Prior to pushing marketing forward and playing with innovative technologies, would be great to ensure Aston takes the full advantage of current marketing technologies.

I am going to cover a couple of things which Aston may want to improve, though they obviously wouldn't be revolutionary.

Not telling you anything new, and aston is definitely getting better, but there are still a lot of room for improvement.

However the website is still not perfect. Still plenty of non-mobile pages, even top level ones, crucially important for target audience. , as it's not mobile by "default".

I know the CMS is not that flexibly, but I think that is something which should be addressed soon, as mobile traffic is still growing. Google have recently announced Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project and though they claim AMp is not considered as a SEO factor, It still can influence traffic.

I think it might be a time to consider a new cms, which woulbe be built with current technologies in mind.

I think minimalism is the key of information architecture. Agaim. Aston is improving, but i think that number of clicks from the home page to destination (course) could be improved.

Just one example, which i liked. They named their audiences, split them into categories, and put them straight onto the home page. It may look too simple, but it think, this works perfectly. this allows to direct them to their landing pages straight away.

Speaking of customer journey I have to mention SEO as well. If there are strictly defined landing pages for each of the audiences- it is so easy to do SEO for them, as we would know what they need and what they would search for.

Also, I believe, generic SEO may be improved. Simple things as descriptions and titles are still missing. Screenshot as an example. I've searched for "aston courses" and got this snippet. If SEO description and title were in place- LSS sitelink would be meaningful

So, enough about these things that we are well aware off and which I still had to mention, as I believe they are crucial for aston's online success. Let's speak about true innovations and trends

One of the current digital marketing trends, which i think would be highly applicable to Aston is personalisatin , by that i mean serving custom content to each user and helping them to find relevant information quicker. There is some email personalissation inplace, but it could be taken further.

For Aston it could be as simple, as having a small form on the home page, which would ask whether user is a perspective student, perspetive undergraduate student or does he belong to any other target audience. Then we would be able to serve the exact content they are looking for, while providing clear and targeted key messages through the user journey.

If we combine personalisation with current tracking technologies we can implement aggressive marketing. Just imagine that you can receive a phone call from potential client, and get his interests, his demographic profile and other information automatically appear in front of you automatically.

All in all, marketing should impress as well.

So I want to discuss one of my favourite technology areas, virtual reality and all other realities. I believe the world would look differently in 20 years time due to VR devices. However, can we use it now? Can we us it now as university?

So, speaking about personalised experience, I thought that we don't give enough information about actual campus living, about societies, about parties, about how the lectures would actually look like. We do give facts, but we cannot show them how would it feel like. I guess we cannot do it properly as it's mostly intangible knowledge which could be acquired only while they are here, experiencing it alive. However, with current technologies we can give them a taste of Aston uni life.

Let me show you a video first.

To give them a feel of Aston, we can send each prospective student a Google Cardboard set, with a video link, so that they can actualy experience being at the lecture, at the aston latin dances class, at aston pub crawl, at aston gym and swimming pool. Cost of a single device is less than a pound. Each student brings 26000 over 3 years. Wow factor is guaranteed, as long as we can shoot an entertaining short video.Good roi