Everybody's got a story to tell

The generation now applying to and attending university are a generation of digital natives. They are generation Z and they are increasingly mindful consumers that require an open and transparent approach to our marketing. The world of social media is second nature to them and it will often be their first port of call when they want to share something with their peers.

It’s around 12 months ago now that I wrote about #MyChesterStory referencing the importance and value of referrals. It’s an idea that has helped us to narrate what it means to be a student at Chester, encouraging our students to share their stories with us. And on the eve of a new intake of students, it’s a concept we want them to engage with more than ever. We want our students to be proud of their University and shout out about it every step of the way, from enrolment all the way to graduation and beyond! Most of all, we want them to do this online in their social networks, where they and many of their peers often frequent.

User Targeted Content – The Initial Teacher Training Campaign

A few months ago, we created a new campaign area of the corporate website dedicated to the recruitment of students to our teacher training courses.This was done in response to the fact that teacher training courses are now a huge recruitment challenge, particularly for some key subjects areas, and the navigation of our website wasn't enabling us to highlight the key benefits of teacher training at Chester.

What is #mychesterstory?

I recently wrote some blogs discussing the importance and value of student referrals for enabling prospective students to gain an authentic view of the real student experience at Chester. It's these student experiences that enable our prospects to identify with the University in such a way that it allows them to envisage what it is really like to live and study at Chester. And it's our students' stories that help tell the story of our brand and consequently differentiate what we have to offer.

Marketing as Mad as the March Hare

At this time of the year, some of my marketing colleagues can appear to be a little reclusive. A sighting of them can be a rare privilege and when you do spot them, they can appear to be in a bit of a frenzy, rushing from one place to another. So what exactly is it that makes them behave like this, particularly at this time of the year? This short blog will clear up the reason for this elusive behaviour and explain why this might be of interest to you if you’re thinking ahead to the next recruitment cycle.

Hare, There and Everywhere...

The first week of March sees the start of our recruitment drive for September 2015. Whilst 2015 may seem a long way off, the next few months will see the Marketing team clocking up the miles as they travel the length and breadth of the country generating further interest in the University's provision of undergraduate courses.

Engaging University Brand Advocates

In a service-led industry, such as higher education, customer referrals have a very important role to play in enhancing the reputation and value added aspects of the brand. Therefore, with this in mind, it is important that we do what we can to encourage positive feedback from students and staff alike.

Of course, in order to do this, first and foremost we need to be doing the basics right: provision of a quality service that adds value to the end user, all delivered with a good dose of customer care. Failure to do this will ultimately result in poor customer satisfaction and the rest will be history. However, if you get this right, then you’re likely to achieve high levels of customer satisfaction and be in a prime position to strategize on how to turn this into a means to market your course.

In marketing circles, this is often referred to as referral marketing or word of mouth. It’s a cost effective means to promoting your course(s) to new group of prospects.  And, whilst this can often happen spontaneously, you can influence this by adopting appropriate strategies.

Statistically Speaking, Visually Communicating

If you’ve seen our latest university promo, you’ll have noticed that there is a heavy use of graphics for illustrating various statistics and facts about the University.  The purpose of this film is to highlight why Chester is a sound investment for higher education; an upcoming university rising up the league tables and getting the recognition it deserves for the service it provides its students.  But why use infographics for narrating such achievements?  And what exactly is an infographic?

Marketing School Direct

For those of you reading this with absolutely no responsibility for the recruitment of School Direct places, or the recruitment of any kind of teacher training course for that matter, you might think that there is little point in reading on. However, if you have a general interest in student recruitment and raising the profile of your course, I would urge you to stick with this blog, especially if you are concerned with ensuring the best return on your marketing expenditure. The marketing principles discussed within this blog really can be applied to any course at the University.

A Game Changer

A change of government policy and the introduction of a new course called School Direct not only changes the rules of the game but also presents new challenges for student recruitment. Raising the awareness of new course provision can often be a challenge in itself, but with School Direct this responsibility doesn't just sit with the university that the school, or group of schools, have decided to go into partnership with, but also with the school itself.

