Memphis Flyer Best of Memphis: How Voting Works & How to Win

A yoga studio and a jazz club can both win, and never once compete

Six groupings. That's the detail most first-time entrants miss about Best of Memphis. Arts & Entertainment, Food & Drinks, Goods, Services, Wellness, Nightlife, each one a separate lane on the same ballot at bom25.memphisflyer.com. A hair salon nominated under Wellness never touches a bar nominated under Nightlife, no matter how the two businesses might compare in foot traffic or Instagram followers.

That structure matters more than it sounds. Treat the whole thing as one contest and a campaign wastes effort courting the wrong audience. Treat it as six separate contests running under one banner, which is what it actually is, and the messaging gets sharper fast.

What's confirmed, and what isn't yet

Memphis Flyer hasn't published a running vote count for this program, so there's no way to say how contested any single category runs in a given year. What is confirmed: open nominations feed a public vote, the ballot spans more than 100 categories, and results land in September. That's the honest floor to build a campaign on.

For the mechanics behind any nominate-then-vote award structure like this one, see award-style vote campaigns. Memphis Flyer's own Tennessee contest hub lists the state's other readers' polls for comparison.

Nomination first, voting second, no shortcut between them

Nothing shows up on the public ballot until Memphis Flyer runs its nomination round. Readers write in businesses and venues; the paper narrows each category down to finalists before opening the vote. Skip the nomination stage and August or September rolls around with no name to click for.

This trips up businesses used to single-stage local polls, the kind where a vote link goes live and that's the entire mechanic. This one isn't that. A business gathering write-in nominations all spring can still miss the finalist ballot if a competitor in the same category draws heavier nomination volume during that same window.

So plan for two separate asks, not one. The nomination message and the voting message are different requests to the same audience, and conflating them into a single generic "support us" post tends to underperform both. See how legitimate vote outreach works for where reminding real supporters ends and where risk starts.

Reading the six groups like an actual campaign plan

Arts & Entertainment. Food & Drinks. Goods. Services. Wellness. Nightlife. Each pulls a different Memphis Flyer reader, and a restaurant chasing a Food & Drinks nomination needs a different reminder than a chiropractor chasing Wellness.

A Beale Street venue chasing Nightlife shouldn't reuse the same message a Cooper-Young boutique sends for Goods. Neither audience overlaps enough to make one post do both jobs. A founder-led business, where the owner's own visibility drives trust locally, may also find the personal-brand vote outreach guide useful for tying a named principal to the ballot reminder.

Plan backward from September, because there's no leaderboard telling you when to push

No live vote count exists during the open window. That single fact should reshape how a Memphis business staffs its campaign, because there's no way to check a lead and ease off. The only visible finish line is the September issue itself.

A restaurant or retailer used to a single-day local poll can badly underestimate how long this actually runs. It isn't a one-week push. The restaurant vote campaign guide covers reminder cadence across a comparable nominate-then-vote calendar, useful if a business is running this alongside another regional program in the same year.

Germantown, Collierville, and the suburbs share the ballot, not the audience

Memphis anchors Best of Memphis, but Germantown, Collierville, Bartlett, and Cordova businesses land in the exact same nomination pool as Midtown and Downtown ones. Category decides the competition, not zip code. A Germantown boutique nominated under Goods can end up on the identical ballot as a Cooper-Young shop three category groups away from touching a Collierville dentist under Services.

That's wider reach than most single-suburb readers' polls offer, and it cuts both ways. A smaller East Memphis business gets access to the full metro readership Memphis Flyer carries; it also means the pool of potential nominees within any one category can run deep. Businesses weighing a similar wide-scope alt-weekly ballot elsewhere can compare notes with Best of Nashville, which runs its own six-group version of this structure at a comparable scale, or check how Tennessee's statewide high school programs frame the Memphis market through Tennessee High School Player of the Year, which has featured Memphis-area nominees on its own ballot.

What Memphis Flyer hasn't published, and why that matters for claims

No public archive of every past category winner exists across all six groupings, and no running vote count publishes during the open window. That's not a gap in this guide, it's a fact about the program itself. An old screenshot, a reseller's claim, or a prior year's category name can misrepresent what's actually live right now.

Checking a competitor's claim on a ballot this wide means matching three things: the cycle year, the grouping, and the exact category name inside it, since the same business can be nominated in more than one place. Before the September issue prints, "nominated" and "vote for us" are the only honest verbs a Memphis business can use. Overstating a result the Flyer hasn't confirmed risks more than a single award cycle for a business that depends on its local reputation. See how online contest votes work for the general mechanics this two-stage ballot builds on, and is buying votes legal for where organizer rules and promotion tactics can conflict.