The University of Nottingham (UoN) is passionate about fostering collaborative partnerships with UK businesses. The University approached our team to design and deliver a digital marketing campaign that would attract businesses who want to leverage Government funding, alongside UoN’s cutting edge research, to facilitate innovation and growth across sectors including Agrifood, Aerospace, MedTech and Zero Carbon.

The campaign needed to target key decision-makers, including senior leaders, business development heads, and those responsible for strategic financial decisions or research and innovation. The objectives were clearly laid out; to double the number of Innovate UK (IUK) and Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) leads, improve awareness and engagement with UoN’s collaborative funding opportunities, focus on quality lead generation and establish measurable tracking of enquiries.

Our campaign highlighted UoN’s strengths, attracting businesses to explore valuable research partnerships. From strategic ad placements across a wide range of digital platforms, to targeted pay-per-click campaigns across Meta, Linkedin and Google, we launched and optimised a campaign that delivered an outstanding return for UoN across a six-month period.

Over the six-month campaign, UoN saw a significant uplift in collaborative funding enquiries, almost tripling the number of leads compared with the previous academic year. The campaign also increased awareness of the university’s research strengths among a business audience, helping UoN translate research into real-world applications and supporting future growth in research income.