Digital first clearing

How many blogs in the HE bloggershere will, over the next few weeks be about clearing? Answer – Probably a lot.

So why move away from what everyone is talking about, let’s add to that with this week’s blog, by me, on clearing.

In the digital team we are definitely getting clearing ready.

The website has been live for two months, and is constantly evolving as we climb further up the rankings in various league tables and awards. The site this this year also boasts a wonderfully enhanced section on our success stories. Here we highlight those alumni who used clearing as an option to choose a university, who perhaps without the clearing process may have taken a different path.

They all break down that stigma that going through clearing means you weren’t good enough to get the place you wanted. We know that this wasn’t really ever the case though, and now more than ever, as behaviours change applicants are shopping around and leaving it later to apply to university. Some of the brightest are looking for the best deal on a degree course. Clearing worked for the students we feature here though, and who’s laughing now hey? The system... no, the students, because most of them are earning more than me!

Another new addition to the clearing site this year is the way we capture data. Introducing Wistia, the video players with inbuilt data capture. Or as they refer to themselves, 'your friendly neighbourhood video platform', whatever that means. We still have our traditional call back form and click to call options to capture leads, but this year the full-length version of our epic clearing video can only be viewed once you have entered your email address. Clever huh?

A beautiful, jam packed site is wonderful, but we need to get users to the site to view all these wonderful messages.

Well the latest figures from Google show that clicks on ads for education grew by 37% last year.

There was a steady 7% growth on users searching for ‘clearing’ on mobile during the first few hours of A-level results day. With this in mind we will be running some very bespoke mobile adwords campaigns, geo-targeted and optimised minute by minute on the morning of the big day.

Now I can’t reveal my hand on this too much, but it has got us in the office all hot and bothered at the thought. So over all there is a lot going on to enhance our clearing messaging and experience for 2017.

I’m more excited about it all than Donald Trump is when ever he hears Kim Jong-un mentioned at a dinner party.

Check out www.beds.ac.uk/clearing more all the latest on our 2017 campaign.

The importance of data

Almost every blog I’ve written over the last year I’ve mentioned that I’m working on evaluation reports. You may (or may not) be tired of my talking about it, but data and analysing performance is a key part of marketing and key to progressing plans and improving performance year on year.

Without stats and having an understanding of activity performance, we’d really just be putting a finger in the air and hoping for the best. Solid stats mean clever decisions!

So it’s important that after every campaign or initiative we understand:

• what activity worked well – which platforms generated higher interest. Depending on the campaign and inventory this could be clicks, click through rate, phone calls generated, website visits, call back requests  
• where potential students are coming from – was our targeting correct and are there any emerging markets to be aware of
• messaging – which messages and visuals appear to have performed best
• source of interest - how did people reach our website or find out about the University – was it through campaign activity, Google organic traffic, college or UCAS events, printed material
• performance against target and previous years – have we hit target and have we improved on the previous year’s performance
• KPIs – what are they key performance indicators that we want to measure ourselves against, and have we performed well against them
• the student journey – first point of contact with the University, how many attend an open day/request a prospectus/make an application/accept an offer/go on to actually study with us
• and of course, return on investment – for every pound we spent during a particular campaign on or a particular piece of inventory, how much have we generated based on the leads generated

All of the above helps give an indication of performance, which we can use to make recommendations and amend activity for future campaigns.

A lot of the stats we get for evaluations we pull ourselves from various sources such as Google Adwords, Pure360 (our email platform), Facebook and Twitter and Eventbrite. However, we also draw on the expertise of our digital team, our market research team and a media agency and digital consultant. Often insight is a collaborative approach, as people have different skills sets and knowledge that we can utilise to get a more holistic view.

It’s also equally important to be aware of competitors, any new platforms or trends and any factors which can influence or affect our campaign efforts (some of which can be out of our control)- this is where market research, a media agency and a digital consultant can come in handy!

As marketers, it’s important to be able to show the value of what we do – marketing is far more than just printing posters and fliers! And good, hard stats go a long way to show the success of the campaigns and activity we run.

So all in all, the better we are at evaluating activity, the more sound our decisions become. And there’s nothing better than stats showing that something you’ve done has worked well!!

Speak soon,

K

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

Becoming the digital marketer

So, we all know how important digital marketing in these days, and I’m slowly dipping my toes in the water and getting to grips with more digital activity. Not necessarily the implementation, but more the briefing process – putting targeted Google and promoted social media briefs together for different aspects of the annual campaign.

