B2B Marketing Awards 2017 – Best Use of Social Media & Best Use of PR

PowWowNow > PowwowNews > B2B Marketing Awards 2017 – Winners of Best Use of Social Media and Best Use of PR

Christmas came early for Powwownow this year, in the form of the B2B Marketing Awards! Shortlisted for Best Use of PR and Best Use of Social Media, we swept up both awards and won it for both categories! Up against some huge clients and agencies like Fujitsu, Lloyd’s, Hewlett Packard, Cisco and Oracle, we knew that the competition was tough. However getting cut through and bringing home the win for our business (in both categories) was a huge triumph, particularly when you have only a fraction of your competition’s commercial firepower.

So what did we win these awards for? What were the campaigns and what made them stand out?

Here’s a bit about our winning award entries for the B2B Marketing Awards:

Public Relations Campaign: The Smarter Working Initiative

Originally launching the Smarter Working Initiative in 2016, we created the official day to raise awareness about the changing reality of the workplace. Employees demand a more flexible approach to work and businesses need to not only recognise that, but empower employees to do so as well. There are major benefits in more flexible, smarter ways of working (for both the employer and employee) so the Smarter Working Initiative got employers to sign their business up to work flexibly on the first day of the school summer holidays, thus getting businesses and employees to experience it first hand.

…and did we see results.

The Smarter Working Initiative gained more than 30 pieces of coverage with a reach of over 17 million across national, consumer, regional and trade media, and over 4 million on social media, not to mention that 120 businesses signed up amounting to over 100,000 UK employees working flexibly on that day. We also managed to get broadcast coverage on BBC ‘Business Live’, Sky News, LondonLive, talkRadio and Share Radio discussing topics including business efficiency and the rise of technology to facilitate flexible working.

Not only did the initiative reach a far wider audience than we could have ever imagined, but it positively changed the negative assumptions about flexible working and it’s effect on productivity. After the initiative, 78% of business owners who didn’t offer flexible working to their employees before, said they will from that year onwards – being a tangible change in attitudes towards smarter working.

Click here to find out a bit more about the Smarter Working Initiative or to read more about our entry for Best Use of PR for the B2B Marketing Awards.

Social Media: Powwownow’s Campaign Led, Audience Centred Focus


As for social media, we did things a little differently. Rather than entering the B2B Marketing Awards for one specific campaign, we entered the award for our overall strategy. This being our campaign led, audience centred focus for the year.

As a business, our core ethos is to promote smarter working. And as you can imagine, conference calling isn’t the most topical conversation on social media. It’s a typically dry subject that doesn’t lend itself well to everyday conversation – and that goes for the whole telecommunications industry.  To challenge that, we came up with a campaign led but audience centred strategy. But what does that even mean you ask?

We used our advertising campaign to set the overarching theme for the year but because our audience is at the heart of everything we do, we kept an audience centred approach for the series of campaigns that we launched:

The #FlexibleWorkWin campaign

Easter – a time when flexibility is crucial – we encouraged employees to tell us what the best part of flexible working was for them, hence the #FlexibleWorkingWin campaign. In workers doing so, it got our audience to become advocates of our ‘Here’s to Flexible Working’ advertising campaign whilst keeping them at the centre of it all. So from snacks, to spending time with loved ones instead of their commute, to going to the gym, through to getting work done without the distractions and stress of travel, it helped to challenge the negative assumptions about flexible working and productivity.

The Smarter Working Initiative #Flexie competition

Launching the Smarter Working Initiative to change business perspectives, we encouraged employers to let their employees work flexible for the first day of the school summer holidays. In doing so, managers and employees could experience first hand, how more flexible, smarter ways of working can benefit individuals and the business itself.

We ran the #Flexie competition on social media to further promote the initiative and produce image-based content from our audience by getting them to post a selfie of them flexible working. And by visualising the day, it helped create noise around the day itself as well as the lead up to it.

The #WorkWish 

At Powwownow, we love being festive so to get us into the spirit we had to do a Christmas campaign. We realised that when people come up with their wishlist for Christmas, it’s only ever for their person life, which leaves a big gap – their work life. As a result, we came up with the #WorkWish campaign where we asked our audience to tell us what their work wish was in the lead up to Christmas and you can bet that we delivered.

And the overall results? We saw a significant increase in our reach (162%), engagement (2083%), followers (154%), click-throughs (248%) and traffic to our website via social (350%), which proved how having a consistent overarching strategy for social media throughout the year whilst staying true to our business with having our customers at the heart of everything we do can create some impressive results.

Fancy reading more about our social media entry for the B2B Marketing Awards? You can find it here.