As someone who was bought up in Southampton that's a pretty hard blog title to write!

For a change I thought I'd write a post about the work we do to support other teams in the department. As part of MARC (Marketing, Admissions, Recruitment and Communications) there is a lot of cross over in what we do in attracting and helping students. My team's role has overlaps with all of the above functions whether it be assisting them with their web presence, answering questions on social media, monitoring brand mentions or attending recruitment fairs...

The two day Hampshire recruitment fair
All staff in the MARC department are required to attend at least one UCAS convention a year as it's a great chance to get out of the office and to shadow our Recruitment team. When choosing which fair I should attend I decided to go back to where it all began and head back down south to the University of Portsmouth (where I studied many moons ago!)

So Michelle (from the Marketing team) and I set off on a Wednesday night armed with boxes of pens and enquiry forms for the three hour journey to Old Portsmouth. It was definitely a help that the area had not changed at all since I was last there (or the university) and we found our hotel with no trouble at all knowing that we'd need a restful night!
After a hearty breakfast we then set off to the student union and I enjoyed giving Michelle a tour of my old haunts (not sure she did!) We were stand number ten (being 'B' in the alphabet is a definite positive for our positioning) and our haulage company had already delivered our stands for us to build along with our prospectuses and freebies. What I found interesting was how old fashioned these fairs were, with most universities just having a branded table cloth and a pile of prospectuses. I decided to setup my laptop with our corporate film playing which did draw a lot of attention throughout the day. Then the hordes of prospective students descended...!

Roll up, roll up! Between us we managed
to get over 100 enquiries a day
It was definitely a busy few days with coach loads of students from local colleges walking the floors. Some were great with a real idea of what they wanted to study and where and we absolutely smashed our target of completed enquiry forms.  We also were one of the only stands to be giving out freebies (light bulb stress balls and tote bags) and I took sympathy on some people carrying arm fulls of prospectuses and just gave them a bag anyway.

Day two was actually busier and were both pretty tired from an epic pool tournament at the hotel the night before (no comment on who won). Again, I found it interesting to see how we had a bigger focus on collecting data than some other universities and also which of our subjects were most popular among our enquirers. We also had to tell a number of people where Bedfordshire is - I'm guessing that's not such a problem for more local fairs!

HMS Warrior (1860)
We finished at 3pm on the second day which left a bit of time for sightseeing at the historic dockyard and a decent meal at Gunwharf Quays. I also managed to find some HMS Victory rock to bring back to the team from one of the gift shops (ever the tourist...)

There's no doubt that these fairs are very important in raising awareness of our university and for gathering leads. My main feeling was that there is also a lot of scope to try and improve the interactive nature of the stands like at similar trade shows. I'm sure that with the sector becoming increasingly competitive this is something we're likely to see in the future.

For my next post I'll be returning to familiar territory as we film our second cinema advert on Wednesday. We've got a slightly different style for this one so watch this space for a full production diary!
This is usually the time of year that we can experiment a bit with our marketing activities to get some customer insight on what generates the best return on investment (and what doesn't!) Usually this means we trial a few small online campaigns to allow us develop a really robust plan for our clearing activity. However, we've just hit upon something which not only could teach us a lot but also allows us an even better way to reach our target demographic.


We've all seen examples of bad
re-marketing that can literally
take hours to remove or rectify!
Re-marketing is something we've been using on a small scale for a while. This is basically where a potential customer visits a website and is then targeted with their adverts forever on any site they subsequently visit. I know from experience that this can definitely get pretty annoying. The user feels like they're being stalked and in many cases it does more harm, to the brand using it, than good. I've definitely seen lots of bad examples of this in the past (mentioning no names!) where one innocent Google search destroys your browsing experience forever.

This is why, up until now, we've been cautious with our approach. However, a recent UI Refresh from Google has made it a lot easier to target meaningful adverts and track them in Google Analytics. As usual, we've been working with Ranjit at Statistics Into Decisions to get this up and running on our site and by just adding a bit of code we're now good to go.


One day's worth of data showing the
common interests of our site visitors
After spending a few days looking at this there's very little we can't do all from our analytics account. For example, we now get really good data on the sites our visitors go to after they go to ours. this can show us anything from their common interests to which of our competitors they are looking at for which courses. One thing I was very pleased to see was the amount of 'Movie lovers' we have who visit us - meaning our cinema advert was money well spent!

The segmentation options are always very simple to use and we can either import our existing lists or create new ones. The one option we definitely will use is targeting only people who visit key areas of the site (i.e 'Open days') and we'll ensure that there's a clear cap on the length of time they see our adverts with useful information.
We already learning a great deal about the type of person who is interested in coming to Bedfordshire to compliment our current data set and with the ability to add a myriad of filters can ensure we don't do more harm than good and oversell with blanket advertising across the internet!

