It's Hannah here - it's been a little while since I contributed to our team blog, partly because Paul has much more interesting things to say, and partly because I have been out and about all over the campuses trying to coordinate the filming of a new University film!

I guess those of you in the know will be experiencing a sharp intake of breath at the mere thought of seamlessly organising four faculties, 19 different academic departments, a Students' Union and more than five locations - but actually this time around it is all going pretty well (famous last words...) I have a lot of 'virtual' contact with students via social media, which is one of the best bits of my job, and it's been good to get out of the office and to talk to some of our students face to face!

Under construction: the new PG Centre
I first worked on this project in 2010, just after I joined the Uni, and I suppose this time I know more people, have more friends in different offices and, most importantly, we have even more to show off. The new accommodation has opened, the PG Centre is almost finished (see photo from the tour I managed to wangle my way on to) and we have a number of new facilities that should make for a great visual spectacle (fingers crossed!).

What's more, we're working with a company who really seem to understand what Bedfordshire is all about and be enthusiastic about promoting what's on offer here. After a number of promising meetings with some very good production teams, we opted for Spectrecom for a number of reasons - including an additional angle on filming which we're really looking forward to seeing in the first edit! (More on that in future blogs...)

Video is undoubtedly one of the most powerful tools we have at our disposal (the last version of the film had over 25,000 views in less than a year) but I think it can sometimes be difficult to approach it in an analytical 'marketingy' way. For this update project, we are focusing on the role the film will play in our wider conversion strategy, in terms of social engagement, online PR and mobile marketing, and the metrics by which we will judge its success as a project.

In other news, I have also been writing our submission for the CIM Marketing Excellence Awards, which gave me a chance to really interrogate the part social and video had to play in our clearing campaign, and produced some interesting findings to inform our campaigns going forward. So, we'll keep you updated and hopefully all our hard work will be rewarded with a night of celebrations on 6 March next year...watch this space!   

  
As well as our main University website there are a number of other sites which the Digital Marketing Team look after. The first is our staff intranet (in.beds) and there's also the dedicated Library website which is managed by their Web and Publications Officer.

We also have 45 individual micro sites (or 'project sites' as we call them). These vary in purpose, with the majority of them promoting various conferences and University funded projects. They are all setup and monitored by us and then the relevant authors are given access to go in and add content, which we approve.

Since our new website launch last year they've kind of been neglected so we felt it was about time we had a proper look at bringing them up to speed. so, the first thing we did was... Audit!

This threw up some very interesting results, especially with regards to the amount of page views and user engagement. Therefore, we decided that the first thing we needed to do was liaise with our authors to close the sites that weren't getting hits and prioritise the most visited ones.

It's always good if you can backup arguments with solid evidence, and the stats provided by Google Analytics have proved invaluable when undertaking with authors about possibly closing their sites.

The work has now begun on re-styling them all and we're really pleased with how they're all going to look. The new style is in keeping with the main site and now allows individual banners to be added. There's also loads of options to customise each site differently with 5 colours and various social media integration options.

Take a look at our Tilda Goldberg Centre site for a sneak preview of how they're all going to be looking as we roll out the new, refined design.
Last week I was asked to give a half hour presentation to our Marketing and Communications teams. The focus was to be 'Social Media do's and don'ts' and it was intended to touch upon what we are currently doing as a University, as well as looking at best practice in general.

This was actually a pretty wide brief, so I had a few problems condensing it down to the allotted time! The presentation itself went really well and there were also some great questions and debate afterwards from the audience.

The plan is, that this should kick off our crusade in the Digital Marketing Team to increase staff engagement with Social Media. We're also planning on running regular technical training sessions in the future, which will tie in with the publication of our revised Social Media guidelines.

Take a look at my (abridged) presentation below. We'll be publishing the full version (with audio) on our internal staff site soon:


Our Clearing 2012 website section
Phew! It's been a hectic few weeks at the University - especially for my team, who have been heavily involved in Clearing. This year, we were expecting students to take a more measured approach to choosing their places, and although it has been a slightly slower process, things have been very steady. After the launch of our Clearing site section on 16th August we were poised for a lot of visits but had no idea quite how busy our site would become.

Digital Marketing is definitely not a sector where you set up the campaign and sit back to see how it runs - it involves constant monitoring and refining... and that's what we've been doing!

We've also been involved in a number of other marketing avenues during this time, including some of the following (which you may have come across):
    An example of some of the daily
    statistics provided by SiD
  • Google AdWords
  • Facebook campaigns
  • Telephone monitoring
  • Daily YouTube videos
  • Audio adverts
  • Online chat
  • Progress reports for the Clearing room
  • Website MPU, skyscraper and leaderboard adverts
What has proved particularly useful for us is constant benchmarking on which campaigns have been driving the most traffic. This year, we've enlisted the help of SiD (Statistics into Decisions) to help us, and they've done a truly fantastic job of collating all of our data and turning it into something meaningful where we can see what is working for us, our prospective student's overall journey, and exactly where, why and how an application to us took place.

So what exactly were our findings? Well, firstly, Google AdWords is a very powerful tool indeed, and drove massive amounts of traffic to our site. I'd recommend any serious Digital marketeer who has not already done so to take part in Google's Certification programme to find out how to fully make use of it. Also, Facebook has proved itself to be invaluable (especially the targeted advertising). We've seen a massive rise in our Twitter interactions this year too which has started to highlight to others at the University the importance of a fast, friendly and accurate response to queries.

