 The broadcast is now starting. All attendees are in listen-only mode. Hello everybody and welcome to the day to our first webinar. This is a run of three webinars around using digital to attract, retain students throughout their academic career lifecycle. The first one today is around the role of digital in acquiring and clearing students and we're really lucky today to have Paul Fenimore with us. He is an expert in digital marketing as a consultant at Sitecore and also an associate lecturer in digital marketing at Oxford Books University. I'm going to hand over quickly to Paul because we've got a lot to go through today and I hope you all enjoy it. Great, thanks very much indeed. Well good morning everybody and thank you very much indeed for joining this webinar today. I hope you find it useful. Get your feedback at some point in the future as well. I know this is a particularly important busy time for you guys because you've just been going through the clearing process and getting through the aftermath of that. Indeed, that's why we felt it was timely to be able to pick on this topic whilst it's front of mind and it was something that you guys have been struggling with or trying to exploit depending on where you are with using your technologies and your people processes to be able to exploit the clearing process as such. So first of all, I thought I'd just give you a brief introduction about myself. I work with a software company called Sitecore and if you don't know who Sitecore is, we are a Danish software company and we're the market leader in digital marketing platform and we work in collaboration with our partners to be able to deploy this in a way that enables universities to really extract the full value from the digital marketing platform and clearly as you serve, given their name is one of our leading partners we work with in terms of helping to exploit the full potential of digital with our mutual clients. So I'm a consultant with Sitecore working across Amir. I also do a lot of training to our partners and also to our clients, prospective clients and existing clients on the possibilities as to how you might be able to apply digital in its latest forms to achieve your overall business marketing and operational objectives. I suppose this is a bit of a throwaway term evangelist but I like to think I am a protagonist of digital marketing and it's a passion for me. I spent the last few years putting a massive investment of time and energy and really trying to understand where this is going and the value it can deliver in a practical way for organizations particularly in the higher education market. I'm also a lecturer. I hope there's no conflict of interest with you guys as well. I recently agreed because I was approached by Oxford Book University to be an associate lecturer there. I have done research with them before and published papers with them and Henley particularly around social media in that context so that's why I'm a bit of a published author. So my areas of expertise in all those things to do with digital marketing which I'll kind of end this. I won't consider myself to be a guru not at all. Anybody who says that they are should be shot down in flames because there's too much to know to be all knowing if that's the definition of a guru. So really I'm about helping organizations doing anything from understanding what the possibilities are and how digital marketing and technologies can be applied to achieve your overall objectives as a business or as a university in this case. Also to think about what the optimal strategies are because I don't only just work in the university sector I work across all vertical markets and quite often we can cross-fertilize ideas from different industries and learn from those so maybe I'll bring something to that today to the party. And then I work with clients whilst they've decided to go and use digital marketing and its full potential to make sure that they are doing about that. They are doing that in the optimum way and we have road maps for the adoption program in other words once you've got the technology and you've got the systems and people and processes in place how do you make sure you're extracting the full value of it and that's what I do. So that's enough about me really. So let's move on to the main topic of the day which is about clearing and it has to be a little bit more about that doesn't it because clearing is not something which stands in isolation that the student journey things happen before and a lot happens after but the clearing process but it seems to me that clearing is becoming increasingly important and we will be having some polls a bit later on so par-attention, c'est-vous-plus I don't lecture in French by the way so it'll be useful to be able to get your feedback on some of these three polls we've got so it'll be good to take a view as to where you are with your clearing processes you're applying digital to this and that will be the emphasis on these three polls that are coming forward as we go through this 45-minute presentation. This is a slide which I've just found the other day earlier this week so it's interesting that universities are starting to drop their grades for clearing in order to get higher volumes of students to participate and join and to meet higher quotas because I understand that your quota levels have been relaxed somewhat so there's obviously pressure on you as marketeers and the other things that you do to try and get more and more students to enrol with your universities to make sure you've got the various fees that you need to sustain your university and to get the right caliber of students to get the right ratings as a university and as an academic institution but it's interesting this is kind of worrying to me and I'm sure it is to you this is actually true that universities are dropping their grades to actually fill places to get income I think that's a worry to me because what that says is that there's could be a knock on effect in three years time when people start to graduate if you haven't recruited the right caliber of people to suit your university and