Passed out

What a nail biting few weeks. After months of hard work it was finally crunch time and I was promised the results of my PG Diploma in Digital Marketing with the IDM would be with me by Friday 5th September. Monday came and went. No email. Then Tuesday and Wednesday. By Thursday morning I was getting pretty edgy and so too were my course mates whom I kept in touch with via our LinkedIn group. Then (after much manual browser refreshing) the email finally appeared in my inbox!

I literally jumped for joy! To receive a credit was beyond my wildest dreams meaning I could add some more letters after my name (see my profile on this blog) and more importantly enjoy the champagne and takeaway pizza my wife had promised me if I passed!

I can honestly say that it was all worth the late nights and stress and now I can't wait until the graduation ceremony (my first in over ten years) on 7th November at the Royal Geographical Society in London. A massive thanks to everyone at the IDM for their help and support...

Our latest campaign visual
with a focus on our alumni

In other news we are finally winding down on our Clearing activity and are now about to go live on our Winter Campaign (tentatively entitled 'Discover') which is due to run until 15th January 2015. This means that we're due to spend the following week in a frenzy of digital activity: 

• Creating a campaign landing page
• Adding the images to the homepage
• Editing and animating a campaign video
• Setting up seven different PPC campaigns
• Designing and distributing a number of MPUs, Leaderboards and Skyscrapers
• Finalising a Social Media content strategy

It's going to be a busy one so we'll definitely need a constant supply of tea and coffee. We're at the stage now where we've been experimenting a bit with making our landing pages work better on mobile and the media split we're decided on is almost wholly dictated by lessons learned from our previous campaigns (Clearing has taught us A LOT!) We've shared out the responsibility for the above activity amongst the team and hope to have everything live by next Monday.

This isn't to say that we don't still like to try new things and as part of our promotions for our upcoming Postgraduate Open Day we've started trialling some LinkedIn advertising. I've personally heard mixed reports on its success rate so the only way to truly find out is to run some small advertising ourselves!

In other developments I've been tasked with creating a bespoke online  Funnelback search (similar to our course finder) for our documents. This is in conjunction with a project to standardise how we name and tag documents across the University so has also included the need to create a number of help sheets and tutorial videos for staff using our CMS. The finished result should be up and running soon and the idea is that it will fulfill both the needs of staff looking for documents on our intranet and our external auditors.

Finally, I attended a really positive meeting chaired by our Vice Chancellor last week where I had the chance to demo our website to him and go through some of the recent developments. We have a few small things to work on with our online messaging but overall he was extremely happy with how the project is being managed and the outcomes we're achieving. I made sure I passed this praise on to the team as sometimes it's useful to know that the person at the top is impressed with the job we're doing and provides that extra impetus to keep driving forward...