Avoid getting spam on your phablet (or creating an email campaign in 2013).

You'll probably not be surprised to learn that email is a big part of our communications strategy. How big? Well, in the last 12 months we have sent over 225,000 emails to prospects, applicants, current students and alumni. So although they might not be as publicly visible or permanent as the website or prospectus, they make up a really important part of our marketing communications mix and they offer some unique features that we try to fully harness.

Yes, email is 'cheap' (less than 1p per email), but they are much more valuable to us than that. The flexible nature means that we can target them much more easily to an individual's needs, and increase their relevance to them. They also offer useful tracking options, so we can see which messages are working and follow up on these accordingly. They're also instant, and during a nervous application cycle, people seem to appreciate it!

Email marketing serves as as useful communications tool to remind people that we are thinking of them and to provide targeted offers of courses and services they might find useful. They also reinforce our other print and digital messages, and it is important that maintain the same design integrity as our other communications. 

It's easy to get email wrong, so here are a few best practice tips to ensure that we are delivering the best quality messages to the right people.

Read all about it

If you’ve read one of my previous blogs, you’ll probably be aware that one of the consistent themes is often based around the premise of creating a stronger bond with the prospect and developing some sort of sense of loyalty to the brand.  It’s fundamental to any business that wants to be successful or even survive.  And it’s why so many businesses now work so hard to encourage you to leave your personal details with them.  They want to know exactly who you are, and what your buying habits are, so they can begin to interact with you in a way that is relevant to you.  Customers are always the lifeblood of any organisation and universities are no different.

Whilst our immediate goal may not be repeat business, which is often the main objective of building brand loyalty, it is necessary to keep our prospects and applicants engaged and interested throughout the various stages of their decision making process.

Previously…

In my previous blog, I discussed the aftermath of the Open Day, putting it into context of where it falls in a prospect’s decision making process.  With applications now starting to flow into the admissions office, the process of making offers has begun.  Hence, it is now that the arduous task begins of trying to convert these applications into enrolments.

Extra, Extra… 

In terms of how you can begin to engage with your applicants, a department or course e-newsletter is a good starting point.  Universities are in a very fortunate position that makes it relatively easy to engage with our prospects.  By virtue of an applicant’s application, not only do we know that they are considering the University as one of their five choices, but we also have a wealth of information on exactly who they are and what they are interested in.  This immediately gives us the ability to create very powerful personalised and targeted marketing communications.

On the campaign trail with the University of You!

Having just sat down to write a post about MRA’s campaign for 2013 undergraduate recruitment, I started to experience a strange feeling of déjà vu. Then I realised that it was only in April of this year that I wrote a piece about the campaign for 2012 undergraduate recruitment. Rereading this, it struck me that my intention had been to write something very similar regarding the work for 2013 and that, quite frankly, seems a bit pointless. As I'm here now, I'll write a post about how some of our recent work fits into the bigger picture. But first, if you didn't see my post from April have a quick look now…

So, you’ll have seen that I wrote about the ‘University of You’ campaign and described a series of activities and marketing communications that we put together to generate applications for 2012 recruitment. I described how we planned the campaign, how we constructed it and how we executed it. I finished by saying how successful it had been. And it was very successful in a particularly tricky year, with the University of Chester being one of the few universities in the North West to recruit to target.

On target in 2012

And it’s perhaps this success that has led us to do something very similar to kick-start recruitment for 2013. While the materials have changed and the presentation of our marketing communications has evolved, the core messages of the campaign stay broadly the same. And as I wrote then, that’s because the messages are true – Chester’s unique offering creates unique graduates in a crowded and competitive graduate market place. It’s a strong message and one that really seems to resonate with prospective students.

A Guide to Conversion: Engaging and Maintaining Student Prospects through Relationship Marketing (Part Two)

The Saga Continues

In my last blog we talked about the importance of implementing a successful relationship marketing strategy and began to look at how this works in practice.  You may recall that I introduced you the model shown below.  Let’s now take a closer look at what is happening at each stage.

