Roll up, roll up

Krystle Hall, Campaign Officer

Things are really heating up on the Campaigns front. It is that time of year, much like the elusive eclipse, when all the campaigns align in the same spot, at the same time. And it’s all a matter of spinning plates. January starts, January Starts, hold on January Start ooo there goes Winter, keep it spinning, and UCMK’s still turning, but watch it, waaaatch it, let’s get Aylesbury and Pre-Clearing going, don’t you fall Winter annnnnd with the left arm Clearing! Phew!

I have been pulling new advertising  ideas out of the hat for Winter Campaign to enhance our current activity. With the help of the digital and design teams I have been refreshing the artwork to promote our latest open days. The digital team has produced some beautiful and highly festive designs for our online copy featuring snowflakes; look how shiny it is…

Next up is January Starts Campaign. The artworks done, the PO’s have been raised, the tracking is in place. It’s bold, its dynamic, the ultimate strong man. With online display, google, email and print, there is sure to be something for everyone.

With much leaping, flipping and jumping the UCMK Campaign has been booked and is in full swing. Witness the bus ads fly by, coffee cups whirr and lamppost banners sway. 

Pre-Clearing is no joke. With the evaluation complete, planning and artwork concept in hand, let’s see just how many platforms we can shove into that clown car.

Watch me walk the Aylesbury Campaign tightrope with Adult Nursing on one side and Paramedic Science on the other. Two plans have been carefully constructed based on extensive analysis to promote our Adult Nursing course starting in March 2015. We also have a new Paramedic Science course running, designed in partnership with the East of England Ambulance Service Trust and Health Education East of England. I have been busy organising the photography of students and graduates for the artwork.

I have only just begun taming the beast that is Clearing. We ran an enormous campaign earlier this year.  I am in the process of pulling together all the data collected to analyse which mediums were most successful. This set us in good stead for campaign planning. We are always working on ways to be better here in MARC and we are conducting evaluations and analysis earlier and earlier so that we can produce the best strategy possible. We have already started booking in activity for August 2015 to make sure that we purchase quality advertising ahead of the competition.

And for my next trick I will be working on a new logo and branding project for our community radio station, Radio LaB. We have created and narrowed it down to 3 logos which our Market Research team are in the process of testing. More news on that to follow.

So be amazed, look on in awe at all the acts we have in store…

Krystle

Keeping it short and sweet (like me)

I would have liked to have started my blog with a big mention of our recent award wins, but Sarah beat me to it! However, I couldn’t write a whole blog without a little nudge to our recent successes- well done team! And I was able to attend my first award ceremony, which was fun, of course!

Well there is lot’s going on at the moment, but I won’t touch on the smaller stuff, perhaps just a little mention on a small task…THE UNDERGRADUATE 2016 PROSPECTUS!

Since my last post we've started work on the prospectus designs, working with a new design agency, and we've been pulling together the content (old and new) and updating our messages to reflect our verbal branding messages. So far it’s coming along well; the designs are starting to come together and the content is too!

My other biggies are working on newsletters for our 2015 applicants, finishing our January start student guide, working on PG virtual event plans and writing reports and evaluations for our recent Open Days.

Recently, we've also been sourcing our student bloggers for 2014-15. Over the next 2-3 weeks, we will have one student per course area blogging on a weekly basis about their experience of the University and what they've been up to each week. It’s a great experience for the bloggers and it also provides great insight into student life for students interested in studying here; straight from the horse’s mouth!

My desk is starting to gather dust…

I’ve feel I’ve been gallivanting around the country a lot lately, on training, of course. I attended a CRM meeting in Liverpool, to look at the developments within the programme that we use. This was a really good meeting, I met some of the team from Azorus (the company that provide our CRM system) and they presented some of the work they are developing at the moment. We also had discussions within the group around what else we would like the system to do, so we can further develop it around our needs.

