Best of the Lakes Region: How Voting Works & How to Win

306,000 votes, four towns, and a ballot most people have never heard of

Laconia, Meredith, Gilford, Tilton. That's the entire footprint of Best of the Lakes Region, and in 2025 it pulled more than 306,000 votes. For a four-town market, that number does a lot of the explaining on its own.

Laconia Daily Sun runs it, now in its 7th edition, and structures it around 194 categories, wide enough that 1,300-plus businesses got nominated in that single cycle. Most regional readers-choice ballots covering a market this size run a fraction of that category count.

New Hampshire Magazine's statewide Best of NH ballot also has a Lakes Region slot buried inside its eight-region structure. That's a different organizer entirely, a different ballot, a different results page. Best of the Lakes Region is Laconia Daily Sun's own program, built for this market specifically rather than folded into a statewide list. See the New Hampshire contest hub for how the state's various readers-choice ballots relate to each other.

Two finalists, not a crowded field, once nomination closes

Nominate first. That's the part a business new to this ballot tends to skip past. Laconia Daily Sun opens a nomination window across all 194 categories, and only after that closes does the field narrow, sharply, to the top two finalists per category.

What that cut actually changes

A crowded open-list vote and a two-finalist head-to-head reward different things. Reaching finalist status in a 194-category ballot with 1,300-plus nominees already means beating every other nominee but one. That's worth stating precisely rather than folding it into a vague "nominated" claim once results are live.

For the mechanics of running a campaign around any award-style vote structured this way, see award-style vote campaigns, and for a category built specifically around annual local recognition, best business of the year voting covers ground that overlaps with how a nominate-then-vote ballot like this one runs.

Why the towns matter more than the category list

Laconia carries the year-round commercial base, restaurants, retail, professional services, the kind of businesses that see foot traffic in January as much as July. Meredith and Gilford lean harder into the lake itself, marinas, seasonal dining, lodging tied to summer visitors. Tilton sits a bit apart, more of a crossroads town, its business mix skews toward services that draw from all three neighbors.

That split matters for outreach. A Gilford marina and a Laconia law office aren't competing for the same customer's attention even inside the same 194-category ballot, and a message built for one won't land with the other. A business that also competes in a wider statewide pool can compare notes with how a larger program handles this same problem in the restaurant vote campaign guide, useful for any Lakes Region business juggling both a local and a statewide ballot in the same season. Sponsors already reminding Laconia-area families about a Friday-night vote will recognize the rhythm from the New Hampshire High School Athlete of the Week ballot, just running on a business calendar instead of a weekly one.

Three stages, three different claims a Lakes Region business can actually make

A nominate-then-vote structure with a top-two cut creates three distinct moments, and each one supports a different claim. During nomination, a business can say it's nominated, nothing more, since the field hasn't narrowed yet. Once Laconia Daily Sun sets the top two per category, "finalist" becomes accurate, and given 1,300-plus nominees across 194 categories, that status already means beating every other nominee in the category but one competitor. Only after that year's Issuu edition from NERUS Strategies goes live does "winner" or confirmed "finalist" become the fact of record.

Skipping straight to "voted best in the Lakes Region" without naming the year and category overstates whichever of those three stages a business is actually in, especially in a four-town market where a customer can check the claim against bestofthelakesregion.com in under a minute. Tie the language to the stage: "nominated" pre-cut, "finalist" post-cut, "Best of the Lakes Region 2025, [category], finalist" or "winner" only once that cycle's Issuu edition confirms it. See how legitimate vote campaigns are run for the standard behind promoting any nominate-then-vote ballot, and how online contest votes work for the general mechanics this program builds on.