Best of Marathon County Community's Choice Awards: How Voting Works & How to Win

What the Best of Marathon County Community's Choice Awards is and who runs it

The Best of Marathon County Community's Choice Awards celebrates the best businesses and organizations in Marathon County, Wisconsin. The Gannett / USA TODAY Network newspaper serving Wausau runs it on the publisher's Your Choice Awards system, a dedicated readers-choice platform. The ballot lives at yourchoiceawards.com/wausau/, and the page footer carries a 2026 copyright line for USA TODAY NETWORK Ventures.

Contrast this with its nearest sibling, Best of the Valley in Appleton: both are Gannett readers-choice ballots built on the same system, but this one answers to Marathon County, while Appleton's serves the Fox Valley. The same distinction separates it from Best of Madison, Best of Milwaukee Readers' Choice, the Eau Claire Reader's Choice Awards, Best of the Bay in Green Bay and Janesville CommunityVotes, each of which covers its own city rather than the Wausau region.

Facts at a glance

Each year the program recognizes over 450 businesses and organizations, which the organizer credits to community involvement. That scale, spread across a county rather than a single city, is what gives the ballot its breadth.

The 2026 dates, the annual record and what is not published

The 2026 cycle runs in three phases. The nomination round opened March 2 and closed March 23, 2026, and the organizer calls nominations the starting point of the whole cycle. After nominations, the top businesses in each category moved forward into the voting round, which runs May 4 through May 18, 2026. Once voting ends, winners are announced on July 12, 2026.

The program is annual. Confirmed editions cover 2025 and 2026 on the Your Choice Awards ballot for the Wausau market, so the 2026 cycle is the second consecutive edition the platform shows, not a first run. The organizer's own wording says the program recognizes businesses and organizations each year, and the next expected cycle would fall in 2027.

One detail worth knowing: the ballot is organized entirely by category, with navigation under the How It Works and Categories headings on the page itself. A $250 giveaway also appears in the page's voting-round text, tied to being entered to win.

The ballot leaves the fine print around eligibility unprinted: who qualifies as a voter, whether any verification applies, and how the organizer handles unusual voting patterns. The daily rule is stated, the rest is not, so confirm on the live ballot each cycle.

How a supporter votes in the Marathon County ballot today

Voting here is straightforward and built on a daily reset. The organizer's stated rule allows one vote each day in every category while the round runs. In practice, the supporter visits the ballot page at yourchoiceawards.com/wausau/, finds the category where the business they back is listed, selects it and submits. The next day, the same supporter can return and vote again in that category, and can also vote in every other category on the ballot.

Because only the top companies from the March nomination round appear in the voting round, a supporter cannot add a new business at this stage. If a favourite did not make the finalist cut in 2026, the path back in runs through the next nomination round, which for a 2027 cycle would follow the same March shape the 2026 edition used.

The daily-return structure is the single most important fact for anyone campaigning in this program. A business with a hundred loyal customers who each remember to return once a day per category accumulates far more support than a larger crowd that votes once and forgets. Reminders, social posts and in-store signage that name the May 4-18 window do the work here, and the ballot's own category navigation makes it easy to send people straight to the right section.

How this ballot sits beside its Wisconsin neighbours

Wisconsin has an unusually crowded readers-choice field, and the Marathon County ballot differs from every neighbour in three ways. First, geography: no other ballot on this list covers Marathon County or the Wausau market. Second, platform: it runs on Your Choice Awards, the Gannett system, while Janesville CommunityVotes answers to a different platform entirely. Third, structure: this program splits into a March nomination round and a May voting round, so the ballot a supporter sees in May is a finalist list, not an open field.

That two-phase shape matters when comparing with siblings. Best of Madison and Best of Milwaukee Readers' Choice serve far larger city audiences, and Best of the Bay and the Eau Claire Reader's Choice Awards cover their own regions. A business in Marathon County gains nothing by campaigning in any of them, because each ballot answers to its own market and support earned in one cannot be transferred to another.

Supporters should first check which program actually covers the county before campaigning. The Wausau ballot's daily per-category rule and its July 12 winners announcement make it the one that matters here, and its two-phase structure keeps the May field to genuine finalists.

Strengthening support in the Marathon County voting round

Everything about this program rewards a steady daily rhythm. The stated rule allows a vote once a day per category through May 18, 2026, so the campaigns that do well are the ones that turn a one-time ask into a habit: a counter sign naming the window, a recurring social post, an email that goes out each morning of the round. Because the reset is per category, a business nominated in several categories can ask each supporter to work through the full list on every visit.

The organizer's rules, as printed, cover the daily limit and nothing else about outside help; eligibility fine print is not on the ballot, so confirm on the live ballot each cycle. What is safe to say is that casting a vote on this ballot is free, and any member of the public can take part, so organic mobilization fits its design exactly. For tactics that go beyond reminders, see our guide to earning more votes online, and for how paid support works in general, the buy votes online page explains the service side without promising results no organizer guarantees.