Blogs make marketing budget go global

A RELATIVELY modest budget of just a few thousand pounds allowed a Scottish university get its name out to prospective students around the world, thanks to an online marketing campaign.

The campaign, on behalf of Strathclyde University, was conducted by Glasgow-based Nation1, which describes itself as a “full service digital agency”.

The company was sharing the secrets of its successes – including also viral marketing techniques and search engine optimisation – at an online marketing seminar hosted last night by Edinburgh-based lawyers, Tods Murray.

What Nation1 did with the budget was organise foreign students at Strathclyde to write blogs about their experiences there for the websites they knew their peers back home would be reading.

And Andrew Grant, managing director of Nation1, reassured the blogs and the students’ enthusiasm for the university were genuine: “Their only payment was beer money,” he said.