Best Of Promotions: How Voting Works & How to Win

What Best Of Promotions is and who runs it

Most Maryland best-of ballots on this site are run by newspapers and magazines in Baltimore, Annapolis or Frederick. Best Of Promotions is the odd shape in the set: it is the business-facing promotion page for the Best of Ocean City® poll, run by OceanCity.com, and the organizer keeps the entire ballot under its own domain instead of handing the vote to a third-party platform. A supporter who votes here is on oceancity.com from start to finish.

The market is Ocean City, Maryland, a resort town whose award program reaches both year-round locals and the seasonal visitor base. The organizer frames the contest in strong terms: its advertising page calls the Best of Ocean City® contest "the only real contest based entirely on customer voting", and the promotions page itself bills the poll as the longest running, most prestigious award of its kind in the market.

The scale of the 2026 cycle is the concrete figure behind that framing. OceanCity.com reported more than 100,000 votes for the 2026 contest, its strongest year by its own account, spread over a wide slate of business categories. That makes this the largest confirmed vote total attached to any Maryland best-of ballot covered here. The promotion page carries the call to action "Promote Your Business for The Best of Ocean City® 2026", addressed to businesses rather than to voters.

The dated record for this ballot

Confirmed editions of this program cover 2025 and 2026, and OceanCity.com's FAQ describes the Best of Ocean City® contest as annual, so the cycle is recurring rather than a single event. The confirmed voting window for the 2026 contest runs from May 23, 2025 through April 2026. That is a full-year ballot: the organizer's timing note says the contest runs from May 1 through the end of April each year, which gives supporters and businesses close to a whole year per cycle instead of the few-week windows typical of newspaper readers' choice polls.

The exact closing day inside April 2026 is not printed on the promotions page, and no per-supporter vote limit, daily voting rule or eligibility terms appear anywhere on that page; confirm on the live ballot each cycle. Those gaps matter more here than on a short ballot, because a window this long gives a business a long stretch in which the rules governing repeat support apply.

What the page does fix is the shape of the cycle. A late-May opening, an end-of-April close and an annual rhythm mean the 2027 cycle, if it follows the published pattern, would open in late May 2026. The promotions page is where OceanCity.com announces each new cycle, so that page is the place a business or supporter should watch for the next window's dates.

How a supporter votes today

Voting here is a straightforward public ballot that never leaves oceancity.com. A supporter opens the promotions page, moves through the categories on offer for the current cycle, picks the Ocean City business to support and submits the choice on the page. There is no outside balloting platform in the path, no redirect to a poll provider, and no nomination round to clear before voting, since the organizer describes the contest as decided purely by customer votes.

Because the vote sits on the same domain that publishes the promotion, the supporter's experience is controlled entirely by the organizer rather than by a platform's standard template. The promotions page does not state whether an email address, an account or any other identification is required before a vote is accepted, so a supporter should simply follow whatever the live form asks at submission time.

For a business, the promotion page is the entry point in the other direction: it invites Ocean City businesses to promote their participation in the Best of Ocean City® poll and to point their customers at the ballot. The practical play for supporters is straightforward given the calendar. With a window running from late May through the end of April, there is no deadline crunch, so a business can ask customers at the register, in email newsletters and on social channels across many months instead of compressing every request into a final week.

How this ballot sits beside its Maryland neighbours

Every other Maryland best-of ballot on this site belongs to a media outlet in a city market. Best of Baltimore from Baltimore Magazine, the Baltimore Style Readers' Choice, the Baltimore Sun's Best and the Baltimore's Child Readers' Choice Awards all serve the Baltimore metro area, while Best of Annapolis and Best of Frederick cover their own cities under separate publishers.

Best Of Promotions differs from all of them on three axes. The market is a coastal resort town rather than a city, so the voter pool mixes residents with a large seasonal visitor base. The vote is kept on OceanCity.com's own web property, where the Baltimore and Annapolis programs run on their respective contest infrastructure. And the calendar is a full year from May through April, where readers' choice polls typically compress voting into a season.

The reported scale also stands out. The organizer's figure of more than 100,000 votes for the 2026 contest is a bigger confirmed total than the sibling pages carry, which fits a program that draws on a whole resort market rather than a single publication's subscriber list. A business weighing which Maryland ballot to pursue should treat this one as the Ocean City option and the others as city and regional options, since each one answers to a different publisher and none shares a ballot with this program.

Strengthening support in this contest

Winning support here means moving customers to a single destination: the promotions page on oceancity.com, where the vote for the current cycle actually happens. Because the ballot is kept under the publisher's own roof, a business can link straight to the page in email signatures, receipts and social posts without worrying about a platform's round structure, and the May-through-April calendar means those asks can be spread across the whole year rather than stacked into a closing week.

On outside help, the organizer's position is the open question. The promotions page prints no rules text on purchased or automated votes, so a business that wants to stay clearly inside the program's intent should keep its push anchored in genuine customer outreach and treat any third-party support cautiously. The tactics that stand on their own regardless of the organizer's unpublished rules, from staff reminders to customer follow-ups, are collected in our votes guide.