A challenging year

Challenged

Not long before it’s time to button down hatches, bust the Baileys and pile up box sets ready to feed into the roaring open fire. But before work memories are banished in a cloud of booze, dioxins, carbon monoxide and stuffing, time for a reflection on 2015.

This year’s General Election returned a Government which, cut loose from its erstwhile Lib Dem-ish stooges, oversaw the much touted removal of student number controls and meddled with student finances. The latter has seen the replacement of maintenance grants with loans and the introduction of financing for PG students (yup; more loans; welcome as a start, but not looking out for folk averse to debt.....).

The University of Bedfordshire’s approved adjective summarising 2015 probably is “challenging”. Which translates, in certain areas, as “very difficult actually”. Here is what would be nice for 2016…..

• A big production opening of Luton’s new nine-level, café-tastic library. Things are shaping up very nicely on the corner of Park Street and Vicarage Street. Most of the facilities will almost certainly be ‘state of the art’ and hopefully someone smart, local and bookish will be lined up to open the place. Stephen Kelman? John Hegley?

•  International students to be removed from migration figures. Immigration has been high on everyone’s agenda over the last few years. International students are seen as a good thing by most mainstream politicians – no, really – if only for the income they bring in. Bizarrely, however, the Home Office insists that international student numbers are included in migration figures, thus helping exert a pressure which has led to more barriers to international students than there have been in the past. Even more bizarre is the fact that the Home Office stands alone and has consistently overruled even its own Conservative party colleagues, from those responsible for universities to others who usually jerk to the right in political debate, or those who just 'jerk' e.g. Boris Johnson and George Osborne. Recent comments from the Chancellor suggest that, finally, sense may prevail and international students are finally taken out of migration numbers. Fingers crossed.

• More encouragement for part-time and mature students. Bedfordshire, in common with most HEIs up and down the country, actively support learners of all ages. Loans may widen participation in the postgraduate market, although there are those concerned they may only subsidise the passage of those from more secure financial backgrounds. who do not mind accruing more long term debt.

Would you buy a degree from this man?

• Checks maintained on emerging private providers. Opening the market to non-traditional providers gives a wider range of institutions and a range of different prices. Fine, until you look a little deeper – for example at a recent report from Higher Education’s Quality Assurance Agency, reporting poor administration, attendance and higher dropout rates than in the established public sector institutions. Of course, there are excellent private providers out there, but extra attention is needed when choosing providers.

• Town and gown becoming a reality. Certainly in Luton (sorry Bedford, MK and Aylesbury; I live in, breathe and love Luton and don’t know how things work anywhere else…..). With exciting events coming up – including Wordfest, the Luton Fringe, the Carnival and others – it would be nice to see the University up its involvement.

Was Clippy so bad?

• Talent shows to be purged from tv schedules and replaced with documentaries about rock formations, knitting, quantum physics and Clippy, the Microsoft Office ‘office assistant’. And steam train documentaries for my Dad. If Clippy had his own show, I'd watch it in preference to, say, Lord Sugar’s Jungle Ballroom Bake-off.

• Luton Town for promotion? NO CHANCE. For two home games running, we’ve conceded four (yes, FOUR) goals. Square pegs are being played in round holes, which doesn’t help. 4-4-2 with Wilkinson instated as captain and Guttridge fit and firing, then “we’ll see”.

A constant state of change

By Sarah Hampton, Marketing Manager

Back to the day job
after a wonderful few
weeks!

This weeks post is focused on change. No matter how much we all try to resist sometimes, its the one thing that's always remains constant. And for us fellow Marketers, embracing change, and being responsive to change is all in the job. The sector and marketing environment is constantly adapting and changing, and therefore so must we!

Slightly off topic, but a change nonetheless, is me! After three long weeks, I'm back in the office and back to the day job after taking a few weeks off to get married. So, if you start to see Sarah De Guzman popping up every now and then in your inbox don't be alarmed, it's just me!

Getting back into the daily grind always takes some time, especially when there's literally hundreds of emails to catch up on. And so that's exactly how my first few days have been spent. It's amazing how quickly you can switch your mind off as you go into holiday mode, and then all the information, meetings and work updates come flooding back upon your return, as though that holiday was a thing of the past. I wish the same could be said for the jet lag!

Pretty much what my desk
looks like at the moment!

Well, it's now week two, post holiday, and the emails have been read, the calendar has been updated, and it's pretty much back to normality for me. Clearing is still underway, just about - we expect this to slowly tail off in the next week or so, as we firmly focus our attentions to the 2016 cycle, which has quietly been ticking along in the background since April this year.

