Growth-Focused Marketing & Brand Specialist for Schools in Barcelona

I’m Sarah.

I help Schools and Universities in Barcelona grow by enhancing their brand and sharpening their messages to attract attention and drive student growth.

Whether it’s defining brand voice, creating a content strategy, website improvement or developing marketing campaigns, I combine audience insight with persuasive storytelling to help educational institutions stand out and attract the right students.

I worked as a Brand and Marketing Manager at the Barcelona School of Economics for 10 years, helping it grow from a small start-up into a globally recognised institution in economics and data science, attracting students from around the world.

Below is a selection of projects I have worked on recently.

What Makes Students Apply: A Qualitative Research Project

The Brief: BSE’s marketing was built on assumptions about what prospective students wanted to hear. Without evidence to back those messages, campaigns risked missing the mark and money spent on paid campaigns was being wasted. 

The Approach: I led a qualitative research project to go directly to the source. We ran focus groups with people who matched our ideal student profile, but had not applied to BSE, giving us unfiltered insight into their motivations, hesitations, and the messages that would resonate at each stage of their decision.

The Work: From the findings, I was able to create a structured messaging framework, mapping the right message to the right moment across the full decision journey, from initial awareness through to application. I then created a guide for what messages should be used by BSE at each stage of the marketing funnel. I also trained the marketing & communications team on the framework to ensure consistency across all channels and campaigns.

The Results: Campaigns built on evidence rather than assumption, and a team equipped to make smarter messaging decisions long after the project ended. 

The Challenge: Qualitative research had revealed a striking finding: BSE was virtually unknown amongst its own target audience. Prospective students who matched the ideal profile were choosing competitors — not because they had considered BSE and rejected it, but because they had never encountered it. When introduced to the school during research, many expressed genuine surprise that they hadn’t heard of it before.

Despite having a genuinely world-class offering, the School wasn’t reaching the full breadth of its potential audience.

The Approach: I developed and led to a multi-channel brand awareness strategy designed to increase awareness in the target audience. The strategy spanned:

• Social media — building presence and consistency across platforms
• Paid advertising — targeted digital campaigns reaching prospective students by profile and interest
• Education portals — creating a presence where the target market was
• Outdoor campaigns in Barcelona — establishing a physical presence in academic hubs in the city 
• Print and digital advertising in publications targeting undergraduates at competitor universities — reaching students before and at the exact moment they were considering their next step

The Challenge of Measuring Awareness: Unlike a recruitment campaign, the goal here wasn’t immediate applications, it was recognition and familiarity. That makes traditional ROI metrics less straightforward. What we could track was reach, engagement, and the gradual shift in how BSE was perceived over time, including follow-up research that showed growing familiarity amongst the target audience.

The Results: A school that had been invisible to its own ideal students became a recognisable name in its field. The awareness strategy laid the groundwork for every recruitment campaign that followed, helping to convert an audience that previously didn’t know that the school existed.

The Brief: Communicate the findings of the ADEMU research programme to policymakers, researchers and the wider public. The project focused on strengthening the fiscal and monetary framework of the European Economic and Monetary Union.

The Work: Translated complex economic research into accessible, audience-focused content, including Policy Briefs | Website Content | Newsletters | Press Releases | Expert Interviews

The Strategy: Created tailored messaging for each audience segment, ensuring complex research findings were communicated in a clear, engaging and actionable way.

The Results: The communications programme received strong recognition from the European Commission and generated significant media coverage, helping to extend the reach of the research among policymakers and key stakeholders.

About Me

I’m Sarah, and I have over 15 years’ experience working in brand and marketing in education and for some of the worlds leading consumer brands!

I have worked in higher education for the last 10 years, at the Barcelona School of Economics and prior to that, I was working in London for Unilever, building brands such as Ben & Jerry’s, Magnum, Dove and Axe.