In other news the team has been monitoring and tweaking our pre-clearing campaign which seems to be performing pretty well and I've been continuing to champion the cause for the right usage of social media. In particular I've been working on a report for our International Centre who are investigating a strategy to engage and highlight further their great research. The report looks at mentions, sentiment and common themes in order for them to see how they are currently perceived and how they can keep up the momentum that culminated in their recent Queen's award.


Portsmouth spinnaker - I remember
voting for this design way back in 1999!
Last of all, this week will see a couple of interesting new initiatives within the team, as on Tuesday we're meeting with Spectrecom to discuss an exciting new video project (more on that in the next post). I'm also off to 'Pompey' on Thursday and Friday to do my bit in assisting with staffing a stall for a recruitment fair. In our department we're obliged to do one of these a year and the reason I chose this one is that I studied in Portsmouth for my degree. I'm intending to take a bit of time to also see how much it's changed down south and re-visit some of my old haunts. I hope Kingfisher is still there as they used to serve the best fish and chips on the south coast!
I'm sure the majority of readers will have seen the University of Bedfordshire absolutely everywhere in the past few weeks.

Firstly, we actually managed to go 'viral'! Personally I don't much care for the phrase and it's definitely true that if you're trying to 'go viral' then you most likely will fall at the first hurdle. Our particular experience all started with a news story focusing on the work of one of our Applied Linguistic Professors, Stephen Bax. His research has made him the first professional linguist to crack the code of the 600 year old Voynich manuscript using an analytical approach.

The Voynich manuscript - for
years many people thought
the writing could be nonsense
Obviously, this is a pretty big deal and also has a great appeal to fans of Indiana Jones and suchlike. However, we didn't quite realise what a large impact this work would have on a worldwide scale. On Thursday 21st February, after sharing the story on our social media channels as usual my team noticed a sudden increase in the amount of social shares. We then had a look at our website analytics to discover that we were averaging new 400 visitors a second!

This was mainly due to the story being picked up in America and shared on Reddit (a site which allows users to vote the top stories to the front page). This proved to be only the beginning as Professor Bax begun his media tour by appearing everywhere from the BBC to the New Scientist and the Daily Mail.

Needless to say we sprung straight into action, posting Google Ads next to blog mentions, recording sentiment/traffic sources and ensuring we were capturing all the buzz to report back and get maximum publicity of the story. To date we have received (and still growing):
That is one MASSIVE spike in traffic!
It dwarfed our usual (quite impressive)
amount of visits in no time
  • Reddit: Over 3,000 user comments 
  • Facebook: 37,000 likes 
  • Twitter: 7538 individual mentions 
  • Unique news story page views: 363,037 
If you do a quick Google search you'll see we're still getting mentioned!

The second big event for us was being awarded with the Queen's Anniversary Prize for Research. This was presented by the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh in recognition of the University's applied research into child sexual exploitation, influencing new safeguarding policy and practice. Our input into the presentation day was again monitoring social media mentions and getting the story seen by as wide an audience as possible. We also liaised with the Royal Communications team to ensure consistency of message and for supply of the footage from the prize giving. Time was of the essence here and we were able to get the video edited and online within an hour of receiving it:



Our new Luton campus library
In other news, we've been liaising with our friends in Learning Resources in order to put together an internal and external marketing plan for our new library. We have a vested interest in this as not only did I used to work in that department but it's being built on top of where our offices used to be! It's going to look pretty impressive as well and will really reinforce our current remit of improving the student experience.

I've also reinstated our Web Working Group meetings where all power users of our CMS can get together to share best practice and have their input into our web strategy. Historically I've really enjoyed these and it also gives us a chance to showcase all of our latest developments which many feed into the goals of each department.

Finally, I've been asked to present at the Inside Government 'Future of Higher Education Marketing Conference on 29th April (my youngest son's first birthday!) with my colleague Sarah from the Marketing Team. The focus of this will be our Prospects Best Website win with the title 'Enhancing Postgraduate Student Recruitment Through Developing a Digital Presence'. Definitely right up my street but I'll have to bring my 'A' Game judging by the quality of the other speakers on the agenda!
Everyone has an opinion!
In the haze of interviewing for new staff (I've been on three panels this week) I thought it was about time that I authored a new post! At the moment it seems we've got loads of mini-projects on the go and I'm trying to get these signed off so we can focus on some big web developments and improvements. A lot of the ideas for the latter have stemmed from our Web Strategy meetings. I've had to be very careful to ensure that, from now on, all decisions and developments are informed by our target audience. The last thing we want is a room full of middle aged men deciding on what's cool! That's why I've started properly organising some focus groups with our feeder colleges, some proper user testing and usage analysis. Stay tuned for the results..