The Decision Making Process

A Guide to Conversion: Engaging and Maintaining Student Prospects through Relationship Marketing (Part One)

Are you sitting comfortably?

Then I’ll begin. 

Getting to the point

Well actually, maybe I won’t start quite yet because I thought I should précis my first blog with a bit of an apology. Despite the fact that, when it comes to advertising copy, I strongly advise to keep it short, otherwise no one will read it, I guess this is a case of not practicing what I preach! Therefore, in order to try and keep you engaged, I’ve decided to do this blog in two parts. No cliff hanger I’m afraid, unless of course my first blog leaves you keen to find out more! I should probably also apologise for my blog being more like a marketing tutorial, but I thought this might be a good starting point to help you understand what Marketing, Recruitment and Admissions (MRA) do to recruit students.

OK, now I’ll begin.

Standing out from the crowd - Welcome to the University of You

In an earlier blog post, Neil mentioned something called the ‘University of You’ campaign. Conscious that much of our work isn’t seen by the wider University community, I think that it’s important to explain some of the concept and campaign planning that goes into recruiting new students. In doing this, you’ll get a better feel for what we do, why we do it, and how we plan and integrate our activities.

So, what on earth is the ‘University of You’ campaign? 

Well, every year we face increasing competition to generate applications for our undergraduate courses and every year it becomes more important to work smartly while really trying to stand out from the crowd. Factor in the changing HE landscape for 2012 entry and we figured it was more important than ever to speak to our prospective students through the channels that they use while addressing their concerns.

So, the ‘University of You’ campaign is our 2012 undergraduate recruitment campaign. It’s the plan we put together to generate the 20,000 applications that we are now working with to secure our 2012 intake. The campaign is based on the simple premise that by working directly with our prospective students to build meaningful relationships, we stand a far better chance of generating a high number of applications from a well informed and engaged group of individuals.

Planning

Planning campaigns is always fun. Over a number of sessions we get the team together to thrash out ideas and concepts. We work and rework ideas, change artwork and strategy and end up… sticking lots of brightly coloured post-it notes to our walls:

My office wall – where the magic happens

But while we try to be as creative as possible at this stage, we always make sure we focus on developing and keeping to a set of core messages. These key principles then inform the entire campaign that follows.

For 2012 entry, our core messages were created to speak directly to our prospective students and to address the issues pertinent to them while at the same time attempting to differentiate the University of Chester from other universities.

There were numerous messages that we needed to get across in this campaign:

• The benefits of a university experience
• Value for money 
• Employability and careers
• Uniqueness – augment your studies with a range of experiences to make yourself unique
• Specific combinations
• Risk reduction – why choosing Chester is not a risky option
• Stories – the real-life of the University

However, there had to be a key overarching theme to hook our prospects. And this is what we went for: Personalisation. 

By placing the student at the heart of everything we do and offering an amazing mix of additional opportunities, our graduates can really stand out in the fierce graduate job market of the future. And that, in a nutshell, is the core message of the campaign: Choosing the University of Chester gives you so much freedom and support to develop as an individual that it really is the University of You.

Execution

So, satisfied with our concept and our core messages, we set out to create an engaging and fresh multimedia campaign that would generate interest in the University and encourage prospective students to interact with us.

As I’ve said, we love a bit of direct marketing here in MRA and what better way to get the ball rolling than with a piece of targeted direct mail? Armed with a database of hot leads (segmented by the course individuals were interested in applying for) we hit the doormats of around 55,000 prospects in the first weeks of September 2011 at exactly the time they would be thinking about getting their UCAS forms for 2012 entry completed. Why direct mail? Well, firstly it’s harder to ignore than an email, a text message or a printed advert and, secondly, because of who else would see it. We wanted parents to engage with the campaign too and learn about the benefits of their offspring applying to Chester.

