Lowcountry's Best: How Voting Works & How to Win

233,000 votes, 1,400 businesses, one 39% jump

That's the 2025 number. Lowcountry's Best pulled 233,000+ votes from 1,400+ competing businesses, a 39% increase over the year before. Whatever a business assumed about its category's competitiveness from an older cycle, that assumption is probably stale now.

The ballot runs through votelowcountry.com, and it's split into two stages: a nomination round first, then public voting on whichever names cleared that first filter. Island Packet & Beaufort Gazette, part of the Post & Courier network, organizes it and publishes results in a special section rather than a routine web post.

A 39% jump across 198 categories doesn't land evenly. Food and home-services categories, the ones most consumer-facing outlets lean on, likely absorbed a bigger share of that growth than a narrow professional-services niche did. There's no published category-level breakdown to confirm the split, so treat the 39% as a program-wide figure, not a guarantee for any single race. See the South Carolina contest hub for how this compares to other South Carolina programs.

198 categories means 198 separate races, not one popularity contest

Healthcare. Food. Home. Professional services. Pets. Those are a sample of the ballot's scope, not the full list, because 198 categories covers ground most single-market readers-choice polls don't attempt.

Wrong category, wasted nomination round

A veterinary clinic that also boards animals could plausibly sit under a pet-services label or a broader home-and-lifestyle grouping, depending on how the current ballot organizes it. Guessing wrong doesn't cost a few votes; it can cost the entire nomination round, since supporters who search for the business under one label won't find it filed under another.

For the general mechanics behind any award-style vote push, see award-style vote campaigns, and for a category built around annual business recognition specifically, best business of the year voting covers similar ground to how Lowcountry's Best structures its own recognition. A restaurant weighing whether to chase the food category alongside a local best-of poll can also read the restaurant vote campaign guide.

Nominate first. Vote later. Skip the first step and there's nothing to vote for

Two stages, not one. votelowcountry.com opens with nominations; only the businesses that clear that round appear on the public ballot afterward. A business waiting for "voting day" without having nominated itself first has already missed the part of the cycle that actually determines who's eligible.

A business used to single-stage polls, cast a vote and wait, may treat the nomination round as a formality. It isn't. If the ballot doesn't carry your name into the voting stage, there's no vote button to point supporters to later, no matter how large the customer list. Automated nomination pushes or fake accounts carry real risk too; see is buying votes legal for the standard that applies to any readers-choice ballot, not just this one.

A Hilton Head hospitality business runs a different playbook than a Beaufort professional-services firm

Lowcountry's Best groups its ballot by category, not by town, so a Hilton Head Island restaurant and a Bluffton restaurant can land on the same food-category race, while a Beaufort accountant and a Port Royal pet groomer never compete at all.

A visitor economy town like Hilton Head Island draws a different nomination base than an inland professional-services market like Beaufort. Messaging that leans on tourist-season timing works for one and falls flat for the other, since a year-round resident isn't nominating a business based on a visitor's schedule. Businesses that also chase consumer-facing recognition further inland can compare notes with Best of North Carolina, which runs a similar nominate-then-vote structure across a state-scale ballot instead of a county-scale one.

No archived Lowcountry's Best winners list exists. Cite the published section, not a guess

There's no confirmed public dataset of Lowcountry's Best winners across past cycles beyond what the Island Packet & Beaufort Gazette special section itself publishes for a given year. Old screenshots and reseller recap pages circulate numbers that may not hold up once the actual section is checked.

Verifying a competitor's claim? Record the year, the specific category out of the 198 on the ballot, and the exact placement as printed in that year's special section, nothing looser. A pet groomer citing a win in the wrong adjacent category, or a business skipping the category name entirely, is a claim the publisher's own section won't back up. Promoting a real placement of your own carries the same rule in reverse: name the year and the category, since that's what separates a Lowcountry's Best result from a generic local-favorite banner. For how repeat voting fits into that same nominate-then-vote structure, see running a legitimate vote campaign, and how online contest votes work covers the general mechanics this two-stage ballot builds on.