After nearly a decade of running awards at TrustRadius, there have always been three distinct levels of vendor promotion:

1. Going above and beyond to promote awards and get engagement
2. Doing the bare minimum to promote awards
3. Doing nothing at all

What not all vendors understand is that promoting awards matters—companies who do a good job promoting get the most return from their awards. Doing so drives more awareness in the market for the product, increases brand trust, and ultimately fills the pipeline with more high-quality leads. 

To help you get the most out of the awards you earn from TrustRadius, we’ve created an official guide filled with best practices and real-world examples. Let’s go!

10 best practices for earning and promoting your TrustRadius awards

TrustRadius awards carry weight because they have to be earned. We do not allow ads or paid placements to give products on TrustRadius a leg up on winning awards—there is no pay-to-play here. Plus, every award winner is verified through stringent fraud protection by our research team. 

This means TrustRadius awards are hard-earned through customer feedback, and worth celebrating. 

Here are some best practices for promoting your hard-earned awards:

1. Prepare to win 

Plan far enough ahead so you can win our highly-sought after awards. You can find out what it takes to win well ahead of the deadlines by checking out our awards page, or finding personalized tracking of your progress in your vendor portal. It takes work to drive the required number of reviews to win each award, so keep an eye on your progress and reach out to your CSM if you need help.

2. Prepare to promote 

All of our awards have time baked in for you to prepare promotional materials ahead of our public winners announcement—and every award comes with a media kit to make promotion efforts easy peasy. Once you’ve been notified that you are a winner, either via email or in the vendor portal, you can use the media kit (more on that below) to prep your press release, social posts, and email campaigns in advance. That way, when we make the official announcement, you can launch your announcement, too. This is especially important if you have direct competitors who are also winning (nobody wants to be the last one to the party).

3. Use the media kit 

As mentioned above, each award has an accompanying media kit. Not every media kit includes the same assets, but there are usually a variety of things to get you started—a customizable video, graphics, press release, emails, and more. Use these resources to save your marketing team time and make promotion easy.

4. Issue a press release 

Press releases serve a couple of key purposes. They provide an asset that you can link to everywhere you promote your award so that interested readers can learn more. They also generate SEO for your brand as the news spreads online. And, they fill your website’s News page with relevant content that helps convert casual visitors into interested prospects. We create a press release announcing each award, and here are examples from Reltio and Watchguard announcing their wins.

5. Put. The. Badge. Everywhere. 

Our hard-earned awards lend credibility to your brand, and increased visibility on TrustRadius. When you win, make sure to add the award badge to all customer touchpoints—your website’s homepage, company-wide email signatures, social media banners, job boards, and even your company boilerplate. Take MIP Fund Accounting for example—they leveraged TrustRadius awards badges on creative and saw a 27% increase in CTR from buyers within their intent data.

6. Enable your sales team 

Awards are a great way to build trust with prospects. We’ve seen successful vendors include an awards badge in their sales deck alongside snippets from real customer reviews. And some vendors are using them in email signatures, like this one from Bloomreach. They’re all visible signs of social proof that can help inspire confidence at every stage of the sales process. 

7. Promote on social. 

As a bare minimum, companies should share one social media post on or around announcement day. For better ROI on your hard work, create multi-post campaigns; share your own creative, on-brand graphics; or share short, celebratory videos. (Not surprisingly, videos tend to get the most engagement—so do companies that get their employees involved in sharing the news).

8. Use in your advertising campaigns

Much like MIP Fund Accounting did, vendors who put their winning badge on advertising campaigns see an increase in conversion rate. Avaya saw an 83% increase in CTR on paid ads on LinkedIn and Facebook that leveraged social proof from the badge—and their product profile page views increased 100% within 12 months. LogicMonitor increased CTR by 14x, and gained multiple conversions in just a few weeks from buyers researching them and their competitors.

Winning Examples of Award Promotion

Top Rated

Customized videos

Original video

Awareness – Top Rated

Customer quote + Top Rated badge

Multiple Awards

Taking the next step with TrustRadius awards

Our awards experts are ready to help you earn and promote your TrustRadius awards. 

This service is FREE and open to all software companies—no paid partnership required. As a part of our promise to vendors, we’re committed to creating an equal-opportunity, no-bias customer voice platform, and our awards program is included in that. 

If you need to brush up on requirements for our different awards, visit our awards page. For tips and strategies on sourcing reviews, check out our Review Growth Kit.

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