It's all new

Hi all. I’m Kylie - another marketing ‘newbie’ having recently joined the University of Bedfordshire as Marketing Officer. As well as being new to the MARC department here and the University itself, I am also new to Luton and the South East in general.

I’m originally from the North East but have been living in the South East (Suffolk) for 19 months and very recently moved to Hertfordshire when I took up my position at the University. So, I've had lots of new things to get used to; new people, new surroundings and new ways of working.

My first three weeks...
I've been working in the MARC department for almost three weeks now, so I'm just starting to find my feet following lots of meetings and reading up on strategies and marketing plans- all really useful stuff! I've really enjoyed my three weeks here- I had a lovely introduction to the marketing team and related departments as well as a yummy welcome lunch on my first day (any excuse to eat pizza). The team are great and I’m really looking forward to working with them as I get stuck in to the workload.

As I approach my fourth week there is a lot going on with work starting on the UCMK prospectus (my first big project as part of the team) as well as open days, campaigns and the new CRM system launching. Lots to keep me busy! 

I’m also slowly working my way around the different campuses- I had my official University induction at Putteridge Bury on Tuesday (what an impressive building!) and I’m visiting our UCMK campus on Monday with my colleague Michelle, so I’m looking forward to seeing what the newest addition to UoB has to offer!

Look forward to updating you all again soon! K

Hot off the press

Very excitingly, a box full of 2015 undergraduate prospectuses arrived in the office yesterday morning. We’re really pleased with the outcome of weeks and weeks of hard work; the die-cut cover has worked well, and the whole thing looks really fresh and colourful.

In other news this week...

I spent a day in London where I attended the CIM Principles of Great Copywriting course.

It was a pretty intensive day of training, but it was full of interesting discussion and creative ideas about how to keep copy accessible while making it fresh and exciting to read.

The course leader told us that if we want to write engaging copy, we must allow ourselves the space to be creative. Something that resonated with all the delegates was Disney’s model for coming up with ideas:

Three people walk into a room. Person one is the dreamer. The dreamer writes down all their thoughts without censoring of filtering them in any way. Person two is the realist; they enter the room and works through all the dreamer’s thoughts, trying to make sense of them and give them some logic, shaping them into a useable idea. Person three is the critic. The critic takes the ideas presented to them and brings up reasonable objections.

We, as writers, should be all three: we should start off by writing down a high volume of our most creative ideas. We probably won’t use them all, but might find one or two ideas that stand out and that we can work on and polish. Writers will always need to think about the practicalities of what they are writing and be ready to accept constructive criticism in order to create the strongest possible end product. 

The course couldn’t have been better timed, just before we start work on the 2015 postgraduate prospectus. Hopefully all the new ideas from training will inspire me to write some great copy.

Happy Friday!

Clare

New month, new starters

By Sarah Hampton, Marketing Manager

Welcome to our new Marketing
Officer, Kylie

For many, the month of March signals the start of spring, and a time of new beginnings. And the same can be said for our very own marketing department. As we get going with a new month we extend a warm welcome to our new Marketing Officer, Kylie Aldridge who has started today. Later this month we'll also be joined by Krystle Hall, our new Campaign Officer. It's a very exciting time as we welcome new members to the team, and get going on lots of exciting new projects. Kylie will be working her way through her induction this week, as she gets to grips with the University environment, and the many teams that make up the MARC department, and so I'm sure you'll be hearing more about this when Kylie posts up her first blog in the comings weeks.

Snapshot from our email
communications - promoting
Project Management

In other news, we've been busy working with the Business School to devise and implement a bespoke small-scale campaign to generate enquiries for the new MSc Project Management (by Distance Learning) course which starts later this March. We've been working to a set budget, and have been actioning a mainly digital marketing plan over the last few weeks. We haven't had much time to work on this, as we usually would like a longer lead time to make any real impact, but we're already starting to see the fruits of our efforts, as the academics keep us informed of the enquiries that are coming through via email as a result of our marketing efforts. Teaching starts week commencing 17 March for this course and so we still have a few weeks for the campaign to continue to take effect. We'll keep you updated on the progress of this.

It's a particularly busy time for us in the marketing team. Now that the UCAS deadline is well and truly out of the way, all of our efforts are focused on conversion, and what we call pre-clearing - a campaign that runs until June to encourage late applications from a mature audience. It also doubles up as the start of our clearing activity, in generating interest amongst those who haven't secured a university place, or may be considering us after the August results are out. Michelle will be sharing more with you about the finer details of the campaign. The visuals have almost been firmed up, the media is being booked in and so you should be seeing this campaign up and around the local area very shortly! Let us know what you think.

Waiting to hear if we've made it into
the short list - fingers crossed!

In other news, after juggling the many marketing tasks we've had going on recently, we finally managed to get an award entry in for the CIPR Excellence awards, and with only a day to spare. We've put in for Best Low Budget Campaign, for some work we did late last year with the Faculty of Education and Sport, to drum up enquiries and applications to our PGT Sport courses. After evaluating the marketing campaign we were successful in increasing applications by 40%. So we're keeping everything crossed as we wait to see whether we've made it into the short-list.

