It's all new

Hi all. I’m Kylie - another marketing ‘newbie’ having recently joined the University of Bedfordshire as Marketing Officer. As well as being new to the MARC department here and the University itself, I am also new to Luton and the South East in general.

I’m originally from the North East but have been living in the South East (Suffolk) for 19 months and very recently moved to Hertfordshire when I took up my position at the University. So, I've had lots of new things to get used to; new people, new surroundings and new ways of working.

My first three weeks...
I've been working in the MARC department for almost three weeks now, so I'm just starting to find my feet following lots of meetings and reading up on strategies and marketing plans- all really useful stuff! I've really enjoyed my three weeks here- I had a lovely introduction to the marketing team and related departments as well as a yummy welcome lunch on my first day (any excuse to eat pizza). The team are great and I’m really looking forward to working with them as I get stuck in to the workload.

As I approach my fourth week there is a lot going on with work starting on the UCMK prospectus (my first big project as part of the team) as well as open days, campaigns and the new CRM system launching. Lots to keep me busy! 

I’m also slowly working my way around the different campuses- I had my official University induction at Putteridge Bury on Tuesday (what an impressive building!) and I’m visiting our UCMK campus on Monday with my colleague Michelle, so I’m looking forward to seeing what the newest addition to UoB has to offer!

Look forward to updating you all again soon! K

Hot off the press

Very excitingly, a box full of 2015 undergraduate prospectuses arrived in the office yesterday morning. We’re really pleased with the outcome of weeks and weeks of hard work; the die-cut cover has worked well, and the whole thing looks really fresh and colourful.

In other news this week...

I spent a day in London where I attended the CIM Principles of Great Copywriting course.

It was a pretty intensive day of training, but it was full of interesting discussion and creative ideas about how to keep copy accessible while making it fresh and exciting to read.

The course leader told us that if we want to write engaging copy, we must allow ourselves the space to be creative. Something that resonated with all the delegates was Disney’s model for coming up with ideas:

Three people walk into a room. Person one is the dreamer. The dreamer writes down all their thoughts without censoring of filtering them in any way. Person two is the realist; they enter the room and works through all the dreamer’s thoughts, trying to make sense of them and give them some logic, shaping them into a useable idea. Person three is the critic. The critic takes the ideas presented to them and brings up reasonable objections.

We, as writers, should be all three: we should start off by writing down a high volume of our most creative ideas. We probably won’t use them all, but might find one or two ideas that stand out and that we can work on and polish. Writers will always need to think about the practicalities of what they are writing and be ready to accept constructive criticism in order to create the strongest possible end product. 

The course couldn’t have been better timed, just before we start work on the 2015 postgraduate prospectus. Hopefully all the new ideas from training will inspire me to write some great copy.

Happy Friday!

Clare

New month, new starters

By Sarah Hampton, Marketing Manager

Welcome to our new Marketing
Officer, Kylie

For many, the month of March signals the start of spring, and a time of new beginnings. And the same can be said for our very own marketing department. As we get going with a new month we extend a warm welcome to our new Marketing Officer, Kylie Aldridge who has started today. Later this month we'll also be joined by Krystle Hall, our new Campaign Officer. It's a very exciting time as we welcome new members to the team, and get going on lots of exciting new projects. Kylie will be working her way through her induction this week, as she gets to grips with the University environment, and the many teams that make up the MARC department, and so I'm sure you'll be hearing more about this when Kylie posts up her first blog in the comings weeks.

Snapshot from our email
communications - promoting
Project Management

In other news, we've been busy working with the Business School to devise and implement a bespoke small-scale campaign to generate enquiries for the new MSc Project Management (by Distance Learning) course which starts later this March. We've been working to a set budget, and have been actioning a mainly digital marketing plan over the last few weeks. We haven't had much time to work on this, as we usually would like a longer lead time to make any real impact, but we're already starting to see the fruits of our efforts, as the academics keep us informed of the enquiries that are coming through via email as a result of our marketing efforts. Teaching starts week commencing 17 March for this course and so we still have a few weeks for the campaign to continue to take effect. We'll keep you updated on the progress of this.

It's a particularly busy time for us in the marketing team. Now that the UCAS deadline is well and truly out of the way, all of our efforts are focused on conversion, and what we call pre-clearing - a campaign that runs until June to encourage late applications from a mature audience. It also doubles up as the start of our clearing activity, in generating interest amongst those who haven't secured a university place, or may be considering us after the August results are out. Michelle will be sharing more with you about the finer details of the campaign. The visuals have almost been firmed up, the media is being booked in and so you should be seeing this campaign up and around the local area very shortly! Let us know what you think.

Waiting to hear if we've made it into
the short list - fingers crossed!

In other news, after juggling the many marketing tasks we've had going on recently, we finally managed to get an award entry in for the CIPR Excellence awards, and with only a day to spare. We've put in for Best Low Budget Campaign, for some work we did late last year with the Faculty of Education and Sport, to drum up enquiries and applications to our PGT Sport courses. After evaluating the marketing campaign we were successful in increasing applications by 40%. So we're keeping everything crossed as we wait to see whether we've made it into the short-list.