The HomeStars Best of Award season is an exciting time to recognize and celebrate our best-performing pros! Starting in 2009, these awards honour those pros who have exceeded the expectations of Canadian homeowners time after time. Based on the qualifying criteria, verified HomeStars pros are eligible to win three types of awards: Best of Newly Listed, Best of Award and Best of the Best Award. These awards don’t just recognize your hard work but also help build homeowner connections, trust and much more!
We want to help you make the most of this opportunity. Learn how to qualify for one of these awards and read on to find out how this accomplishment will enhance your reputation and learn all about the benefits a HomeStars Best of Award offers to its winners.
Build More Homeowner Connections For More Opportunities
More than 8 million homeowners visit HomeStars every year to hire trusted pros for their projects using trust metrics like Reviews, Verification Badge and Star Score. All these trust metrics are also the qualifying criteria for the annual HomeStars Best of Awards! An active Verification Badge, recent reviews and higher Star Score help you build a strong homeowner connection, win the award and ultimately win more service requests!
Build Homeowner Assurance
Any pro who is caught engaging in suspicious activity, fraud, or review tampering is automatically disqualified from winning a HomeStars award. This allows homeowners to rest easy knowing any winners they hire are a safe choice. In this way, victory of a HomeStars award eases the sales process. It assures homeowners that they can feel confident bringing you into their home and leaving their project in your hands.
Exclusive Invite To Our Awards Ceremony
HomeStars Best of Award winners receive an exclusive invite to our annual event to celebrate the success of their win. At our in-person event for the Best of Awards gala, you are sure to have an enjoyable evening, where you will get a chance to celebrate your victory, be a part of the award winning community of selected pros and have a party dedicated to your hardwork like never before! This is also a wonderful opportunity to network with other pros in the industry and meet your HomeStars team that sets you up for success every day!
Gain Credibility On Your HomeStars Profile
When you win a HomeStars Best of Award, we add that shiny badge of honour on your profile, right next to your Star Score. So when a project-ready homeowner visits your profile, they see this badge and are inclined to hire you with immense trust compared to your competitors who may not have won this honour! With this badge on your profile, you can proudly showcase to homeowners that you are a trusted and reputable company.
Be Featured in HomeStars Content
At HomeStars, we are always on the lookout for pros we can spotlight on our homeowner blog, our Here at Home magazine, and on social media. Best of Award winners often get first crack at these opportunities. Spotlights like these will drive more traffic to your HomeStars listing and your website, and supply you with high-quality content you can share and re-purpose to round out your digital presence and impress homeowners.
Get More Visibility On Your HomeStars Profile
In our survey with pros, 93% said that winning the award got them more recognition and visibility online. When homeowners visit HomeStars looking for credible pros in their neighbourhood, we provide them with a ‘sort option’ to easily filter through a list of available pros. Here, homeowners opt to use the filter ‘Best of HomeStars’ to choose the award-winning pro. If you are a HomeStars Best of Award winner, your profile will get more visibility in homeowner search.
Get On the Winner’s List
When you win a HomeStars Best of Award, your company name is put on a special winner’s list which is shared in our vast network of project-ready homeowners. These ready-to-hire homeowners filter through this list and hire the award-winning pro in their neighbourhood. In our homeowner survey, we found that 75% of homeowners preferred to hire a Best of Award winner for their jobs. If you qualify and win the award, you can earn a spot on the winner’s list and this will highly improve your chances of being hired by project-ready homeowners.
Receive A Swag Package From HomeStars
At HomeStars, we love to celebrate the wins of our pros like you. All our Best of Award-winning pros will receive a special swag package to celebrate their outstanding achievement. This package will have a shiny digital certificate of achievement, vehicle decals, HomeStars branded stationary and much more!!! You can leverage the goodies from this swag package to tell the whole world about your success and credible achievements.
Provide Instant Credibility
HomeStars’ awards signify excellence. They indicate to homeowners that, although you may be a stranger they contacted online, you’re a trustworthy pro with a Verified badge, a healthy Star Score, and authentic homeowner reviews. It cuts out all the guesswork involved in hiring, and reduces the barriers between someone coming across your company online and contacting you to learn more.
Showcase Digital Certificate & Badges On Your HomeStars Profile
When you win a HomeStars Best of Award, we will send you a digital copy of your certificate. You can upload this digital certificate on your HomeStars profile, your social media channels and even on your website to spread the word. We will also send you digital badges of your award that you can proudly display on your company website.
Stand Out From The Competition
Contrary to popular opinion, not all HomeStars pros win a Best of Award. Only 2.5% of service professionals won a HomeStars Best of Awards in 2022. The award has given them exclusive status and helped them stand apart from their competitors. Award winners are preferred by a whopping 75% of project-ready Canadian homeowners for home renovation and repair projects. Homeowners looking to hire for home improvement projects have dozens of options at their fingertips. Even if the quality of your work is superior to your competitors, it’s hard to demonstrate this to someone who is scrolling quickly past businesses on a screen. It’s important to stand out from the pack in any way you can. Winning one of HomeStars coveted awards is one of the most effective ways to do so. When homeowners see an award badge on your listing (or other marketing materials) it lets them know instantly that you’re a top performing pro in your field. So if you want to be the winner as well, make sure you fit the qualifying criteria for each year!
Use The Best Of Award As A Marketing Tool
As mentioned earlier, you can use the digital copy of your winning certificate and badges on your website and social media. But did you know that you can leverage the Best of Award win as an organic marketing tool as well? You can put the decals on your business vehicle, lawn signs, business cards, brochures, physical adverts in local newspapers and much more! All the winner will also receive a marketing toolkit with all the digital assets needed to share their win on social media or website which also includes a press release. Even a small placement of the award badge online or offline can help you score a big opportunity!
Widen Your Word-Of-Mouth Network
In our latest survey with homeowners, 68% of homeowners said that reading reviews before hiring were extremely important to them. At HomeStars, we have taken the word-of-mouth model to a digital scale by creating a vetted review platform where homeowners benefit from connecting with community-reviewed pros. To qualify for the Best of Awards, you need a specific number of recently approved reviews, depending on your category. The more recent and relevant reviews you have, the higher your chances of winning an award. This also helps to get more eyeballs on your profile and creates favourable hiring conditions for project-ready homeowners.
Now that you know all about the benefits of winning the Best of Award, you might be interested in knowing more about how to win one! Good news – we have got you covered. If you are in your first year with HomeStars, you can still qualify for the Best of Newly Listed Award. For the pros who have been with us for over a year, you can check out the qualifying criteria for winning the Best of Award, here. For the pros, who have proved their hardwork year after year by winning 3 or more Best of Awards in a row, it’s time to qualify for the Best of the Best Award! If you have any questions, you can reach out to your dedicated account manager for answers.
Make Sure You Qualify
Now that you know how much a HomeStars award can improve your reputation and all the benefits they offer, chances are you’re wondering how you can guarantee victory. Thankfully, qualifying for one of these awards is a lot easier than you think. Take the first step towards ensuring you qualify by logging in to request a review today!