It's a game of Guess Who

By Michelle Ramsumair, Marketing Administrator

It's nice to see what is going on at the campus, but being located off campus we don't get to. So opportunities where we can take a quick wonder round to feel part of the buzz, we head for a meeting there. It amazes me how much we can interact with people but if we were to see them in the street we wouldn't have a clue. I always try to put a face to a voice or name so met with a couple contacts I have been working with when I book directly for media activity for campaigns. That's always a good way to build the relationship, negotiate deals and get to meet new people.

We've never worked with a media agency before so we were not too sure what to expect when we went to London to meet the team. However, they were reassuring and we soon realised just how much they can do. Also, we finally have budget approval for the Pre-Clearing campaign! I just need to rework it to fit and then it's go go GO! It's always a massive team effort to execute these plans successfully and promptly. We do tend to work on the edge here, but will be much better once the Campaigns Officer starts. Next month we have a few new faces to welcome which will be exciting.We're a very welcoming bunch and thanks to Sarah's induction schedule they will feel like part of the team in no time.

I do enjoy sitting at the Marketing team's pod as I got to see the little victory dance my colleague did when she finally signed off the UG 2015 prospectus (no video footage available unfortunately). We work super hard so a celebratory outing is definitely in order. However, hot desking waiting for my PC I now occupy two desks and somehow with the same amount of paperwork on both. I must say for an Administrator I am rather messy.

I have my next CIM exam next week so have been studying for what feels like forever. I know it will all pay off  in the end so just got to keep pushing through. During the stressful times it's always worth having things to look forward to though like one of my closest friend's weddings in Easter and I booked my flight to Israel for the summer. I'm so excited!

Becoming a proof reading pro.

This week seems to be drawing to a close before it’s even started! It’s been really busy - full of interesting new experiences.

On Monday I was out of the office and in London completing the CiM Effective Proofreading course. It was great to be learning again, especially developing skills that will help me do my job more effectively on a day-to-day basis... Bring on the PG Prospectus proofing!

Our course leader shared his years of experience, talking us through lots things to watch out for when we’re proof reading. He also explained lots of writing and proofing methods. Some of the things that stood out to me were:



Follow the University of Bedfordshire style guide.
Our course leader asked us to write down the date and when we each revealed how we had written it, we realised that all eight people in the room had written it differently but that no version was incorrect; this exercise pointed out how important it is for everyone in an organisation to be writing and proofing with our specific style guide in mind. Our style guide is really easy to access on in.beds

Take the sense out of the copy by reading it backwards to begin with.
It is difficult to proof when you are invested in the story so reading it from end to start allows you to thoroughly proof the copy for grammatical and spelling errors. Proofing for sense should come later.

Keep the customer in mind when writing, editing or proofing.
Consider what their greatest challenge is and tailor your copy to address their needs. Keep it simple.

Ask somebody else to proof read your work, and be prepared to proof read for others.

Not only did I leave with loads of tried and tested proof reading methods, but the course was also a really good refresher for spelling, grammar and punctuation meaning that my writing will hopefully benefit lots too.

At the end of the day we each got a certificate. I don't think I've been given a certificate since I was about ten years old so that was a very exciting moment.

On Wednesday I was tasked with meeting and greeting all our candidates at the Campaign Officer interviews. It was not so long ago that I was being questioned by a very similar panel, so I felt nervous for everyone as they arrived! I met some really interesting people throughout what was a very busy day, and I look forward to finding out who the successful interviewee is.

As you can imagine, with all that going on, the week has slipped by very, very quickly! I’m looking forward to a week off next week but before I can relax there’s a lot left to do…

See you on the other side!

Clare

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!

Work hard and...work harder

By Michelle Ramsumair

Recently I attended the CIM Writing an integrated marketing communications plan training day in Euston, London. The title is pretty self explanatory and it’s something we should all be doing in some way but we don't always take the time to step back from the daily grind to really consider exactly why we are doing what we are doing. It was reassuring so see we are on the right track but learnt a lot from the workshop leader and hearing feedback from other organisations in different industries.

We are currently looking to work with a media agency to assist with the logistics of the campaigns. We have never done this before but with the number of campaigns we roll out now it has become more apparent this is needed. The challenge will be making sure everything from the bookings to the artwork is as transparent and integrated as possible. However, here we do enjoy a challenge and for me it’s a new project to sink my teeth into.

We had our first Applicant Open Day this Saturday gone at our Bedford campus which was very successful. I always enjoy working these and helping nervous applicants and parents as much as possible. Everyone enjoyed the day and improvements for this type of event definitely paid off. Our next one is at our Luton campus this Saturday 08 February where more registrants are expected. I think flat shoes are in order again! For further information about our open days feel free to visit www.beds.ac.uk and click '2014 Applicant Open Days' for more details. 

I am currently working on a campaign for Aylesbury to promote the March intake for Adult Nursing. As we haven’t done much promoting for this in the past, it is very interesting to work on as we will be able to better measure and review throughout as it is very specific. If you know anyone who maybe interested why not recommend they come along to our healthcare open day on Saturday 15 February at our Aylesbury campus.

With all the above going on it's important to just break away, maybe to some scenic views and fresh air. I was either rather brave or silly but I decided to take a trip to The Downs on what was possibly the windiest day of the week. Enjoy the view!