March23
By: Liam McMurray
Last week we did some stuff and it was fun and we learned a lot of things. Our Content Manager, Richard, took the lead as we embarked on a week-long odyssey to retool and refocus on digital marketing. A great chance for the content team to blow off some cobwebs, and for the development team to get an introduction to the "dark art of marketing" (their words).
As well as providing some amazing presentations and great discussion points on digital marketing during the week, Rich also acted as a client with the requirement for some digital marketing in order to put the team through its' paces.
In a nutshell we had a predetermined (small) budget with which to promote the (fictional) launch of an awesome new way for students to communicate with us. It was to tie in with the University's Open Day on June 21st.
First thing to do was to decide how best to spend the budget - what would give us the biggest bang for our buck?
Although it's been around forever, and despite there being much more shiny attractive things to use as the basis for your digital marketing campaign, still nothing has the same impact as an HTML email in terms of views and conversions. That's not to say it's a magic bullet, there is still a heckalot to consider when planning the content and the message, never mind the nuts and bolts of building something that's based on the kind of HTML that would embarrass you at parties.
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Posted in: Communication, Marketing
February22
By: Phil Wilson
QR codes are increasingly in use around campus and, regardless of opinions of whether they are actually useful or not, there are still some best practices to follow to get the best results:
- legibility
- suitability of destination
- statistics tracking
Legibility
You have to remember the practicalities of QR codes - it's no use putting them on a billboard in the middle of a train route - no-one can get out their phone, load the scanning app and get a decent picture in anything less than ~10 seconds. Similarly, it's no use putting them on a poster which is too high, or on the bottom of a poster which is stuck at ground level. In the same vein you need to maximise the number of people who can scan the code correctly - don't play with the colours! It's black on white or nothing.
Destination
You might have the best, most whizzy, dynamically updating, image scrolling, pop-uppy website in the world, which all your users tell you they love, but it'll probably suck on a mobile phone. You don't need to test on a thousand different phones, but having a good idea of the capabilities of the devices that your target audience has will help you keep it simple and deliver a good experience once they've scanned your code. They'll love you for it.
Statistics tracking
If your QR code goes straight to a target page without going through an intermediary, you will have no idea whether your campaign has been successful or not. Lots of URL-shortening tools will also give you statistics on the number of visitors, when they came etc. - using one will also keep your QR code simple, and be easier to scan. The other part of this is authenticity - if you are publishing a QR code and the user has an expectation of where it will take them, then why are you sending them to a bit.ly address? Far better would be to either run your own in-house URL shortener, or create a simple PHP file which exists on your domain and is just used to increment a counter and redirect people to the full URL. The latter won't give you detailed statistics, but it'll be far better than nothing.
Have you got any more advice for anyone wanting to use QR codes? Let us know in the comments!
Posted in: Communication
January19
By: Richard Prowse
It's the new year, so I thought it was about time I said hello!
As Web Content Manager, I'm the editor responsible for all content you read, watch and listen to on bath.ac.uk. My job is to make sure that I keep our 2.5 million readers happy; not an easy task trust me.
This is something I am familiar with from my previous role at Bournemouth University, working as part of a HEIST nominated team for education marketing.
With over a quarter of a million pages we share many of the same problems other large organisations have with content, including:
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Posted in: Communication
I have been here for nearly 3 months now and thought I had better introduce myself.
I am the Web Supporter for the University of Bath. In other words, the friendly face at the other end of the RT queue here at Web Services! So far it has been a very interesting and varied role with a range of queries about all things web and delivering training courses on the Content Management System. It is a very different environment after working for Wiltshire Police previously but at least I don’t get chairs thrown at me anymore!
During my time here so far I have attended the Web Dev Conference in Bristol which had some really interesting presentations about HTML5 and Designing for Emotion. Some exciting things to come I think in the world of web.
I have also been compiling statistics regarding the queries and requests we get through the RT system and I have found some very interesting facts regarding the queries that we get.
Did you know that in November:
- 10% of tickets received needed more information from the requestor
- The top query was to ask about making changes to a CMS page
So please make sure you include as much information as you can when making a request or raising a query.
I have also made an analysis of tickets in the last 3 months and the number of tickets resolved within 1 day has increased by 34% and the number of tickets resolved within 1 week has increased by 35% - so we are definitely going in the right direction as you can see:
Graph of RT queries resolved in 1 week
I am really enjoying myself here and look forward to bumping in to one or two of you around the campus soon.
Oh, and Merry Christmas!
Posted in: Communication
November13
By: Phil Wilson
For our September 2011 Open Day we put together a single-page destination specifically for the event.
The percentage of visitors to our site whom Google Analytics classifies as using "Mobile" devices currently runs at 3.4% (up from 1.4% this time last year) but since we always see a spike in mobile traffic on an Open Day and during the days leading up to it we thought we'd try and make a little more of it.
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Posted in: Communication
November9
By: Phil Wilson
It's been just over three months since our glorious leader, Alison Kerwin, left on maternity leave - since then I'm delighted to be able to say that not only has she added two healthy bouncing babies to the fray but we've also had four new members of the team start!
Sophie has already said hello on this blog and over the next few weeks the other three (Julian Buchannun, Chris Shimmin-Vincent and Rich Prowse) will also be introducing themselves here -you can get a sneak preview on our Team page!. We're really thrilled to have them on board, helping us deliver the best web experience that we possibly can.
Of course having also recently said goodbye to both Andy Savin and Yvonne Aburrow we now have some vacancies in the team again which we'll be advertising as soon as we can, so keep your eyes peeled!
Posted in: Communication
