UniTasterDays training for marketing teams
Inspiring, insightful, and interactive training for your marketing teams
Inspiring, insightful, and interactive training for your marketing teams
We now offer a selection of inspiring, informative, and interactive training days for university marketing teams. Our training will help supercharge your student recruitment marketing activity in a challenging and competitive sector.
Marketing is more essential than ever. Much like student recruitment teams, university marketers are being asked to work their magic (and miracles) to attract students in a challenging economic climate and a competitive international sector. Meanwhile, alternatives to higher education continue to gain momentum.
Our new suite of marketing training days is here to help. Each day is designed to be informative, inspiring, and interactive, keeping with the ethos of our successful training for outreach teams. We blend marketing theory with hands-on practical exercises, ensuring a valuable and enjoyable day for attendees.
And we don’t just deliver marketing training to marketing teams. In this trying time, every university professional is required to champion higher education. As such, our training days will help everyone gain the mindset and skillset to become marketers, regardless of whether you work in outreach, admissions, events, administration, or academia.
We offer a selection of themed training days. Each is focussed on marketing within higher education. We also add further tailoring to your specific university following an exploratory conversation before the event.
Furthermore, each day can be delivered at a beginner, intermediate, or expert level depending on the experience level of your team. For that reason, we can adapt these training days for teams outside of marketing who are keen to advance their ability as marketers.
Our themes are:
You can find further details about each theme by expanding the dropdown boxes below. We can also discuss the potential for making something bespoke and combining two themes for a blended day of learning.
You might also be interested in our ambassador training for new and experienced student ambassadors if you employ ambassadors to support marketing activity.
Brand is a difficult patronus to sustain across an organisation as vast as a university. How can our thousands of employees, our myriad of silos, our tangle of touchpoints ever hope to project a consistent personality, voice, and set of values?
This training day will help you (re)discover your brand. We’ll unearth your brand guidelines, mission, and values, and reflect on these together. We’ll then help you capture them in your marketing mix with practical exercises.
We’ll cover how to become a brand custodian, internally and externally. We’ll practice articulating your brand in words, images, and actions. And we’ll explore the reach and results of your brand through online (and offline) social listening.
Sessions will include:
Words matter. They’re found in our pages and posts, our brochures and billboards, and flyers and feeds. The right combination of nouns and verbs and punctuation can work wonders. Words can engage, persuade, heal. They can inspire our audiences to take action, prompting applications, collaborations, and donations.
But are our words working as hard as they could? Do they make heads stir and hearts whir? Are they credible, accessible, and unforgettable? And are we over-reliant on overworked copywriters, when we could (and should) be word-slinging ourselves?
This training day will teach you the world-class basics (and not-so-basics) of copywriting. To make this super-practical, we’ll use your most business-critical webpages as a case study: your undergraduate course pages.
Together, we’ll explore how to perfect the balance of care and flair when crafting copy. You’ll learn content design essentials, such as simplicity and readability. You’ll also gain a portmanteau of poetic devices to add panache to your prose. Minds open. Eyes down. Let’s write.
Sessions will include:
Email is alive. But not alive and well. Our noisy inboxes are brimming with poor practice, spam overload, and impenetrable waffle. Our universities must stand out amongst the endless swill. For that reason, we can’t afford to send a bad email, internally or externally. We must make our email count.
This training day will help you artfully craft every single email. We’ll cover world-class basics, such as the mechanics of subject lines, pre-header text, and openings lines. Next, we’ll explore writing our emails with a content design mindset, including readability, usability, and the placement of CTA buttons.
We’ll also reflect on the two types of email: single action and newsletter. (There isn’t a third type.) We’ll discuss how to identify which type we’re writing, why it’s critical, and how to lean into each approach. Finally, you’ll discover that email success is a spectrum, with a huge difference between outputs and outcomes.
Sessions will include:
Social media is a lot. In recent years, it has become an overgrown forest. Every platform is trying to evolve into every other platform, all vying for the attention of our eyeballs, our eardrums, our ever-scrolling thumbs. In the maelstrom of nagging notifications, ambiguous algorithms, and dubious DMs, it’s no wonder we are left feeling nauseous.
And yet. Our audiences are delving into their feeds for hours at a time. How can we miss this opportunity to engage with prospective students and their supporters? How can we venture into the feed in the best possible way? How do we offer content that meets their wants and needs and standards?
This training day will give you a grounding in the social media landscape. To begin, we’ll explore how to prioritise your efforts with a social media strategy and channel plan. Next, you’ll learn how to create the perfect post, understanding the dual importance of what you say and how you say it.
Lastly, you’ll learn that social media success if a spectrum, ranging from reach to engagement to conversion to transaction. We’ll explain how to review each metric, whilst also benchmarking against competitors. And we’ll discuss other vital post-posting activities to ensure you gain maximum value from each output.
Sessions will include:
Stories are an inspirational way to engage our audiences: prospective students, their families, their teachers, their agents, and our own colleagues. As marketing professionals, we don’t gather around a campfire. Instead, we tell our stories through webpages, podcasts, prospectuses, videos, and social media posts.
This training day will teach you how to become a compelling storyteller and form an emotional connection with your audiences. Firstly, we cover the topic of creativity to help kickstart our muse, including why creativity is a skill, not a birthright. In doing so, we all have the potential (and permission) to become master storytellers.
