Case Study

Organisation: St Mary’s University College

 

An exciting mix of traditional and contemporary makes up St Mary’s story, but the University College was struggling to find the right audience to listen to it. That is until Cision’s Content Marketing suite amplified its PR and communications strategy by boosting reach and coverage.

Located in the leafy suburb of Strawberry Hill in Twickenham, London, St Mary’s University College is one of the oldest Roman Catholic higher education institutions in the UK. It is recognised for its long and distinguished history in education with a wide range of undergraduate and postgraduate courses on offer.

In recent years, the University College has gained a reputation for its comprehensive sports development program. Ranked as one of London’s top performing sports institutions, the campus served as a pre-Games training camp for the London 2012 Olympic Games. One of the most famous athletes of our times, Mo Farah, the double Olympic gold medalist, started out on St Mary’s tracks. A former student at the University College, Mo trained at the campus for 10 years, before moving to the United States.

A great story, but few listeners

It is this exciting mix of traditional and contemporary which makes up St Mary’s story, but the University College was struggling to find the right audience to listen to it. Sure, the University College has a website, social media presence and video clips. However, despite beefing up content for students,the marketing team was yet to exploit the full potential of social media. ‘We used brochures, videos, press releases and blogs but there was limited engagement,’ noted Marina Boor, senior PR and marketing officer at St Mary’s University College.

Maximise, optimise, amplify

A new media centre was set up and with it a brand new and aggressive communication strategy to help further its reach and optimise its social media game.

Coinciding with the launch of the media centre, the marketing team realised a content marketing platform would be a critical step in maximising its content and supporting the offline marketing campaigns in place.

‘We were entering clearing for the first time in several years and wanted to communicate tips and pointers to students who were yet to secure a place in university,’ said Marina. ‘This was the best chance to try Cision’s content marketing platform and analyse the difference in response generated.’ 

‘90% of the clicks received on the clearing post were from Cision – it works!’

What did Cision do?

Using amplification tools from its content marketing platform, it promoted St Mary’s content on the world’s biggest news websites.

The post on clearing appeared alongside relevant articles on the Mail Online, the Guardian and the Telegraph, among other premium news sites that form part of Cision’s distribution network, which has a reach of over 200 million people a month.

Report card

A week after the content went live, Cision sent Marina a detailed analytics report that incorporated all the statistics needed to understand how its content strategy performed, including numbers on visits and pageviews, referrals, downloads, impressions, clicks and shares. Cross-checked against the University

College’s own performance results, Marina was, as she put it, ‘massively impressed.’ The verdict: ‘90% of the clicks received on the clearing post were from Cision– it works!’ she exclaimed.

A second followed immediately after, and the results were just as positive. ‘The two pieces we amplified through Cision’s content marketing platform generated more traffic to our site than the combined results from ten other posts we uploaded onto our social media accounts over the same time period. We were not doing anything different with content, it was the amplification that was clearly driving traffic to our site.’

A long-term Cision customer, content marketing is now firmly embedded as part of St Mary’s larger PR strategy. ‘Online is definitely the future of media. However, there is no point having presence on social media and putting all that effort in writing press releases and blogs, if there is no one reading it.’

‘Cision’s Content Marketing works, it has for St Mary’s.’