City of Sydney Business Awards
The City of Sydney connected with CP Communications to engage with the Sydney’s centrally located business community to recognise, reward and celebrate the local business achievements through the City of Sydney Business Awards. Additionally CP Communications were involved in encouraging the same community to attend a series of seminars designed to provide tactical advice, resources and networking opportunities for SMEs within the City of Sydney.
We developed a strategic PR strategy which focused on raising the profile of the awards and the seminars as well as engaging with target audiences with the aim of encouraging them to enter their business in the awards and attend the seminars.
Through this project we also hoped to display the City of Sydney as a council that is supportive of their business community and appreciative of their contributions to the local government area.
The Seminars
CPC developed a strategic strategy to build awareness of the Let’s Talk Business Seminars as a City of Sydney initiative as well as increasing the number of attendees at each seminar. CPC developed a media pitch including key information about the events as well as an invitation to attend. This resulted in significant media coverage in a range of different business publications.
In addition to media pitching, we provided each speaker involved with information about the event and encouraged them to distribute this via their networks. We also made use of business listing sites and had information posted on these sites encouraging Sydney business people to attend.
CPC reached our target of increasing attendees to each of the seminars from 80 to 120.
The Awards
The launch
To kick off the project we developed an initial media release to engage the attention of the media from our researched target publications including, local media, business publications, ethnic media and online sites. This release included information about the awards including the new categories for the year, interesting local business statistics and an invitation to attend a launch event.
A large number of media attended the launch event which achieved some great media coverage. But more significant was the amount of media coverage achieved from the initial media release helping to increase the number of entrants and public votes from previous years.
Media pitching
Within the awards there were over 20 different categories businesses were eligible to enter. CPC devised a strategy whereby we developed a number of interesting media angles aligned with a number of the key categories within the awards. These were then pitched into key vertical publications that helped us to deliver more targeted messages to businesses within each category.
Key announcements
CPC used media releases as the main strategy to make important announcements to the media. The first of these was the announcement of finalists which was sent out to all target publications. As an addition to the media release, we informed the journalists that the winners would be announced at a Gala Dinner and invited key journalists to attend.
We developed an embargoed media release including the details of the winners of each of the categories and distributed to media ahead of time ready for the media the next day.
On the night of the Gala Dinner, CPC managed the media in attendance arranging interviews with category finalists as well as a number of live radio interviews on the night.
Results
As a result of our PR efforts CPC helped increase entries to the awards to more than 520, a significant increase from previous years. More than twice as many members of the public from previous years nominated businesses and there was an increase of over 20 percent of votes.
CPC achieved more than $925,000 worth of coverage reaching out to over six million people when combining each single piece of coverage. This included a weekly story for the duration of the awards in the local publication, Central Magazine as well as coverage in the major metropolitan publications including mX and The Wentworth Courier, major dailies including the Sydney Morning Herald and the AFR, major business publications including Dynamic Business and Nett Magazine, ethnic publications, selected vertical publications and local radio stations.