Showing posts with label Heist Awards 2013. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Heist Awards 2013. Show all posts

Friday, 7 February 2014

Offline To Online; The Big Debate

By Sarah Hampton, Marketing Manager

It's good to talk:
Postgraduate Marketing Forums
As usual, it's been another busy few weeks in the central Marketing team. I've been getting out and about; this time attending one of my favourite training sessions: the Postgraduate Marketing Forum. Run by Postgraduate Studentships, these forums are great for two reasons. 1: It's like group therapy, where we get to share problems in the sector and get some great reassurance that we're actually ahead of the game when it comes to many marketing initiatives. 2: It's great to talk to other Postgraduate Marketers from universities across the UK, and hear what they are up to and what they are planning.

One of the many slides: discussing the many
media platforms
This particular forum was entitled "From offline to online... and keeping them there". It was a great nod to the shift towards digital marketing, but had a strong emphasis on not leaving traditional media (print) behind - sounds like a recipe for integrated marketing if you ask me! The slides provided an overview of the national picture, which showed a decline in Postgraduate recruitment nationally. However we're pleased to share that for our September intake of PGT students we had a 30% increase compared with the previous year - so it's great to see that we're bucking the national trend ;-). Overall it was an engaging and informative session. The forum highlighted what we're already doing really well, and threw up some ideas which we may dabble with, and test, over the coming months to see what impact this has, if any, on our marketing and recruitment strategies.

Back in the office, and it's been all go on the publications front. Not only have we signed off the Mini Undergraduate guide for print, but as of today the main Undergraduate 2015 Prospectus has been approved for print (hurrah!). It'll be making its way over to our printers for tomorrow morning, and then we move swiftly into the print production stage of our schedule. That means there's one more round of proofing standing in the way of the finished product. It'll be ready for the 7 March (ready to be included in the Heist mailing to schools and careers advisers nationally) so we'll keep you posted as to when it's ready for your perusal.

Moving online: Postgraduate Virtual Event
This week has also seen us take part in our third Postgraduate Virtual Open Event - a culmination of 6 weeks of hard campaign work from our Marketing Assistant Clare, as she actioned a lot of marketing activity to drive up enquiries for this event. This year a lot of work was done from our digital counterparts (thank you!) to refresh video content and the way in which we capture data for the event so that we can continue with our conversion efforts post event. Now that the event is over we'll be pulling together all of our stats for an event wash up report, and will be able to make some further recommendations as to how we can improve these events in the future.

There's still no progress in writing awards entries, and we're coming up to the CIPR deadline. And Heist are not far behind; they're already touting their deadline dates. So, now that the main UG publications have been completed, here's hoping we can turn some attention to report writing and demonstrating our success!

Monday, 15 July 2013

And the award goes to...

By Lauren Hague - Marketing Assistant

Look who’s back!

First Monday morning in the new office and my first ever blog post! (please bear this in mind when reading!) As Sarah mentioned in her previous post, I have been doing a whistle stop tour of Central America for the past two and half weeks trying to fit in as much as possible.
From this... Nicaragua - Ometepe
Including a little white water rafting and ziplining – activities that are all very out of character for me but can't say I didn't make the most of my time! I had a great time and met lots of new people but for now back to the real world…

…and to welcome my return (I like to think) the marketing team were invited to the Heist Awards 2013 last week. The Heist Awards are the leading awards for education marketing so we were very proud that as a university we were shortlisted for four awards:

Best Postgraduate prospectus (That’s us!)
Best use of Digital/social Marketing (Digital Marketing team  - shameless plug for their blog)
Best Website (Digital Marketing team)
Best Internal Communication campaign (Learning Resources team)

And I am very proud to say that although we didn’t win Best Postgraduate Prospectus we did win Silver for Best Website (take a look at the award-winning site) and we won Bronze for Best Internal Communication campaign. Bravo Learning Resources and Digital teams!  

To this... Manchester - Heist Awards 2013
It was a great night had by all. The awards had a movie theme to them, complete with ‘fake’ paparazzi on arrival and clapper board place settings, so even though we didn’t win at least we got to rub shoulders with cardboard cut outs of Darth Vader and James Dean so all was not lost! To get an idea of how the evening went check out the Heist Awards and our Postgraduate twitter.

We have a busy and exciting couple of weeks coming up in the Marketing department including more prospectuses and the Clearing campaign getting fully underway (which I am sure you will hear more about as the weeks go by) so we have enlisted the help of an extra team member Scott for the next couple of weeks so he will contributing to our blog soon too so watch this space...

To this... Luton - New home in the new office