Another thing the team have been working on has been data capture for our latest Postgraduate virtual event. Previously, we've helped get the the event up and running but this time we wanted to 'gate' it to ensure we had some meaningful leads afterwards. This did mean a drop in attendance (people are quite wary before giving away their contact details) but hopefully will mean we can send them some useful follow up material to show them the benefits of becoming students with us!

A campaign
skyscraper advert
Another series of mini-projects has been evidenced in our 'pre-clearing campaign' which runs until June. In the past, this has mainly been to showcase our open days but I have now put together a full plan of activity (with budget) to highlight the great reasons why students should choose us over our competitors. The bulk of this has been through Google AdWords and we have three adjacent campaigns running (branding, under recruiting courses and new courses). As I usually handle all of this myself it's been a great opportunity to get the team trained up in AdWords and share the burden courtesy of our friends at Jellyfish. One thing we do have is a generous training budget!

An example campaign landing page
We've created bespoke landing pages for every subject area and with the new addition of student blogs have plugged these in to each page using a great little RSS tool I found called Feeder Ninja.

We also have been creating the usual radio adverts, MPUs, leaderboards and skyscrapers and a full content strategy for social media. Promoted Tweets are working particularly well for us and our account managers there have been great at advising on our choice of content and ways to track our campaigns - the platform is developing daily!

There has still been time for the odd little improvement to our website though and we got the jquery accordion up and running. This is something which I've previously used on a personal project for my brother in law and already is being utilised by our power users across the University.

That's about it for now. Finally, my quest to get my professional profile seen across the entire internet was helped by Spectrecom Films, who asked if I could do an interview for their February 2014 sector report (included below!) We're also in the initial stages of another exciting new project with them so I should have something to report back on that very soon. Enjoy! ;)
Click for a larger version. From the photo it looks like I live in our student halls!
As the logo says I'm VERY 'proud
to be shortlisted!'
I launch into my second post of the year with some great news as this very blog has been shortlisted for a National Blog Award! This is as an organisation blog in the Education category. I'm particularly excited about this one as I'd put it forward a few months before Christmas and had forgotten I'd done so.

Whilst casually looking at the blog stats I then noticed I had some referral traffic from the Blog Awards website. A bit of further investigation showed that I'd made it through to the public vote - with just three days left before it closed! I sprang straight into action on a social media campaign to rally some votes which was enough to get me to the final shortlist and the judging stage.

Therefore, I'd like to say a BIG THANK YOU to all the readers who voted for me! Although it's a lot of work to keep this updated, whilst doing the day job, it's also very therapeutic. It's all too easy to think about what I don't manage to achieve at work that this is a great document of the projects which do get completed (and I like to think of myself as a 'glass half full' person!) It also is a great tool for getting some valuable internal buy in.

The awards ceremony is on Friday 25th April in London so hopefully I'll be there, in my cheap dinner suit, with a glass of champagne in my hand to do some networking (and nail biting!) I'd also like to give a quick shout out to Pure360 (our email marketing solution) for being shortlisted as an organisation blog in the Digital & Technology category. Now down to business...

Last week was a busy one as the entire team were working on the launch of the new Partnership and Community section. This has consisted on literally making something from nothing as it is all new content! Obviously, it's still a work in progress but it's great to have the skeleton now there laying a great groundwork for expanding this area. It's also been a good learning curve for the team to see how all of our skills compliment each other - I've developed the project plan and homepage visual, Graeme's built the homepage, Elisabeth and Angela have got the site structure up and running and approved the content and Lauren has designed the graphics and the right column. Some great team work!

It was great to see our students
presenting their digital marketing ideas
so eloquently
It's also been a good few weeks for gaining new knowledge. I have now seen through to completion a project I started a few months ago by grading the projects of our MSc Business Web Analytics and Management students. They came up with some great ideas to better market their course, presented them very well and I really enjoyed the opportunity to get involved in the curriculum again. Needless to say they all passed with flying colours. and I may well be using some of their ideas...

Finally, Lauren and Angela attended an internally run SEO course which was in equal parts interesting and reassuring (as these courses often are!)

To close this post I'd like to say thank you again to everyone who reads and voted for this blog and I'll try my best to ensure that I add some unique and interesting insights into what the team has been up to in the future. Above all I hope to show that work CAN be fun!
So, here it goes for another year... As an indicator of how we've had to hit the ground running it's taken me a good few weeks to get around to this blog post. Since Monday I've been on the second stage of my IDM Diploma in Teddington and am writing this from the bar of the hotel in which I'm staying in Hampton Court after just wishing my kids goodnight via Facetime - the best thing work ever did was give me this laptop!