Change in tactic
Ok so back to the focus of my blog post - change. The main focus of the marketing team has been in supporting the Recruitment team in the promotion of the September open day and lots of changes have been made to this years plan; from the media inventory selected to the times of communications. We've implemented a much more aggressive Digital Marketing campaign this time round, pulled back some communications based on intelligence learnt from previous plans, and we're very pleased with the results. If you happened to be on campus (Luton and Bedford) on that day you'll have seen that it was very busy indeed, and had a great vibe on campus, and that's always great to see. Take a look at our open day picture gallery - kindly taken by Sara, Marketing Assistant. And a big shout out to the recruitment team who really pulled it out of the bag with the number of schools in attendance. The day was a resounding success. That's one event down and on to the next, as we're already busily preparing a promotional push for our October events.

Krystle, far left, is setting off for
new adventures

Team change
This week will be offering up a bit of a mixed bag for the Marketing team. Krystle, our Campaign Officer is sadly leaving us on Wednesday, after being part of the Marketing team for about 18 months now. We're really sad to see her go, and to see our mighty marketing team reduced to just three colleagues now. In the relatively short time that Krystle has been with us, she's made a significant difference to the way in which campaigns are planned, implemented and evaluated, and she will be very much missed by us all. We'll be sending Krystle off and wishing her well over lunch on Wednesday. And, to pick up our mood, the remaining Marketing team will be heading off to Homerton College in Cambridge on Thursday, for this year's coveted CIPRide awards. We're up for two awards: Best Integrated Campaign for our 2014 Clearing campaign, and Best Low Budget Campaign for our September 2014 open day promotions. So a good evening out shall definitely pick up our moods, and provide a much needed evening out to re group, celebrate our achievements and look ahead to the future.

Keep everything crossed for us, and follow @CIPR_Awards to watch the evenings events unfold!

So change can mean many different things to many people. And boy are we experiencing a lot of it at the moment. From changing the way we do things and implemented planned changes to be more effective, all the way through to adapting to unforeseen changes, and changes in team resource and dynamics, we remain a positive marketing force to be reckoned with - it may just take us that bit longer to reply to your email, so please bear with us!

What's my name again? Clearing, campaigns and creative pitches - all in a days work

By Sarah Hampton, Marketing Manager

What's my name? Where do I live? What do I do? What day is it? These are just some of the many questions you'll find us asking ourselves over the next few weeks. With the mad Clearing rush in full force, all of the days start to blur into one. The multi-tasking marketers strike again...

We're making it happen for many
students who we hope to join this Sept!

Clearing...
And so Clearing has finally begun for many students in search of that university place. But for us over in Marketing, Clearing has been high on our agenda for months now. Although results day was all but yesterday, planning for this infamous campaign first started way back in November, so it's great for us to finally see the campaign taking shape, and to hear the busy phone lines ringing, whilst we constantly refresh our dashboards to track our performance and make adjustments to our campaign targeting.

Whilst Clearing often ensues months of organised chaos, I always particularly enjoy the chance for us marketers to do what we do best - be creative! Each year in Clearing, we have the opportunity to trial new innovations and initiatives to grab the headlines, boost traction in the media, and beguile and inspire the minds of our audience. Following on from last year's Flash mob, we've had heaps of fun working with the press team to launch some Guerrilla marketing techniques in the run up to results day; this involved projecting our marketing messages and campaign creatives on to a series of buildings and landmarks. If you haven't already seen it, check it out below...

Our nice and new shiny
shell scheme

We've also been supporting the Recruitment team as they gear up to lead a series of community events in a whole host of locations, including: Luton, Bedford, Milton Keynes and London. You can see left, a new shell scheme which I put together (design wise of course - I can not take any credit for assembling the actual thing, and so a big well done is due to recruitment for overcoming the ultimate flat pack challenge). These 'Pods' as well call them lead on our verbal brand themes, and this nice, new piece of kit enables the team to offer more engaging and interactive sessions with the local community - providing a real insight into what exciting subjects we offer. So I'm really looking forward to seeing how the team gets on.

Campaigns...
Whilst Clearing remains at the forefront of our minds for the next few weeks, we've already been looking ahead and turning our attention to our 2016 enquirer recruitment, which we officially started back in March. The photoshoots have taken place, the artwork is almost finalised, and the plan is moments away from being approved (I'll get round to it shortly, I'm sure!). But if working on two consecutive intakes and recruitment cycles isn't fun enough, let's throw a third one in there for good measure shall we? Yes, not only are we working on 2015 and 2016 recruitment, but we are well away and are already working on our 2017 marketing. And this comes in the form of our publications tender which took place this week, over at the Putteridge Bury campus.