Next, we’ll help you find your optimum storytelling approach – head or heart, plotting or pantsing – and how you can embrace your preference. Finally, we’ll offer tried-and-tested-and-triumphant exercises for telling compelling stories, ranging from improvisation games to millennia-old narrative plots.
Sessions will include:
Your website is your herald, your masthead, your open-all-hours hub of news, information, and stories. The home page is your shop window, whilst every underlying page is your shop floor where audiences can explore. It’s also your labyrinth.
Our universities are infamous for their unwieldy website growth, with outdated content, dead ends, and inaccessible barriers. Much like Theseus, we need to escape this labyrinth. This training day will give you the ball of thread to do so.
We’ll focus on three principles to make your website a welcoming place for audiences: readability, accessibility, and sustainability. Each principle follows similar rules and approaches, thereby creating a reinforcing triangle of web best practice.
Firstly, we’ll offer a deep dive into readability, drawing upon universal content design guidelines, to ensure every webpage is clear and user-friendly. Secondly, you’ll learn how to complete an accessibility audit to identify pages and pinch-points which don’t meet WCAG standards or its POUR ethos. Finally, we’ll reflect on the need for greener websites, and how you can actively reduce your digital carbon footprint.
Sessions will include:
Marketing vs outreach. It’s one of the most problematic divisions found within universities. It’s also one of the best opportunities. Both departments are tasked with student recruitment, yet each follows their own approach. Two teams, one purpose. Two sides, one coin. And if we play that coin right, then we can win big.
But as marketing professionals, you may struggle to understand your outreach colleagues. They have a different strategy, different mindset, different jargon. Or maybe your team is beginning to absorb outreach tasks as part of a restructure, and you don’t know where to start. Never fear, our outreach crash course is here.
Firstly, we’ll unpack common outreach lingo – WP, APP, FSM, UKUS, POLAR4 – to help you navigate your next outreach catch-up. Secondly, you’ll learn fundamental outreach activities that are built into the DNA of every successful outreach strategy. These include school liaison, widening participation, and the infamous Mad March.
Finally, we’ll venture into public speaking, a must-have skill for any outreach professional. You’ll discover the value of a memorable slide deck, embedding play into your presentations, and how to speak with authority, confidence, and resilience. You’ll also learn to adopt Fish Philosophy to overcome any challenging classroom.
Sessions will include:
Our training costs £2,500 + VAT for a full-day training session. This includes around 5 hours of interactive learning and development activity, built around refreshment breaks during the day. This fee is fully inclusive of all delivery content and expenses.
We also have a half-day option costing £2,000 + VAT. This allows around 3 hours of learning activity. Again, this is fully inclusive of all delivery content and expenses.
Simon has almost 20 years of experience in the higher education sector. This includes student recruitment, marketing, and events roles at four different universities in the UK: Nottingham, Birmingham, Warwick, and Coventry.
Simon is an accredited marketer, having achieved Level 4 and Level 6 marketing qualifications from the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM). He combines this theoretical knowledge with practical experience as a university marketing professional and content strategy consultant for the international education sector.
Through his consultancy role, Simon helped schools, colleges, and universities share their stories through digital communications. He created marketing strategies, channel plans, editorial calendars, social media recommendations, original compelling copy, and a wide range of workshops and training activities.
Simon is an international speaker. He has spoken at a variety of conferences, including CASE, ContentEd, EFMD, IDPE, FindAUniversity, HELOA, HighEdWeb, PSEWeb, SU Digital, SU Marketing Conference, and Utterly Content. He was Chair of the Newcomers Track at CASE Europe Annual Conference from 2020 to 2023.
As a published author, Simon is particularly interested in storytelling in the education sector. He spends his free time reading, writing, running, and finding new ways to make his children laugh.
To book your sessions, or arrange a call to find out more, please email Simon Fairbanks, our Head of Community Engagement, at [email protected]
Below, you’ll find a selection of quotes from university colleagues who have recently used our training services.
Simon and the team took the time to truly understand our needs and designed an away day that felt completely tailored to us. The training was engaging, energising, and genuinely meaningful, and not just a tick-box exercise. Every member of the team came away with something valuable. It was a day really well spent. Can we book the next one already?
My favourite training event in 16 years of working in HE Recruitment. Engaging, exciting, and fun - it was genuinely lovely to be in a room full of laughter all day! I'd highly recommend UniTasterDays training if you're looking to enthuse and motivate your team, we can't wait to put our learning into practice.
We collaborated with Simon to develop a team away day session. The UniTasterDays team listened to our needs attentively, then designed and delivered a high-quality training session focused on overcoming imposter syndrome. The session was well received, with positive feedback from colleagues.
We are very grateful to Simon who developed and delivered a thoroughly enjoyable and beneficial training day for colleagues in recruitment, widening access, and digital marketing. He took the time to understand the needs of the team and customised the sessions to our institutional strategy. A particular favourite was the empathy-mapping session which really helped us to understand the needs of our varied audiences. Thank you so much, Simon!
The training session delivered by Simon for our partnership away day was exactly what was needed - engaging, informative, energetic, and delivered with humour and enthusiasm! Simon spent time understanding who was 'in the room' and tailored the activities to ensure it benefitted everyone.