I also attended a PG forum in Manchester, which looked at PG marketing and how to increase conversion. This was a great meeting and provided a good networking opportunity for me, and I was able to speak to other universities and institutes that were experiencing similar things to us. There was also some case study presentations from other unis and a student panel, which were really informative. I left feeling inspired.

And, on top of the above travelling, I’m back up to Manchesteragain tonight for a friend’s wedding!

Speak soon,

K

Full of PRide after awards win

Sarah Hampton, Marketing Manager

After a week off in the sunshine, I'm finally back in the office and what a first few days back it's been.

Two Gold Awards for Team UoB!

On Friday the Marketing team got glammed up and headed on over to the CIPRide Awards, as we had been short-listed for not one, but two coveted awards. As I was still over in Gran Canaria, I sat with cocktail in hand, in the hotel bar (the only place with wifi!) sporadically refreshing my twitter feed to see how we had done. Much to my delight, we scooped a Gold award for Best Publication - for our 2014 Undergraduate Prospectus. After whooping in the bar and celebrating with a few more cocktails, I was surprised to see that we had won another Gold award - this was a special judges prize (and the second consecutive year that we had won this award) for the Best Use of Research, Planning, Measurement and Evaluation.

Celebrating on stage with an
award win

This really was a great achievement for the Marketing team, and really is testament to the hard work that is undertaken throughout the year. A lot of time and effort is placed into producing our university publications, but in also evaluating the performance of all work, and assessing the ROI and value in all that we do. The team I'm told, had a great evening out, although were left a little on the hungry side after letting the canapes pass them by.

Gold for Best Publication: @uniofbeds for their Undergraduate 2015 Prospectus #PRideATC
— CIPR East Anglia (@CIPR_EastAnglia) November 7, 2014

Midland Hotel - Manchester

And just when you think it can't get any better! Paul and Lauren from the Digital team, alongside Beverley and I headed off to the Midland Hotel in Manchester only yesterday, as we were up for another award. This time the Marketing team was up for Best Faculty Campaign at the Prospects Postgraduate Awards for our work done last year to increase applications to PGT Sport courses.

Celebrating our award win

After a hearty three course dinner, and a good catch up with our contacts at Prospects, the awards were upon us. We were up in the penultimate category, against three other universities and so left to sweat it out until the end. As the speaker started to talk about the winner, I could see that Paul was already celebrating - I of course had missed the subtle references of a 'photo finish' - which of course was relating to our sport campaign. Once it was announced we cheered as we made our way up to the stage to collect our very first award for a marketing campaign.

Award for Best Faculty Campaign

This brings us to a close for this years' award season. So, until next year it's back to work on our 2016 Undergraduate Prospectus, as well as our main corporate campaigns: Winter, Jan Start and Pre-Clearing - and who knows, maybe next year, it could be one of these initiatives that we'll be celebrating... :-)

Back to work

Having spent last week exploring Berlin and carving pumpkins to celebrate hallowe'en, I’ve arrived back in the office feeling energised and ready to work, which is just as well really because there is so much to do!

The East Side Gallery, Berlin

A day off and a pumpkin later...

Now I’m back I’ll be turning my attention to the 2016 undergraduate prospectus. Kylie has been working hard on the flat plan - the working document that we’ll be able to refer to throughout the production process. Once that’s complete I, along with the rest of the team, will get involved in copywriting for the general sections of the prospectus. Writing is always a highlight as it's a chance to get creative.   

This week I’ll also be spending some time writing a selection of short news articles for our subject newsletters. With the help of academics who have shared some interesting stories with me, I’ve been able to pull together some of the highlights of the past year. Now it’s a case of writing them up into striking news items to help with our conversion efforts.

Over the next week or so I will be having meetings with potential new student bloggers. Our student bloggers come recommended by their lecturers, and will be blogging on a weekly basis about their time at the University of Bedfordshire. It's a great (and paid!) experience for them, and it means we gain lots of valuable content that allows us to showcase the student experience here to our future students. Hopefully we'll have the blogs up and running in the next few weeks.