As Neil has mentioned before on the blog, we don’t communicate with prospects without a call to action. And the call to action here was clear. We had created a beautiful stand-alone website filled with the core messages of the campaign and we wanted to drive traffic to it.

Phase one. Getting the message out there

The University of You phase one campaign website was a genuinely engaging and user friendly experience. Quirkily designed to help differentiate us from the competition, the site navigated left to right across the user’s screen rather than up and down like a traditional website. It was filled with snappy content and bespoke video and generated excellent feedback from users. Most importantly, it really started to hammer home our key messages and its own call to action – to order a prospectus or to book for an Open Day.

The site was ably supported online by bespoke University of You Facebook and twitter content and its success was shown by massive October Open Days and an unprecedented level of interaction with prospective students. 

But where are we up to now? Well, the campaign isn’t over and now we have moved into a second, ‘conversion’ phase. We all know that generating a high number of applications is important but converting these expressions of interest into students is the key and phase two, the applicant zone, launched in February of this year to coincide with the end of the on-time application cycle and keep our applicants engaged with the 'University of You' message.

Results

Has it worked? Yes, the evidence would suggest that the campaign has been successful. Of course, we won’t know the final outcome of 2012 recruitment until later on in the year but what we do know is that the level of engagement we have had with our applicants this year has been better than ever (more on this to follow from Adam) and that the messages we worked so hard to create and communicate are really getting across.

What’s perhaps most important is where the campaign has taken our thinking as a department. The look and feel of the campaign now informs much of what we do and this adds great strength to how we are perceived and understood in the marketplace.

The message goes on…

The campaign has really refreshed our thinking and brought renewed clarity to the way we communicate with prospective students. And what’s most important is that the messages are rooted in truth. We really do have a unique offering here at the University. There really is enough to offer our students to augment their course so that they can stand out as unique graduates in a crowded marketplace. It’s something we should all be very proud of.

Until next time…

Cheers,

Ric.

Bridging the gap between print and web

Back in October 2011 we sat down, cups of tea and flipchart paper at the ready, to work out what we wanted to achieve from the forthcoming 2013 Undergraduate Prospectus.

The marketing team headed by Adam (Bodger) was keen to build on the successes of undergraduate conversion or (in simple terms) bump up the amount of students that choose Chester and stick with us!

These successes had been built on improved efforts in relationship marketing with increased communication, interaction and engagement through a variation of direct mail, website and social networking.

But before Marc (Kneebone), sporting his graphics pen and notepad, could get creative with his Apple Mac, I was keen to see if we could bridge the gap between print and web.

This wasn’t just because I am sad geek, championing the website at every given opportunity, but also because printed materials can often only form part of the mission. For example, say a student picks up a leaflet or maybe takes a Prospectus at UCAS fair - what is it that we ultimately want them to do?

Maybe it’s to find out more information, or get in contact with someone, hey it may be just to simply know who you are and what you’re all about.

If it’s the latter you may think that all you require is killer content, punchy facts about the programme or department and some eye catching images, right? Well, yes… but you may want to consider what you want the individual to do after digesting this dazzling piece of marketing material. This is what us Marketers speak of as ‘Call to Action’, something that if any of you have ever had the pleasure of sitting in a meeting with either myself, Ric (Bengree) or Adam have witnessed us getting rather animated about.

What is a Call to Action, I hear you shout?

Well, a call to action is simply something on a print or web page that motivates or encourages a reader/user to do something.

Why are they useful, you may say?

They are excellent to keep individuals engaged (or as Adam would say ‘hot’), but also for measuring the success of a particular printed material.


With this in mind we agreed that we needed a campaign that:

1. Engaged potential students
2. Bridged the gap between print and web
3. Something that was to go beyond the basic “for more information visit www.chester.ac.uk”
4. Maintained the marketing message of the University of You campaign
5. Reduced the risk for potential applicants
6. Was measurable

To achieve the aims of this campaign we firstly looked at what the core aims were in the 2012 undergraduate recruitment campaign titled the University of You campaign.