Like I said, it's been a longer process this year, but a very rewarding and successful one. Courses have been filling up fast and we are now down to just having a few places still available. We're looking forward to using our findings on this campaign to inform what we do next year so we can continue to market ourselves to the right people. The power of social media is becoming increasingly evident, along with the amount of website visits being made from mobile devices but what really matters is the content people arrive at at their journey's end.
Here in the Digital Marketing Team, we don't just concentrate on improving our website. We also take responsibility for setting in motion all of our Digital Marketing Campaigns and look after the University-wide social media provision.

This week we'll be taking part in a very significant event in the Higher Education calendar... Clearing! This really kicks into gear immediately after exam results are published (this year that'll be Thursday 16th August). Clearing helps applicants who have not secured a place at university or college, for whatever reason, to find vacancies on higher education courses. We'll all be banding together to make sure we offer the best service possible to students wanting information on joining our courses in September.

Posters depicting our three key messages
Our Marketing campaign this year focusses on three simple, key messages - the job opportunities available to graduates, the financial support and our great facilities. The print advertising we'll be running across the county is quite minimalist and aims to direct people at our website - and here's where we come in! The Clearing section of our site contains all the information students need to get in touch with us and we'll be updating it daily with key content. This will include: an up to date list of the courses we're still recruiting for, FAQs and links to our accommodation and campus tour pages. We'll then feature new interviews each day with students who have come through Clearing themselves, like this one:



We're also running extensive UCAS, Facebook, Student Room and Google AdWords campaigns as well as a Spotify audio advert so I'm sure you'll see us somewhere online in the next week!

We'd like to encoarage all potential students to also speak to us via our Twitter feed which we're relaying into our Clearing room via the great little online tool Visible Tweets. This will keep our operators up to date with what's going on.

Of course, the great thing about Digital Marketing is how easy it is to track, and this year we're really stepping up a gear. I'll be providing daily reports of the digital and print campaign's effectiveness. This in itself is a massive project, so will no doubt have a Blog post of it's own in the very near future. In the meantime, all the best for those of you who are getting your results on Thursday. Remember, we're here waiting to talk you through your options and next steps!
Now our website has been live for almost a year it's time to properly start analysing our statistics, look at tweaking the design, do some user testing and really look at how we can improve it yet further.

One of the main and most used features on our homepage is definitely our course finder:
All of our courses at your fingertips!
A lot of development and testing has previously gone into this and we've been working with the team at Funnelback to make it a really user friendly search solution.

This led us to looking at the one big issue we have - being a multi-campus university (five in total) displaying related courses in the search has proven very difficult at times. At one stage, all courses with the same name but at different campuses yielded the exact same results. For example, a search for 'Accountancy' bought up five related courses also all called 'Accountancy' - with no indicator they were different! Definitely not the best for students weighing up the options of what to study...

That's more like it!
Well, finally we have a solution! Using the content collected from SITs (our student record system) our clever little course finder can now display the campus as well as the course title in the related courses section. This makes it much more intuitive, gives the user a much more tailored experience and helps them easily navigate between courses.

So there you have it, related courses that really are related. We think the styling looks nice too, and this is just the first step. We already have a project spec written up to improve the tabbed site search and include our many YouTube videos in the results - we have all the great and up to date content so why not use it?

Watch this space for many ongoing developments. It's an exciting time for the University of Bedfordshire website...
Fun, true...and can be used to cover up 'to-do' lists
A quick intro, as this is my first go in the team blog - I'm Hannah and my role in the gang is digital marketing assistant, sweepstake coordinator and deputy pod tea maker. We'll be taking it in turns to share what we have going on, and from me you can expect ramblings mainly around social media and video. But I'm starting with yesterday's inagural European Users' Summit, where Paul and I joined a 100-ish strong group of Squiz and Funnelback clients and staff. Despite fate (and broken ticket machines at Hitchin) conspiring against us, we arrived just in time to grab a cuppa and a pastry courtesy of the amazing hospitality team (shout out!) at the very grand English Speaking Union.

We'd decided beforehand to take the 'Design and Technology' track in the morning and 'Web Solutions' in the afternoon. Design and tech sounded really fun, and allowed us to be geeky without fear of mockery from our colleagues! And web solutions speaks for itself - if you work in HE you'll know where we're coming from there! There were plenty of familiar faces from the Squiz London offices presenting, and it was also good to hear from John-Paul Syriatowicz, the MD from the Australian offices in the keynote presentation.

So there was loads to learn, plenty of people from other unis to meet and lots of new products to find out about (credit goes to Squiz for not plugging them too heavily!)

Highlights for me? Aside from Matt's declaration that "your finger is not as pointy as a cursor!" when discussing the challenges of designing for mobile, there was a great runthrough of Squiz's Roadmap system, as well as a demo of Edit+, which by the looks of things could make a big improvement to how easy colleagues around the University find it to edit their own content.

But the most enjoyable and relevant part was kept until the end of the afternoon session, where Dave the Trainer (as he is always called here) ran through using HTML5 for Matrix forms and covered off the main differences between what is currently supported by each browser. We definitely picked up some tips that should improve our forms, which is pretty important to us given that form submission is one of our main response channels, in terms of registration for open days and recruitment events, requests for prospectuses, and registering of interest in future courses.

One last extremely important part of yesterday, the I ♥ Web and I ♥ Search competition - which, as you can see from the below, was won (with our loyal support) by Duncan, who I was sat next to, and who shamelessly stole all our jellybeans in his bid for victory. (And he never even shared his champagne prize...!!) 



 
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