And creative pitches
I always enjoy the publications tenders. Whilst the admin aspect can take a lot of time, it's really refreshing to meet the different agencies, and see how they respond to the challenges and brief that you set. This tender was particularly interesting, as 4 of the 5 agencies were entirely new to us. So we set out on a fact finding mission to grill each company in turn, to make sure we haven't just got a stand out creative, but the man power behind it to deliver it. Although a long day, the panel had lots of fun, and came away feeling inspired. Keep a look out in future posts for more on this - as we'll share more, once the agency has been appointed.

For now, it's the end of my blog post, and back to the day job and the ever growing list of things to do before my holiday (woo - 2 weeks to go!). So whilst I'm slowly getting excited, there still seems to be an awful lot to do before that holiday milestone even starts to begin to feel like it's within my reach - right, back to work - what year is it again?

Marketing, Media and Emerging Trends for 2015

By Sarah Hampton, Marketing Manager

Being able to monitor trends is a key part to any marketers role, as this is fundamentally the best way in which we can stay ahead of the competition. Now that we're well and truly back into the swing of things after the xmas break, I thought I'd start off our blog this year with a series of tips on what to watch out for in 2015 from the Marketing department. So, this post is more of a focus on our own emerging trends for 2015 if you like: take a look...

Content is king

1). Content is king
Marketers are being called upon to place less of a focus on the hard marketing sell, and more emphasis on providing information and useful content to support potential students in their decision making. And whilst this is an emerging theme across the sector as a whole, we're already one step ahead as we continue to develop our content marketing strategies here in the Marketing department. For 2015, we're building on last year's introduction of a variety of new initiatives, which all focused on one thing: providing relevant and useful content which our customer really wants, so that they can better engage with, and buy in to, the Bedfordshire brand.

As we approach the Conversion stage to the recruitment cycle, we'll be implementing a number of key communications such as themed emails, the B4Beds Undergraduate e-zine, and our CRM personalised web portal, in order to share a wide variety of rich content with our applicants.

Peer-to-peer and user
generated content

2). Offering value through content marketing
Building on the above, as the demand for non-university generated content increases, we'll be shortly rolling out Student Bloggers for 2015. This year we have even expanded on the number of bloggers we have, to generate even more subject specific content which is written by our very own current students. We're really excited as we continue to build up the peer-to-peer content which focuses on real experiences of real Bedfordshire students.

This idea of offering value through our marketing, also translates over to our PG recruitment too. Last year saw the pilot of 'PG Tips' in our monthly, award-winning Postgraduate e-zine. These short videos act as a mini lecture series, and are loosely modeled on MOOCs (Massive open online courses ie free online classes) which some other universities have dabbled in, in order to reach and engage with an audience in a more meaningful way.

Moving towards mobile 

3). Welcome to the mobile age
Through our many post campaign evaluations and live campaign reporting, the one thing that was clear from 2014, was the major shift towards mobile usage from our prospective students. And that's why we've been working with the Digital Marketing team to produce and launch a brand new set of email templates for 2015. These new templates are all optimised for mobile use, making our marketing messages more easily readable across the vast array of media devises currently available. The new templates will be in use from 15 January onwards, so keep a look out for our new professional, and 'snazzy' looking templates, coming to an inbox near you!

Keeping one eye on the competition

4). It's all about who you know
Last, but certainly not least, we'll be continuing to work with our Media Planning and Buying Agency to meet different suppliers and HE advertisers so we are fully clued up and get the latest on the latest technologies and marketing products currently out there. We'll be hosting our very first set of meet the supplier days later this month, where the wider MARC department is able to meet the key players, movers and shakers in the HE advertising industry, and they share their insight on changing consumer behaviour, what works, and most importantly, what our competitors are up to!

Stay tuned throughout the year, as we keep you posted on the many initiatives that we'll be rolling out over the coming months. We'll be keeping you posted on what's worked particularly well, and what developments and insight there is from our university neighbours.

Another busy month!

I'm finding it hard to believe that a whole month has passed since my last post; it feels more like a few days! So much has happened in the last few weeks so I'm just going to pick out a few highlights to talk about…

Tender Pitches
As Krystle mentioned in the last post, the team was recently part of the panel listening to agencies pitch. My particular interest was in how the agencies presented their creative ideas for our 2016 suite of publications; as I'll be working with the team on the 2016 prospectuses, I wanted to know lots about the look and style of the publications but also the processes that will be help us reach an outstanding final result without too many issues along the way.
It was fascinating to see how each agency approached the tender process in their own unique way, and some of the creative ideas they came up with were really impressive. I found it a massive challenge to pick a favourite at the end of the day!

Can't wait to see what the 2016
prospectuses will look like!

