must adhere to or risk receiving a cease and desist request. For example, some awards programs stipulate that you can’t change the wording, shape, or color of the badge. Others may require you to refrain from mentioning competitors or other third parties in your promotional materials. Time-bound awards usually require you to not release the news early. Just follow the rules, ok?

5. Quality Over Quantity.

We’ve seen that winning a Top Rated Award from TrustRadius can mean a lot more than winning 18 category-based awards from G2 in a single quarter. Tech buyers see those awards side by side and can clearly see the quality vs quantity difference. Don’t flood your channels with meaningless awards. Awards lose their power when your audience grows desensitized and stops paying attention.

6. Use Your Resources.

Use the media assets provided to you by the award-giving company. They’ll usually provide press release templates, graphics, and social media assets that are already pre-made and delivered to you as part of the awards package. Using these resources will save time for whoever on your internal marketing team is in charge of promoting awards. 

7. Run a Press Release.

This is the bare minimum of what vendors do to promote their award wins. Press releases may be old fashioned, but they do serve a couple of key purposes. First, they provide an asset that you can link to everywhere you promote your award so that interested readers can learn more. They generate some level of SEO benefit for your brand. And they fill your website “News” page with relevant content that helps convert casual visitors into interested prospects. 

8. Put the Badge Everywhere.

High-quality awards lend credibility to your brand. If you win an award, make sure to put your winning graphic/badge at all touchpoints where customers interact with you. Carve out prominent space for the badge on the homepage of your website. Slip it into company-wide email signatures. Name the award in your social media profiles. Put the badge at the bottom of your marketing collateral, campaign banners, and case studies. Name the award in your company boilerplate text that you use for other press releases throughout the year. We’ve even seen vendors put their awards status on the bottom of job advertisements for new hires.

9. Enable Your Sales Team.

Awards are a great way to build trust with interested prospects. We’ve seen successful vendors include an awards badge in their sales decks alongside snippets from real customer reviews. These are visible signs of social proof—which can help inspire confidence at every stage of the sales process.

10. Promote on Social.

When you win an award, you should leverage your audience across all platforms. Twitter tends to be especially active for tech awards, so we usually encourage vendors to prioritize posting frequently there during awards season. As a bare minimum, companies will often post prepared social media assets to promote their award on announcement day. Others go above and beyond with creating new graphics, multi-post campaigns, and even short videos celebrating their award. Not surprisingly, videos tend to get the most engagement. The companies that get their employees involved in tweeting or retweeting about the awards also see more engagement than those that just post from official company channels.

Winning Examples of Award Promotion

Looking for inspiration? Here are some examples of awesome award promotion that we’ve seen for TrustRadius awards recently.  

Promoting Awards on Your Website

Companies like Mailchimp, TriNet, and Solarwinds place their award badges prominently above the fold on the homepage of their websites. This helps increase credibility and conversion.

Mailchimp:

TriNet:

SolarWinds:

Khoros included an awards section on their homepage as well, below the fold:

Promoting Awards With a Blog Post

Getting a new element designed into your homepage can be a big lift for some companies. Publishing a blog post is often a way easier option. Some companies choose to do both.

Check out these blog posts for examples of how to promote your awards: 

• ChurnZero
• BlackLine
• PureStorage
• Khoros

Promoting With Press Releases

This is the standard way for companies to promote their awards. Often, the award-giving platforms (like TrustRadius) provide you with a pre-written press release template that you can quickly cue up in your existing PR systems. 

Here are some examples of press releases:  

• TOPdesk
• BlackLine
• Mimecast

Promoting Awards on Social Media – Easy

The easiest way to promote your awards on social media is to use the templates provided by the award-giving platform. Here’s an example like this from SoGoSurvey during the 2021 Most Loved Awards:

Here is Scale Computing promoting their Best Customer Support Award:

Some companies go a step further and incorporate their awards badge into newly-designed graphics that fit their visual brand. Here are examples from Ascentis, and Kofax:  

Promoting Awards on Social Media – Advanced

We mentioned above that some companies see way higher engagement on social media through creating videos or other interactive assets. 

This video from MobileIron was easy to create and earned a lot of views on LinkedIn:

Cision made a similar short video to showcase their recent award win:

PureStorage earned a lot of cross-platform social interaction with this video:

And finally, Cisco generated thousands of views with this 15-second video: 

Promoting Awards in Your Product

Some companies go above and beyond with promoting their awards within their product. 

Zoom is one example. During a previous Top Rated Award season, they displayed their badge prominently on the screen that pops up at the end of every Zoom call: 

Getting Creative With Awards Promotion

When you win an award, you don’t have to do what everyone else is doing. Go against the grain. Do something creative! 

This is a great example from Prophix Software of using LinkedIn slides to promote their awards. They’re also actively driving people back to read their reviews on TrustRadius, to highlight the great reviews that earned them the award. 

Here’s one example of an email campaign sent by Matillion to promote their awards:

Nintex added the award badge to their widget:

Here is PandaDoc including the badge in some advertisements:

Finally, here’s an awards promotion slide taken from an Oracle sales deck:

Taking the Next Step With TrustRadius Awards

Our awards experts are ready to help you earn and promote awards this year. 

This service is FREE and open to all software companies—no paid partnership required. This is part of our promise to vendors. We’re committed to creating an equal-opportunity, no-bias customer voice platform, and awards are a big part of what helps buyers thrive. 

To help companies in all categories win awards, check out our Review Growth Kit. This free resource will help you drive more reviews and get in touch with the voice of your customers.

Need more help with your awards strategy? Let’s chat.