the courses that you're delivering then three years hence maybe you're not getting the grades that you want and if you're not getting the grades that you could get because of what you did when you relaxed the rules when people went through clearing then that's going to impact your ratings arguably it'd be interesting to see what your views on it that's trouble whether we're asked we don't get a lot of interaction by the way you are able to ask questions so in terms of the tab at the top right hand side with the go to webinar please do ask questions and we will fill these various intervals through this presentation there's some really good ones that need to be addressed immediately at the end then we can address those so there will be a Q&A session at the end if you've got time and there's some things that you want to delve into in more depth a subsequence to this webinar clearly we'd love to have a one-to-one chat with you about that anyway come back to this topic so that's the backdrop in terms of clearing that we're finding ourselves in and so you know some research that was done by Crunch recently in fact it was last year in hindsight I have to say but it probably got exacerbated these situations that are highlighted by these bullet points on this slide probably got exacerbated not lessened over the last 12 months and it's interesting that it seems that clearing is becoming an increasingly important part of the process of recruiting students but are we recruiting the right ones and one concerning thing here for all of us is that whilst it's 20% of increased year on year in number of students who are often courses through clearing so that's a significant number in anybody's terms but the issue is that we know that students being digital natives by generation, that generation could or what you want will be going to your digital properties whether that's social I'll be looking at your emails and your referral sites student sites the Sunday Times top 120 list of universities and all the other sources they go to but they definitely will be going to your website as the first port of core won't they to determine whether in fact this is the university that they want to join and this piece of research which was done by Crunch over a number of universities during this period is quite telling, over 50% of traffic was due to a loss of budget so that to me is an oxymoron in a way because if you can get the conversions if you can get the right caliber of students and the right level of investment from these students then it's a false economy not to put the right level of investment into your digital properties to attract those people and to enable them to self-serve as students and get information what they want in order to be able to then take it to the next stage of progression and become a student there so that's a worrying backdrop and a little bit of research that substantiates the point I've just made this is a piece of research that was done by Sheridan College who one of the leading polytechnic institutes in Ontario and they've got about I think about 18,000 full-time students and they did some research last year and clearly of all the people they researched over 2,000 applicants about 55% of the respondents considered the institution's website to be a major factor a decicing moment in terms of their journey to decide whether they're going to enroll or not so if you go back to the previous slide that said hey, 50% are bounce rates on the websites when students are looking to evaluate your universities but conversely they're saying it's the most important thing that they're considering in university then there's a deficit there that we need to address and I'm sure you recognize that and desperately try to do something about it but you know 70% indicated that the institution's website did have an effect on their perception of the institution of course it does and in fact that's the way digital natives now communicate don't they they expect about to get information in the moment using digital properties so that goes back a bit that talking about clearing and Tim did mention earlier on we'll be having other webinars that talks about the whole journey of the student during their life cycle right from attracting them through to being part of the alumni and getting them to sponsor and research your institutions and remain part of it and recommend it and refer it and become advocates you know that the clearing process is just a phase you know it's four months during the year where you're trying to attract those people and it's a bit of a scramble I'm sure but the point I'm making here is that whilst we are talking about clearing there are things that very much go before that and after it as well and I'll be touching on that today but also we'll be talking about that in more detail about those other phases in the journey in the subsequent webinars and more about that later so the point I'm making in this slide is that the stuff that comes before it the stuff that comes after it that you need to do and you are doing to attract the right caliber of students and get that level of engagement that you require to give them the confidence and trust to want to sign up to your universities and to maintain that relationship from there on and onwards and actually one of our clients through our Navy do this particularly well so yeah you know they're a government institution and they don't necessarily recruit the same levels of students and volumes of people as you do I think they have to recruit something about 3,000 new recruits every year but the pressures on them is that they have to you know they're not able to recruit the same volumes of people because there are no budget pressures therefore what they need to be able to do is to recruit the very best the right caliber of people so when they do come on board and no pun intended that they are there and they are going to deliver and they're going to have an high impact on the Royal Navy and one of the things that they do particularly well is using all their digital properties in an omnichannel way also therefore when I mean omnichannel