This week marks the end of my first year at the University. It's hard to believe really but, when I look back on all the things I've learned so far, all the deadlines I've reached, and all the work I've helped to produce, I feel quite proud of what I've achieved. And, now that I've done it all once, finger crossed the second time round will be even better!

Clare

Once upon a midnight dreary

Krystle Hall, Campaign Officer

As it was Halloween on Friday and you may have noticed my mild obsession with macabre literature…

“and the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting, on the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door…” – bit of Poe (The Raven) there for you.  Bringing a bit of culture to the blog.

…I jumped at the chance to go and see a screening of Danny Boyle’s Frankenstein in London last week.  It was the version with Benedict Cumberbatch (‘that one off of BBC’s Sherlock”) as Dr Frankenstein and Jonny Lee Miller (‘the bloke who dated Angelina Jolie when she bared semblance to a vampire’) as the Monster.  It was standard Boyle, amazing.  It was really visceral, cathartic and sombre; compelling.  If you get a chance, go and see it.

I hope that you all had an excellent Halloween, whatever you got up to.  I ended up going to a local fun fair and fire work display which was great fun. 

The Marketing Team never ceases to amaze me with their hidden talents; our resident Marketing Manager Sarah, emerged as quite the skilled pumpkin carver; who knew.  Ask her to see pictures of her Tigger creation.   

Camp-whaaaaat-CAMPAIGNS

So “what’s the latest in the world of campaigns” I hear to cry, well I’ll tell you.

We are in the middle of delivering a robust, multichannel Winter Campaign which will run until 15 January 2015 UCAS application deadline.  We are using a range of platforms including bus streetliners, cinema 6 sheets, digital display ads, open day listings, Google search, display, keywords  and retargeting, along with Facebook promoted posts.  We also have a range of online profiles on UCAS, Complete University Guide, Student Room, and Hotcourses.

I have been working closely with our in-house teams, our advertising agency SMRS and the media as part of live reporting to closely track an optimise activity.

Beyond Winter Campaign, we are about to launch activity for the January Start and UCMK Campaigns.  I have been busy finalising plans, organising media and arranging artwork for those.

After that will come Pre-Clearing.  I am meeting with the new appointed design agency for campaigns, Fabrik, on Thursday to get the ball rolling with the artwork concept.  I will be finalising the creative brief in readiness for our meeting.  I am very excited about this new collaboration and am looking forward to get going.  I am also arranging graduates and putting together a schedule for the photography.

I have been working with the Market Research team to arrange focus groups to get feedback on the Clearing Campaign and the current Winter Campaign.  We will be running interactive workshop sessions on Wednesday to get student feedback on our artwork and on competitor campaign activity.  This will feed into future briefs.  I will let you know the outcomes.

A really important part of my job is evaluating campaigns.  By using all the data at my disposal I am able to analyse activity and reflect on what worked, what didn’t and recommend progressive measures.  I have recently been working on the Aylesbury and Pre-Clearing evaluations, the recommendations of which will feed into the brief for this year’s plan of activity.

There’s a lot going on as ever so I better get back to it.  

Later skaters,

Krystle

All this talk of 'winter' is getting me excited for Christmas!!

Some of our Recruitment Team
and student Ambassadors waiting to greet
PG students on campus  

From recent blog posts, you will certainly be aware that we have now launched our Winter campaign. Winter is definitely the most used word around the MARC office at the moment. The teams have done a great job pulling it all together and the artwork looks really good.

We’re also in the middle of the open day rush. Since my last blog we’ve held a PG open day on 16 October and another UG open day on 18 October at our Bedford campus. Our Bedford event saw 183 prospective students on our campus, not to manetion schools we had in attendence. There is also another UG open day this Saturday (25 October) at our Luton campus. And let’s not forget our November open days too (15 November, Bedford campus and 22 November, Luton campus). Once the November open days have taken place, we have a couple of months before the next events, so we can evaluate the pre-January events, which will influence our planning for the post-January open day events. So far we’ve seen some good sign up numbers , so hopefully this will continue. We currently have 656 student signed up to our event this Saturday.

