Our new series, ‘HE Copy We Love’, showcases the very best of higher education marketing. For our first entry, we’ve chosen to share Nottingham Trent’s ‘Researchers Revealed’ campaign with you. Launched in January 2023, it’s had more than 13 million impressions worldwide.
https://www.ntu.ac.uk/research/researchers-revealed
Three reasons why we love this campaign:
1. It’s an emotional rollercoaster
On a good day, most HE marketing materials would struggle to arouse a single emotion in their reader, beyond ‘mildly impressed’.
Dig into ‘Researchers Revealed’, however, and the personal stories it contains are going to take you places.
You’ve got humour – like one researcher’s admission that he accidentally chose to explore “printed electroluminescent lamps on textile” as his final master’s project, even though he didn’t know what electroluminescence meant.
You’ve got stories of heartbreak and hard conversations in the kitchen, from researchers whose determination is fueled by the agony of addiction and its impact on the people they love.
Each story is unique and personal, delivered from a first-person perspective that brings the researcher closer to the reader.
2. Great use of video
Too often, HE video content offers the same information that’s written on the page (as if website visitors should choose a ‘learning style’ and stick with it).
In this campaign, video and copy complement each other, using different details to create a fuller picture of the individual researchers, their motivations and the context of the work. Both elements are so engaging, you stay on the page for twice as long.
3. They stay humble
Given the amount of ‘expert’ and ‘world-leading’ trumpets they have to blow, humility is often a difficult note for HE marketers to play – but it’s here, right from the very first line:
“Nobody wakes up one day and decides to be a researcher.”
Universities usually fall back on the prestige of their departmental rankings or Research Excellence Framework results (often damning themselves with the faint praise of ‘18th best social sciences department in Northern England’ or similar).
In their recognition of the real motivations that drive research, Nottingham Trent celebrates something much more relevant to the reader – the power of ordinary people attempting to do extraordinary things.
In that spirit, it’d be remiss of us not to pay our respects to the marketer behind this brilliant campaign.
Hannah Hopkins, the Undergraduate Marketing Officer at Nottingham Trent, was rightly awarded Content Marketer of the Year 2023 at the Higher Education Content Marketing Awards for this work.
Do you like this campaign? Are there any other brilliant HE marketing campaigns you’d like to see highlighted? Get in touch, either on LinkedIn or at jo@allthingswords.co.uk.