 2016 Prospectuses

While we finish off our work on the 2014 entry and start work on the 2015 cycle, the Marketing Team has begun work on the 2016 suite of prospectuses! So, as well as trying not to get confused, I've been working with Kylie to arrange a photo shoot for prospectus images. The shoot is due to take place at the end of October. We'll be taking profile photos of students and also photographing as many of our brilliant facilities as we can.

Verbal Brand

In that past week or two I've met up with colleagues from the Students' Union and the Department of Computer Science and Technology. In these meetings we've discussed the University's new Verbal Brand strategy.
As ever, it's great to talk to colleagues. I always come away from meetings like these full of new knowledge about the impressive things that are going on in the University. The verbal brand project is exciting because it's going to allow us to use all the information we find out to positively explain what we do here and why we do it so well.

Catch up soon.

Clare

Pride of place: Beds Marketing team going for Gold

Sarah Hampton, Marketing Manager

Making the final cut: Short-listed
for two CIPR Awards

With Clearing activity now in full swing, I completely forgot that Friday (1 August) was a very special day in our working calendar - it was the short-list announcement for the CIPRide Awards 2014! As it suddenly dawned on me what day it was, I had a sneaky peak online and was very excited to see that we'd been short-listed for not one but TWO awards this year: Best Publication (for our 2014 Undergraduate Prospectus), and Best Low Budget Campaign (for our work on increasing PGT Sport applications by 60% for 2013 entry).

We're up against, 4 and 5 other organisations respectively in our short-listed categories, and will find out the final result later this year in November, so watch this space (and keep everything crossed for us).

Yay very pleased to see that we're short listed for not one but TWO @CIPR_Awards - Best Publication and Best Low Budget Campaign #CIPRide
— Sarah Hampton (@Sarah_Hampton) August 1, 2014

As many of you will know from my previous posts, writing award entries is no easy task. You always know when an awards deadline is approaching, as both Paul (Digital Marketing Manager) and I are scrambling around to get our entries in on time - a fine juggling act when you have your day job to carry on with too! And as always, a big shout out to the Market Research team whose data filtering and analytical skills are always much appreciated :-)

Entering awards has become quite an important focus of my role. Not only is it a great pat on the back, and testament to all of the hard work that the team has completed over the year, but it's a great benchmark against our peers and the wider sector - a glowing example of best practice. For me personally, it's a great way to elevate our teams' profile amongst the wider University, further reiterating that we are specialists in our field, with tried and tested initiatives that yield great results.

Planning ahead for 2016
and beyond...

Ok so back to work, and back in the office. Aside from Clearing, there have been a number of other exciting projects going on recently. The first of which has been preparing the 2016 tender documents. Yes, you read that right: 2016! It's an interesting challenge here in the Marketing team, as in any given day we can find ourselves working on collateral across three consecutive years: We're still working on the 2014 intake (through our Clearing campaign); and we're already engaging with our 2015 enquirers and gearing up for enquirer open days which will take place from September in preparation for the 15 January 2015 UCAS deadline. And now to add to the mix, we're planning ahead for 2016 intake, which involves the production of our core corporate publications.

Over the past few months we've been meeting with a selection of new agencies to discuss the tender process, our suite of publications, and to find out a little more about their structures and ability to deliver on a series of quite demanding and time sensitive projects. The tenders have now gone live, and we're excited to see which of the companies will submit to work with us over the coming year, and help shape the look and feel of our publications - we'll keep you posted on this process, and may even share an exclusive first-look of publication visuals, once an agency has been appointed, so stay tuned!

Team outings

Photo-booth fun

Last Friday we all spent the afternoon at the staff summer party, celebrating our hard work over the last six months, eating ice cream and generally having a good time (see embarrassing brilliant photo-booth picture for evidence). 

Putteridge Bury not only played host to the Brazil-themed summer party, but was the location for another team outing this week too; the marketing team got together to discuss the implementation of the verbal brand research that has been taking place over the last months.

Though the implementation of the verbal brand is quite a daunting task, there was a lot of good discussion about how best to use all the research that has been undertaken to our advantage. 

Our location: Putteridge Bury

During a creative session at the end of the day, we broke down the wording of the verbal brand and discussed how it could be used to communicate with some of our extensive audiences. We also discussed it on a subject by subject basis and, while we only really scratched the surface of what we can do, it quickly became clear that the verbal brand will be useful on every level of the organisation and in every task we undertake.

We plan to have further creative sessions where we will go into even more detail about how the verbal brand will be implemented in the marketing materials we are producing. I already feel positive about the impact it will have on our ability to communicate effectively with our audiences but I think, as time goes on and we understand it in ever more detail, the task ahead will feel a lot less enormous!

As well as being out of the office, I’ve been working hard on my sections of the 2015 PG prospectus; the deadline is getting ever closer and I still have some work to do, so I’d better stop blogging and get to it..!

Clare