Photography
As part of the prospectus project, we have our annual photography session this week and next. We have five days of photography booked in total, giving us the opportunity to get new student profiles and photographs of our new and upgraded facilities. As our prospectuses hold a lot of images, it’s really important that we get the images right, to really show off our campuses and reflect what we can offer our students. A picture speaks a thousand words, as they say! Clare spent two days with the photographer this week to get shots of students and video interviews and I will be working with photographers next week to get shots of our facilities and campuses. I’m excited to be art directing the shoots, as it’s the first time I’ve done photography at the University and it will give me the opportunity to meet some more of our academics and students, as well as experiencing some of the facilities that I have not yet seen.

My lovely CIM certificate

My CIM Training

I recently went to London for a one day CIM course on how to write an integrated marketing plan. I was really keen to attend the session as one of my main responsibilities in the team is putting together our open day plans, which this year need to produce a 25% increase in footfall. The day was quite useful, it was a good refresh to some of the things I learnt at university (which seems like forever ago) and also gave me a few things to think about. Now that I have been at Bedfordshire for eight months and I have been writing integrated open day plans for the past five months, it was really good to leave the course feeling reassured that what we do in terms of our planning is really robust, and we really use insight and evaluations from previous events to influence our future plans, which is key to improving. I also got a little certificate at the end of the day, to show I had taken part in the course.

Welcome to Maria

And finally, on behalf of the marketing team, I’d like to give a warm welcome to Maria, our new marketing administrator, who will be working with the team two days a week for the next six weeks. She is a recent University of Bedfordshire PG graduate and we look forward to working with her in the coming weeks!

Speak soon,

K

Graduates, gavels and a glowing awards 'do

Sarah Hampton, Marketing Manager

Going live with our Winter visuals.

You'll see from previous blog posts that winter has well and truly arrived. And we're not talking seasons here. The central marketing team has been working behind the scenes for a few months now to create our new Winter campaign artwork (above), which I'm sure you'll agree looks fantastic and takes the 'journey' concept that one step further, as we show some of our successful graduates reflecting on their success and how it all began back at Bedfordshire. We're really excited as our campaign goes live across the many print and digital platforms. However, as we firmly move into our Winter campaign, it seems that not everyone can bear to part with our creative Clearing concept just yet...

Studying Law in Beds ;-)

Much to the amusement of the marketing team, this years' visual has really taken the media by storm and has really got people talking; from a select few websites taking issue with our use of a gavel and wig as props to represent a stereotyped image of Law, and hysterically likening the wig to 'the one worn by the Prince Regent in Blackadder the Third', through to the Guardian placing us in the top 5 for campaign faux pas' for the use of what they deem to be a 'risque hasthag'. It's certainly been an interesting few months for us here at Bedfordshire as we take on a more confident and commercial advertising approach to increase stand out in a crowded market place, whilst still having a little fun along the way!

For us, the Clearing campaign has been a resounding success, and so whether you love it or hate it, we can safely say that you knew about it. What did you think of this years campaign?

Good luck to @uniofbeds post grad sports dept, finalist in best faculty campaign category #pgawards
— postgradawards (@postgradawards) September 30, 2014

Short-listed for Best Faculty Campaign.

In other news, I was really excited to see that we've been short-listed for yet another award, at this years' Prospects Postgraduate Awards. We're up against three other universities including Brunel University London, Cambridge Judge Business School, and the University of Sunderland in the category of Best Faculty Campaign - for our work undertaken last summer to promote our PGT Sport courses, which generated an overall increase in applications by more than 60% compared to the previous year.

The awards dinner is taking place in November up in Manchester, so we'll keep you posted as to how we do. Keep everything crossed for us!