The thrill isn't in the winning, it's in the doing

Sarah De Guzman, Marketing Manager



Hot off the press

Friday cheer!

There was already a celebratory mood over in Marketing HQ today, as we finalised the proofing of our mini guide and prospectus, and began rejoicing in getting all of our final amends over on time - the last stage of production before we approve for print. And if that wasn't enough of a cause for us to celebrate, our day just got so much better!

We were delighted to see that we've been short-listed in the UK Blog Awards 2016, in the Education category.

Congratulations to our marketing team for being shortlisted @UKBlogAwards Education category #UKBA16 #fingerscrossed https://t.co/pUFcJQTUI7

— uniofbeds (@uniofbeds) January 29, 2016

Although we entered on a bit of a whim, and didn't expect it go to anywhere, we were ecstatic to see that we made it to the short-list after a big rally of support from our colleagues and fellow blog readers - Thank you! It looks as though we're up against a few other universities such as Salford Business School, and Southampton Solent University to name a few, and will wait with baited breath to see how we do in the next round of judging; with the results announced in April.

We've spent a lot of time building up this blog over the years, and gradually recruited new blog contributors to widen the pool of insight shared and to expand on the marketing transparency, knowledge and discussions each week, so it's great to see the blog being recognised in this way, and is a big coup for the team.

A great way to kick off awards season, and a great end to the week!

There's no quiet before the storm, not yet anyway!

Sarah De Guzman, Marketing Manager

Marketing wants your votes!

With the new year, comes the start of 'awards season', and the first one to catch my attention was the UK Blog Awards 2016. It's the first time we're entering a blog, and best of all it was free to enter; so our Market Research Manager (a regular contributor to the blog) and I thought, why not?

We've entered this very blog into this years awards, in the categories of PR, Media, Marketing & Communications; and Education. So, if you are a regular reader, enjoy having a browse and are inspired by our insight, then be sure to vote for us! Voting is open until Monday 25th January, and then the short-list will announced soon after. Ok, shameless plug now over, ahem.

We do love a good excuse to enter an award, but it's not all fun and games within Marketing at the moment. It's what we currently call 'crunch time' - one of our busiest times of the year. The run up to Christmas is always quite hectic as we juggle campaigns, but now that the 15 January deadline has passed, the work continues to come in thick and fast.

As Kylie mentioned in her previous post, we're juggling a lot of publications at the moment with the 'biggie's' being our main Undergraduate Prospectus for 2017 and our Mini Undergraduate Prospectus, both of which are at the final stages of design and proofing. The process has run surprisingly smoothly this year, which had many of us questioning, what's about to go wrong. But no, our schedules have stood firm; even when faced with a massive audit of entry requirements to prepare for the new tariff being rolled out for 2017, all has gone surprisingly well. We're days away from approving for print - hurrah! So stay tuned in the next week or so, for an exclusive preview of our cover.

Influencing our applicants -
all in a day's work

We've now seamlessly moved into what we call Pre-Clearing and Conversion, aka the time after the initial UCAS deadline, but before Clearing starts to take over our lives. It's a key time for us marketers as we send out a series of meaningful communications to further support our applicants in their decision making. And so, another flurry of activity is about to take place. It's all go, go go, as we send out our applicant newsletters, and advice features to welcome the newest crop of potential students, and gather lots of exciting content to showcase why Beds is Best. We've also got an exciting web project being rolled out to further cement our positioning and verbal brand messaging, which we're all really excited about, and keen to share with our applicants. It should be up and running in February - so more on that later.

Who said print was dead

The second week in after the Christmas break and things are going rather smoothly (despite my silly picture on the right!) We usually have a busy period the last two months of the year and then we have a bit of a lull before pre-Clearing starts. So I’m enjoying having time to catch up on reports.

Publications

So, we’re working on a few publications at the moment. We’ve recently briefed back the second round of amends to the undergraduate 2017 prospectus. It’s been relatively easy this time around considering the changes we’ve had to make – absorbing the international aspects as we’re no longer producing a separate international publication, UCAS point changes, plus other factors.

We’ve also briefed back the first round of amends to the mini guide, so this is also going well. It’s such a small publication compared to the main prospectus so between the three of us in the team, this isn’t too big of a task.

The final publication I’m working on at the moment is our fees brochure. We’ve not produced a solus fees brochure for a couple of years, so I’ve been working with our freelance designer to create this in line with our 2016 suite of publications. I’ve just briefed back the final amends on this and we’re two weeks ahead of schedule, which I love!

Once we sign off the undergraduate prospectus, it won’t be long before we’ll be starting work on the postgraduate 2017 prospectus.

I know a lot of people think that marketing is moving towards a more digital focus, which is largely right to a certain degree, but there’s still very much a need for supporting printed collateral, and we always have at least one printed publication on the go at any one given time throughout the cycle.

To help with future projects I’m going to be working on an error log – where we will log all common errors that we come across time and time again when working on publications and campaigns, in the hope that by doing this we can eliminate them for future projects and therefore make our job a little bit easier. I’m also going to be working on updating our in-house style guide. Our style guide is a little bit outdated so it’ll be good for us to be working from new ones later this year. I’ll be liaising with the digital team and the communications team as well to ensure we take into account their needs, as we all use these guides as part of our daily role, whether its creating artwork or writing copy and news stories. 

Come in, we’re open

We’re also in the thick of the open day season with three UG open days taking place in February – Luton and Bedford, UCMK and Aylesbury, and we’ve also got our PG open day in February too. So we’ve been sending out emails, creating artwork, sending items to external media, and setting up more Google activity; all in a day’s work!

Some of our artwork for our forthcoming open days

And besides the above, like I mentioned earlier - I‘ve got a little down time to catch up on my evaluations before pre-Clearing kicks off!

Speak soon,

K

Happy New Year from the Marketing Team

Happy New Year everyone! I hope you all had a great break - I realised yesterday that I didn't have a single mince pie this year (well last year) so my year has started full of regrets!

We've been back at work three days now and in that time we've received the second proof of our 2017 Undergraduate Prospectus. It's looking really good and I'm excited for you all to see it. The last couple of days I've been proof reading my sections and contacting various departments across the university to finalise a few things. The first proof of the Mini Undergraduate Prospectus is also due next week. This is my first time working on the UG prospectus so I'm enjoying seeing everything come together.

Just before the Christmas break I was working on the Welcome Guide for our February and March starters. This was completed on my first day back and can now be found online.

This year I'm going to be working on a project called "More than a degree". I'm going to be gathering content for the website about extra curricular activities at the university such as RadioLab, Get Into Sport, industry talks, PAL and much more. I'm really excited to get started on this so keep an eye out for some exciting new content coming your way soon!

Kylie has been busy preparing the UG and PG open day plans so I will be supporting her in implementing these. For me this usually means sending out some emails to our enquirers, and creating the open day notices that you may have seen around the university on the digital screens.

I'm also working on a few small projects including creating some ads for the upcoming UCAS events and updating some of our online profiles.