My view as I write this post -
(The Kings Arms, Hampton Court)
It's been a good few days so far with some great lectures on brand, social media and campaign planning and I now have a big list of actions to take back to the office. We've also been informed that the qualification we've been studying for has been upgraded to a Postgraduate Digital Marketing Diploma (PG DipDigM) meaning if I pass I get an extra two letters after my name! It's all looking good so far too as I passed my first assignment with flying colours. Let's hope I can keep up the momentum...

As far as work is concerned, the team has already been busy with some new innovations. The first of these being that we are now displaying unit information on our course pages. This has been a real team effort between our ICT department, Squiz and myself and brings us up to speed with our competitors. What it means is that each course page shows the units which are currently being studied on each course. This data comes directly from our SITS database and is updated nightly so should always be completely accurate and gives a much more detailed overview of the exact content of each course.

'This page is now offline as it hasn't
been updated since 2003...'
The team also spent a day at Squiz getting some bespoke training on asset listings and their applications. It was really great stuff and has not only allowed us to better understand and automate our front end lists but also our back end reporting. The latter is evidenced by our latest report showing the most active departments in removing content from their sections (people are great at putting content online but rubbish at removing it) and who needs to try harder!

Today we've also gone live with our phase 2 of our events calendar. This allows the functionality of adding key dates and most excitingly customised embeddable calendars. The way these work is users add their events to the calendar as usual but can then apply a number of filters (e.g. location, department) and use the code it generates to embed a bespoke version into their own section of the site. Very useful for all as it allows the user to highlight just their events but also keeps everything held centrally.

In other news, I've taken part in my first set of interviews for the year for Marketing Officer which were very enjoyable (but tiring!) and have worked with our colleagues in Student Services to launch a whole new Careers section. I've also been working with our Education and Sport department to create a number of new films highlighting each of their departments (Teacher Education, Education Studies and English Language & Communication). The content of these was developed by the faculty themselves with our input in helping to select a production company, briefing them on our brand and working on a seeding strategy to ensure maximum impact. We're particularly happy with one which was produced to highlight the opportunity for students to take part in work placements at Club Le Santa in Lanzarote:



Anyway, time to sign off as my bar snacks have just arrived! It's been good to get back into my blogging groove and here's to a fantastic 2014...
And with that awful pun I launch into my last blog post of the year...

I'll start by outlining an addition to our course lists, which are now all alphabetically sorted. For a while now we've made do with these displaying as a long list which, although being dynamically updated from our course database, were pretty static with no anchor points. This is why we undertook a bit of work to make them more accessible and to include a little alphabet picker at the top. Job done and much more user friendly! We're also planning on rolling this out to our other asset lists in the near future.


New staff training opportunities
coming soon!
Other things the team have been working on of late are content updates to our Student Life, Alumni and Partnerships sections and delivering the first of many Writing for the Web training session. The latter is something which will offered to all staff in the new year - meaning that we hope for the quality of writing on our site to improve tenfold. My favourite quote from the first session has to be "This is WRITING for the web, not copying and pasting..."

Yesterday afternoon I attended the unofficial Squiz/Funnelback user group at City University. This was a great opportunity to talk to our equivalents at other universities (and beyond) who work with Matrix on a daily basis.


This is about as classy as
our decorations get
Lots of great ideas were shared and I particularly liked the demo of Trello, a fantastic free project organisation tool. We're already setting it up with the idea that this is now the go to place for all web projects and progress monitoring. We also used the meeting to talk about how we found the upgrade to Matrix version 14.8 which is something we're in the middle of having implemented right now!

In other news, it's been a week full of getting into the Christmas spirit. From spending all of the swear box money accumulated through the year on decorations from the 99p Stores (we have a LOT!), to going out for a festive pizza with the team. We also exchanged our Secret Santa presents, took part in national Christmas jumper day and 'Christmas-ified' our intranet to coincide with the launch of our digital Christmas card.


Looking back on 2013 (my first full year in the job) it's been a pretty intense but rewarding time. We've seen some team members come and go (the former mainly due to me as I've been on nine interview panels this year!) and also have had more than our fare share of accolades in the form of external awards (two golds, three silvers and five ceremonies) which have been tremendous fun. I've also learnt lots and loved the opportunity to work on the first University cinema advert which seems to have been a great success. On a personal level it's also been great as I've welcomed my third child and have started studying for a diploma (having just submitted my first assignment...)

So what do we have planned for 2014? Definitely loads of revamped website sections and we've been gearing up for these in the last month by undertaking a variety of audits. We're also working on stage two of our events calendar and are in the process of a complete homepage redesign.

I hope you all have a brilliant Christmas and new year break. My final task for 2013 is to get my 'to do' list down to double figures...

Merry Christmas from the University of Bedfordshire Digital Marketing team!


A badly Photoshopped montage of the team. I've excluded myself as there's enough
photos of me on here already!
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