And we're live! - Getting to grips with CRM

Sarah Hampton, Marketing Manager

LIVE: Our new CRM personalised web portal:
Belong at Bedfordshire

Hi everyone. It's been a short while since my last post. But now that I'm back from my staycation, I'm already ploughing through hundreds of emails and getting my calendar filled up with meetings to progress some exciting initiatives. First on my list was to progress the launch of our new CRM system, Belong at Beds. This has been a long project in the making, headed up by our CRM Manager Amanda, and Digital Marketing Manager, Paul. Since I took up the Marketing Manager role last June, I've been getting my teeth into it also; understanding what it is, what it can do, and what we need to do to get it up and running. After a few initial delays in development, we're finally ready to go live, which we're all very excited about. Training complete, data at the ready, content schedule devised. We're going for a soft launch whilst we settle into working with a live system and live data, but that's not to say we're scrimping on the content. So what are you waiting for? Take a look for yourself.

Now that the March cohort of students have arrived, it means that our MSc Project Management Distance Learning Marketing plan has come to an end. Over the last few days I've been collating stats and assessing the performance of our digital communications to pull together into an end of campaign report. Here, we'll be able to look at what activity has worked particularly well for us, and what hasn't, all of which will help us plan for future campaigns and make recommendations for improvements. So far it's looking good in terms of traffic generated and reach. I've also got my hands on our student numbers for the courses, and it seems that we've met the original targets set at the start of the campaign. It's always great to see when a campaign has gone well and delivered on it's initial objectives (Well done team!). The report will soon be available on the Staff Intranet site in.beds, so if you're an internal member of staff reading this blog and want to know more, be sure to take a look, and do get in touch to discuss how the Marketing team can support your courses.

New UCMK, Milton Keynes Prospectus
ready June 2014

In other news, work is now well underway on the UCMK prospectus. Kylie, Marketing Officer, and Clare, Marketing Assistant, have been busily updating text, imagery, and auditing courses to feature in the 2015 publication. We're now ready to brief this in to our agency, and so look forward to seeing 1st proofs shortly. We can then turn our attention to the PG 2015 Prospectus. I've audited all of our Postgraduate provision to form a flatplan, and we're now ready to start reworking content over the next few weeks. We'll keep you posted on the progress of these publications, and make sure you keep checking back to get a first-look at the visuals.

Presentation preparation: Boosting our PG
Profile

In between all of the above, I've also been doing a fair bit of number crunching to look at our Postgraduate student numbers between 2011 and 2013. Paul Fryer, who heads up our Digital team, and myself have both been invited to present at the Inside Government Conference: The Future of Higher Education Marketing 2014 later this month on the success of our Postgraduate marketing. Our talk title is: Enhancing Postgraduate Student Recruitment Through Developing A Digital Presence. Wish us luck!