SO Marketing Nominated for 7 RAR Awards

That’s right, it’s time for us to break out those “special occasion” shoes once again, because the SO Marketing team are going to be returning to London this April, after having received nominations for an astounding seven awards…

We’re happy to announce that we’ve been shortlisted for the following seven categories:

• Design
• Strategic Thinking
• Client Service
• Creativity/Innovation
• Effectiveness
• Value for Money
• On Budget

But what is a RAR award?
For those of you that don’t know already, RAR stands for the ‘Recommended Agency Register’, and if you work in the fields of design or marketing, a nod from them is a huge deal for your business. For those of us (like me) that spend our days holed up in the office, meticulously pouring over an e-commerce website or promotional leaflet, the RAR awards are the closest we’ll get to realising that inner dream everyone has of one day living the rock star lifestyle; they’re basically the BRITs for design agencies, but with considerably less controversy every year.

For us, however, RAR awards are ultimately so important because they’re decided by our clients’ opinions of our services; they’re a true measure of our commitment as an agency to continually providing a great service. Here at SO we see customer satisfaction as a method of marketing; we’ve gained a lot of returning business by forging healthy, long lasting relationships with our clients, and we like to think our RAR nominations reflect and quantify this.

What does this mean for our clients?
Regardless of whether or not we win these awards, we hope that our nominations alone stand as a testament to our clients (both current and prospective) that our team will always go the extra mile to deliver brand and marketing solutions that exceed your expectations without exceeding your budget. As a creative agency, we’ve grown on the back of our local connections with smaller businesses, so ranking highly in categories such as ‘On Budget’, ‘Client Service’ and ‘Value for Money’ really means a lot to us personally. It’s also great to feature in the shortlist for awards such as ‘Creativity/Innovation’ and ‘Design’ because we’ve always tried to be a little different with our ideas, and it’s great to get some recognition of that.

There’s no ‘I’ in SO Marketing! Well, actually…
As well as thanking our clients for taking the time to submit their opinions, we’d also like to take a moment to give the individual members that make up our agency a well-deserved pat on the back. Projects really are a team effort here at SO, which is why we believe they’re so engaging and successful. We’re not going to publicly embarrass everyone on here (the ‘About Us’ page does enough of that already) but we’ve all read the RAR report, and whether you’re “like a blood hungry shark” when it comes to sales, or simply just “very professional and efficient” we want you to know we heavily value your input and commitment.

Giving us a boost
As we move into our new office in April, these award nominations really have re-invigorated the SO Marketing team, making us more passionate than ever about what we do, and the level of service we strive to provide. We’d really like to stress how grateful we are to all of our clients for the time they spent filling out the survey; your appreciation for our services is truly heart-warming, but it’s also useful to identify areas in which we could improve. Even if we don’t win these awards (which obviously, we really hope we do), it’s a great honour just to be nominated, so thanks again to our clients and team for getting us there.

Oh and by the way, I’ve bought a cape with a Velcro fastening, so hopefully there won’t be any falls at this awards ceremony…