Client story Empowering Contextual Marketing to Better Attract Future Students

Facts at a glance

Client industry:

Higher Education

Challenge:

The client looked to improve its student experience digitally to better attract prospective students from abroad and compete on a world stage.

Solution:

• Sitecore experience platform, integrated with the CRM for student experience management
• New Website Information architecture and wireframes that intelligently surfaces contextual and personalised content
• Automated course catalogue
• A number of recruitment and decision support tools

Results:

• Unified view of prospective students, allowing centrally managed content to be effectively driven to applications
• Empowering contextual marketing to better attract future students

Solution area:

Insight’s Digital Innovation solutions help clients digitally transform their business operations to improve customer engagement and experience.

The concept and the challenge

A solution to transform the student experience

The University of Western Australia (UWA) is recognised as a top 100 university, with a vision of being a top 50 University by 2050.

To achieve this, UWA recently launched a program to transform its Student Experience, kicking off with the ‘Future Students’ project; with a goal of ensuring the University is able to attract and retain the best students from around the world.

The rise of increasing competition both in the local and international student market, meant the need to invest in promotion and marketing through a focus on personalised digital media initiatives. UWA recognised the importance of the digital student experience and so it was imperative to invest in a digital marketing platform to compete on the world stage.

The solution

A Unified Platform for Customer Experience Management

Insight was appointed to build the Sitecore digital marketing platform on Microsoft's Cloud platform.  This solution integrated with the CRM, enables a unified platform for customer experience management, with capabilities of best-in-class content management, analytics and database, real-time personalisation, content marketing, social login to a personal dashboard of courses, careers and events with a mobile-first experience.

"It provides a platform to enable a unified view of prospective students, allowing centrally managed content to be effectively driven to applications including cross-device websites, mobile applications, portals, reporting and ability to interact with devices in Internet-of-Things (IoT) scenarios."

Another great outcome

Adaptive to prospective student interests

From the front end, the platform has enabled Insight to develop UWA’s Future Students Website that intelligently surfaces personalised content to users, through profiling users against 1 of the 9 UWA student personas. This is achieved through the developed information architecture and wireframes.

Together, the platform and the website strongly enhances UWA’s ability to be more responsive and adaptive to the individual interests of prospective students, from initial search and evaluation of UWA courses, through to online application and process tracking.

Insight’s engagement also extended to the development of recruitment and decision support tools, including:

• • The Career Voyager Tool – to suggest different career pathways to a user based on the answers they provide to a series of questions about strengths, values, interests, education and abilities. UWA courses are then recommended study pathways, providing engagement with prospective students early on their discovery journey, in a relevant and meaningful way.

  • The Agent Portal – a comprehensive tool that opens a direct communications channel for recruitment and enables international agents to individually curate the website experience for high-value international students.

  • Course Catalogue – delivering automated course information synchronisation from systems of record to Sitecore, with the ability to enrich the course information with personalised content that adapts to the future students' location and preferences.

  • Migration of a number of UWA’s Sitecore websites to best practice architectural framework principles (Helix) for Sitecore, to drive consistency of solution development on the platform to enable faster and more supported upgrades moving forward.

"We wanted to create a Smart Campus to offer them a much easier experience. We’re wanting to go from prospective students all the way through to alumni. From a content point of view, we are presenting exactly what people are after, and also from a data analytics point of view, we can start to learn what people are looking for, and making better decisions moving forward based on that." - Aaron Collyer, Head of Digital & Creative Services, UWA

Improve your institution’s ability to engage students digitally. Leverage intelligent student applications to drive up engagement and retention, today.