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.