As we like to be as targeted as possible using analysis from previous campaigns, there are a lot of ideas and thoughts to get down as coherently as possible; search ads, display ads, re-targeting, mobile ads, promoted social media posts. And then there's targeting, reaching new audiences, which subjects get more traction in which areas of the UK, different visuals for different subjects or locations, key words, affiliate websites, hidden landing pages…the list seems endless.  

I’ve got to admit it was daunting pulling together the first large brief, but I’ve just recently finished this and it’s now up and running. So, I’m now working on the next. Now here comes the issue; when we’re targeting some similar subjects in different campaigns how do we ensure we don’t compete with ourselves for the likes of key words or affiliate websites? And so it starts again; targeting, reaching new audiences, which subjects get more traction in which areas of the UK, different visuals for different subject or locations, key words, affiliate websites, hidden landing pages…the list seems endless.  Have I said that already?!

Although all of this has been a lot to get my head around, I am feeling excited that it’s giving me the opportunity to broaden my knowledge in terms of the digital aspects of marketing, which is great for my own development. Keep your eyes peeled for some analysis on my first large Google campaign...

Fruits of our labour
As Sara mentioned last week, we directed some photo shoots earlier this month and I thought I’d share a couple of images below as we’ve now had these back from the photographers we worked with. I'm looking forward to seeing these in our 2017 publications. We’ve still got one more shoot to do mid-November for the prospectus cover, and that’s photography done for 2016. Well that’s all from me this week and I’ve got a nice day off tomorrow! :)
Speak soon,
K

Students in our Go Global Cafe

New library at our UCMK campus

One of our business, Luton campus

Multi-channel, Multi-tasking Marketers - The Digital Frontier

By Sarah Hampton, Marketing Manager

We 'do' digital

In true 'the Fast show' style: This week I have mostly... been in training sessions and agency meetings. Sounds fun right? Well, with current changes taking place within the department, and being part of a team who are always keen to expand our repertoire and skills set, we've taken it upon ourselves to shadow other colleagues and enhance our knowledge, particularly in the digital arena. The need to be fully integrated, and shift the weighting of our campaigns towards a stronger digital focus, means that it's becoming more and more important for us marketers to have a firm understanding of the many digital platforms available to support us in campaign planning and implementation. And so, to help us on our merry way, we've been working closely with the digital team this week, to grasp a firmer understanding of Google advertising and analytics, as well as getting some handy hints, tips and techniques to engage with our audiences through social media. It's all very exciting, and so we look forward to sharing some learnings and insight as we get more involved in upcoming campaigns, on the digital front.

Taking PRide in our work -
 to gain regional recognition

In between all of the meetings, training sessions and Marketing tasks, I've still somehow managed to squeeze in two more award entries - there's just so many exciting things going on at the moment and so it's hard to resist. This week, we've submitted two entries to the CIPRide Awards for the Thames and Chiltern region, in the categories of best Integrated Campaign (for our 2014 Clearing campaign), and best Low Budget Campaign (for the September 2014 Open day campaign, where we almost doubled the footfall compared to the previous year). The short-list is out in mid-July. It's always great to showcase the effectiveness of the work undertaken within Marketing, and it's great for the team to be able to see the results of their hard work; especially after Kylie wrote an 87 page report on Open Day insight. So it's always nice when we're able to use the wealth of data, insight and analysis to further bolster the reputation and credibility of the team through bench-marking against our fellow industry peers.

Delighted to see @uniofbeds have been shortlisted for Best Student Recruitment campaign at the @heistawards - yay! pic.twitter.com/DRxYcuht5U

— Sarah Hampton (@Sarah_Hampton) May 15, 2015

Making a PR splash - with
our Clearing flash mob

In order news, I was absolutely over the moon to see that we had been short-listed for Best Student Recruitment Campaign at this year's Heist awards. The award entry, which was wonderfully written by Krystle Hall (Campaign Officer), showcases the very best from the 2014 Clearing campaign; from our community events and recruitment roadshow, to a range of wide spanning activity which made up a fully integrated, multi-channel approach - it's all in there. And don't forget the University's very own flash mob which took place in the Mall Luton. It's quite a large short-list, but we're going to keep everything crossed that we scoop the big win at these coveted awards. The ceremony dinner is on the 9th July, so stay tuned or keep an eye on twitter @uniofbeds to watch the evening's events unfold.

Finally, as we come to the end of the week, it becomes time to bid farewell to some more MARC colleagues. Lauren Hague (Digital Marketing Officer) and Mick Hart (Publications Officer) are leaving the University this week; Lauren is leaving us to pursue new challenges in the digital marketing arena, whilst Mick is retiring after serving almost 19 years as part of the team. We wish them all the best for their future endeavours, and look forward to sending them off in the traditional MARC way. It's going to be a quiet office, come Monday!