Last week, thousands of students found out which universities they were heading to - and the majority of the UK education sector has been focused on helping some of them find places through Clearing. Now, they’re moving on to the next big milestone: arriving at university.

At its heart though, your content needs to see this as an extension of the application process. Your students’ experience doesn’t start now. It began months ago.

Every education marketer that I have ever worked with truly wants to be able to create impactful campaigns. And yet few of those campaigns really ever rock the world. So, what is the disconnect that has it be this way? And how can we bridge it so that we can really pioneer cutting-edge marketing approaches in the education sector?

‘What influenced your decision to study at your chosen university?’

Ask a bunch of students and you’ll hear them recount personal stories about why they chose to study at their university: it was the interesting course content, the reputation of the university, or the good feeling they got at the Open Day.

University marketing teams often conduct focus groups and surveys as we seek to understand what drives students’ decision making. We use these insights to inform the content and campaigns we create. So far, so normal.

But research suggests these decision-making stories may be just that, stories. Our judgments can be influenced by a messy set of factors beyond our conscious awareness.

In my experience of working in higher education, communication between departments and central teams is always an issue. It’s certainly not the case for all institutions, and if your relationship with departments is fantastic, keep it up! You might start to think, “Oh but they aren’t speaking to me, they’re making it hard”. I’m going to break your bubble here and say it’s very, very rare to be fully one-sided. Are you really making an effort? Probably not. 

“We want to be seen as bold and pioneering, but we want to follow other people already doing it and be extra cautious about what we do.”

It’s a common occurrence that we see with clients over the years, the desire to be bold but not actually behaving in line with their brand strategy and organisational vision. This blog talks about our new BCE model which will help your team overcome these problems, and helps to create the best experience for your audience.

It’s 2022 and the summer graduation ceremony is back without government COVID restrictions. For higher education teams, this might be the biggest year you’ve had yet if you’re holding postponed pandemic ceremonies. Or you might be thinking about how to make this year bigger and better than anything you’ve done before.

So here’s the A to Z of creating content at graduations to show your newest alumni how amazing you know they are.

Clearing is one of the busiest times of year for (almost) any UK university - and it can seem overwhelming.

So we’re here to help. Take a look at our top five tips to make the most of Clearing 2022.

Find out what ContentEd Conference is all about, and how to get tickets!

In early May, Manchester United Football Club tweeted about Juan Mata García, asking its followers to read the alt text. In the functionality designed to describe imagery for assistive technology, their social media team shared a joke about how great the player is.

And, as you might expect, Twitter users were angry.

But what is alt text, why should you be using it - and why did Man Utd receive such a backlash?

Thursday May 11th was REF Day, the day on which UK universities found out how their research had been rated by independent assessment panels.

The Research Excellence Framework gets a decidedly mixed response from the higher education community, but there’s no denying that a lot of hard work has gone in to the submissions from every university, and it’s worth celebrating those efforts.

Find out why you should be focussing your efforts on a smaller audience.

ContentEd 2022 Awards are now open for submissions! Find out more about our new categories, previous winners and how to enter.

There are very few things that I think are “wrong” in how we might approach any project. But today, I’m going to share ones that I have some pretty strong opinions about when it comes to website redesign, and why your planning for any redesign probably needs to start sooner than you think.

We are super excited to announce that this May, we’ll be welcoming Lucy Guest into the Pickle team as our new Content and experience designer!

We asked Lucy to answer a few questions for you to get to know her a bit better.

In this blog post, I share five strategic considerations for your Canadian enrollment strategy based on key aggregate findings from the Academica University/College Applicant Survey (UCAS).

Introducing our new Director of Experience!

How can you make peer-to-peer a pillar of your conversion strategy? Try these three ways: outbound via SMS/texting, inbound through messaging, video or chat, and anonymously through reddit.

We all know prospective students need a lot of information to help them make a decision about where and what to study. And it makes sense to provide that information in a manner that’s as useful as possible. But that means we need to make some informed decisions of our own about what information should be presented in what kind of format.

The person that made this sign wanted to help their users (thank you!). But they did so from the context of the building/employees, not from the context of the user. Everyone in the building knows that’s the second floor. Not every user walking in the door does.

To innovate in higher ed, we just have to look at other industries. Copy these five lessons learned from real estate, food delivery, retail, and fitness.