We're feeling simply the Beds. with another award accolade

Sarah De Guzman, Marketing Manager

After spending a week in sunny Las Vegas, USA, it's back to the not so sunny Luton, and a mountain of emails and campaign work to catch up on.

Another accolade to add to
the marketing shelf

Whilst ploughing through the hundreds of emails (yes really, and I was only gone for a week!) I happened to stumble across one particular email which caught my attention - from UKBA - the UK Blog Awards.

A while back, Andy our Market Research Manager and I decided on a bit of a whim to enter this here blog for an award, to see how we fared amongst the sector and our fellow marketing peers and HE professionals. I was pretty happy to see that whilst we didn't secure the big win, we did receive a 'Highly Commended' recognition from the judges.

It was great to see that we'd made the short-list in the first place as it was very competitive. There were 2,000 entries submitted for the award, and 79,000 public votes were cast resulting in our Marketing Blog beating off stiff competition to make it into the top ten short list. So we're very pleased with the result and to make it that far, considering our humble blogging beginnings.

UKBA sent us an email notifying us of the big result:

"Congratulations on being awarded highly commended at the UK Blog Awards. The judges assessed your Blog against a rigorous criteria of: Design, Style, Content, Marketing, and Usability which was then assessed against five sub-criteria’s. Some of our judges have said that the criteria is the most intense that they have critiqued against. Therefore, you should be super proud of your highly commended blog achievement!" - And indeed we are!

So, a big thank you to everyone who voted to help us secure the short-list, and we'll be sure to continue to share our marketing updates and insight and to build on the good work here, ready for UKBA 2017, next year!

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.