The Value of Awards

I encourage my clients to enter awards. Yes, it takes time to get the application in, but the rewards can be tremendous.

Many of you will know that my wife, Linda, and I have a sweet chestnut farm. This year we entered the Global Agritourism Awards. Farms in the sector entered from around the work. The first stage was the enters were reduced to a group of 30 and then the five international judges voted on the top ten agri-tourism destinations in their opinion. The ten winners came from USA, India, Taiwan, Albania and two from Australia. Chestnut Brae being one of the two winners from Australia.

This allowed us to develop a marketing campaign. To date we have had an article in the State newspaper, two radio sessions on national radio and a session on the National news. Other promotional campaigns have included a mention in the tourism newsletters of a number of organisations. This would have cost the
business thousands of dollars in paid advertising. Something we could not justify. Our actual cost, apart from our time has been zero dollars.
I agree we may not have won recognition and then the argument could have been a wasted time, but if you win the dollar return is enormous.

If you are not entering awards as a small business, I would encourage you to do so. You never know where it will take you.