As part of the 2012 recruitment campaign, MRA have implemented a ‘University of You’ campaign, where we are putting the applicant at the centre of everything we do. With 2012 set to be the first year when students start to pay the higher tuition fees, applicants are likely to be looking closely of what they are getting in return for their investment. What can one university offer them that perhaps another can’t? We have implemented this theme throughout all our current marketing for 2012, remembering that applicants decisions are made on an entirely self-referenced basis:

• how does this affect me?
• what do I get out of this?

So we are trying to keep our messages very personal and have an ‘all about you’ approach.

The Concept

The agreed concept was to promote the benefits of the University of Chester, through current students rather than any marketing spin. This, in essence would enable the potential student to hear about real experiences ‘straight from the horse’s mouth’.

Execution

To execute this concept we planned the prospectus to have miniature profiles with each individual student's quote about their programme, student life, opportunities whilst here as well as much more.

The student profiles were to span throughout the prospectus, but each profile in the prospectus would direct readers to an area of the website with more information about the student.

Now at this point, it would have been easy to ask for some content from a department (one of you guys) and create a page on the website, but that would have firstly increased the bounce rate of the website (visitors landing on our website and jumping straight off it), but also not fully satisfy the overall aims of the campaign. So this is what we did…

Contacted each student and organised for them to be involved firstly in a photo-shoot and then a one to one video interview. Now you can imagine the prospect of getting a substantial number of students to firstly commit to a photo-shoot and then a video interview as being slim to none, but if you know me I don’t take no as an answer.

Anyway, we organised it (well, I did), shot it (well, Marc did) and edited it and it was ready for the web. Both Annabelle (Davies) and Lee (Bennett) did a sterling job teasing out the best answers and trimming down an hour long video for each student into an entertaining 1 to 2 minutes clip.

Next up, me and Marc sat down and laid out what we wanted from the website in terms of design and content. We agreed a design that focused on presenting information in a visually engaging way, bringing together style cues from the prospectus, with splashes of fresh colours and fonts as well as some funky wallpaper courtesy of (Ian) White’s Dining rooms.

Also, to complement the content in each video we created a miniature fact file and image gallery for each student, as created by Angela (Evans). This gave each profile a good basis of information about the student, and we felt it was more likely to engage our target audience than having bags of text.

Measurability

So, after the web pages were designed and built, you might think, 'job done', but we had one final box to tick, and probably one of the most important.

As the title suggests, we had to put our heads together and agree how to measure the success of this campaign. Of course this was done prior to the design phase, but I didn’t have enough room to fit it in up there (odds on I’m not going to be submitted for the Booker Prize for literature).

Any way back to the story, we agreed that we could measure the success of this campaign through clear calls to action. Firstly, each student profile on the website would have a bespoke URL (web address) set up, which would track visitors who had got the URL from the 2013 prospectus.

In addition both Shai and Adam were keen and a little giddy about the power of using QR codes.

QR codes work in the following way, first point your phone (has to be a smart one, so your Granddad’s Binatone isn’t going to cut it) at a printed page. Take a picture. Get taken to a website. It is that simple, and from a user’s point a view, very cool.

With the QR Code set up Shai (Vure) ensured that we could track these smartphone visitors from the prospectus to the website. All in all with tracking set up for direct visitors via the prospectus URL’s and QR codes we could measure the success of bridging the gap between print and web.

Recap

I believe this campaign really adds value to both print and web, whilst also emphasising the key messages of the original University of You campaign. Hopefully this has given you an insight into how a fully planned marketing campaign can be set up, delivered and measured.

Check out the finished campaign website - Meet the Students

With myself and Marc heading up Marketing communications whilst Sarah (Steele) is away with newly born baby Henry, we hope to bring you more on marketing communications, as well as any interesting snippets along the way.

This is the first of a fresh and constant Blog from Marketing, Recruitment and Admissions – so watch this space for more posts in the near future.



Toodaloo,


Neil