integrating that with the bricks and mortar world with the digital world as well and they do an excellent job of knitting those things together and identifying prospective recruits way before the stage that they are in their life to actually join the Royal Navy so they identify people who may be in the cadets or are members of yachting clubs or have expressed some interest in the sea you know and got a passion for that also flying helicopters so it would seem as well of course so they are absolutely brilliant at using this omnichannel capability knitting together the physical world with the digital world to be able to identify recruits very early on in their life stages and nurture them not in a manipulative way to nurture them by a way of entertaining and forming, educating and supporting them to a point where they are in the position to join the Royal Navy and at that point they know these people and the potential recruits know the Royal Navy so they know that they are getting a win-win situation they are getting the best recruits and those recruits are passionate about joining the Royal Navy at that particular point in time and I thought I would just show you that slide by way of example albeit the volumes that they are trying to recruit are a lot less than most universities but the principles and practices that they put in place are very impressive so a lesson to be learned here now we have a poll coming up here so we are going to move on to the bit about how important clearing is is there no change is it slightly more important or is it much more important are we able to get this survey up here at the moment are we able to get the poll up guys so sharing the should be up now can you guys so everybody should be able to see that oh yeah the votes are coming in good, excellent, fine so we just let the delegates participants here have a minute and a half to actually think about where clearing is in their minds and whether it is becoming more difficult or more important all the evidence suggests from what I have just covered that it is but it is nothing like hearing it from the people today and if it is becoming much more important then we need to recognize that and think about how we can use digital technologies and the people processes required to make it more important and so actually work it there is an interesting point for you to talk about in terms of getting the right calibre of people as well and the quality in there have you seen any good examples of people trying to improve that and track through maybe some more context so try to understand where people are when they are returning and how you can really fine tune your messaging for them I have, yeah in point of fact later on in this presentation I am going to cover an example of a university in Canada who I think is doing an exceptional job of doing this and that is about having the analytics to know who your prospective students are where they come online and the segmentation of personas really well and then providing them with the relevant real time dynamic content to get that engagement so you get those conversions you take them to the next stage of progression so yeah, I will be talking a bit more about that, a lot more about that once we get on to the next stage of the presentation so yeah, Roteburn University is a stand up example of an organization just turning corners around that and there is also new entrance of course who are doing it extremely well who have completely different business models I will be touching on that in a moment so how are we doing on a survey okay, we have got a share here so I will allow you to speak to it yeah, I can actually see it so let me see if I can say that can you share that now we are looking at the biggest one is much more important which is coming in at 45% right, yeah that is what I would expect and then following up from that, slightly more important 27% and with 27% around no change as well so around a quarter seeing no change but three quarters either seeing a bit more important or as I said around half saying much more important right, well that so that is what that is saying to us it is quite simply and it is blatantly simple there somehow or other we need to be able to use digital to be able to grapple with this capability during this sort of pressurized four month period because whether we like it or not whether we need to do things like what the Royal Navy does what we need to be able to do is to recognize that is how it works and to be able to respond to that and to make sure that there isn't a 50% bounce rate on your digital properties and therefore students bouncing off or having to ring up your help desks unnecessarily so getting frustrated in that process as well okay that was a good poll then so it would be good to publicize perhaps that information so I thought just on this point moving on then, thank you for that poll people participating in that I thought I just mentioned something about we might need to try and re-share your presentation again alright okay can't see that can you see that now yeah we're back yeah thank you for reminding me I forgot about that so there we go hello hello yes we can see it oh yeah now I just you all went blank there for a moment so how can you hear me yes we can hear you alright that's fine excellent so I thought perhaps it was worth in terms of clearing then clearly it's important for people to be able to pounce on this and have the methodologies in place to be able to exploit and manage the volumes of clearing and provide the relevant context and information to those prospective students and to complete the transaction through to recruitment but against that backdrop if universities aren't doing that successfully well there is an argument that students will increasingly so given perhaps some of the fees that are being asked to pay as well look at alternatives and we know that there are alternatives being offered out to them now and they're starting to emerge and there's new business models occurring in the world of academia and Udemy is something that I should imagine you guys who are listening to already familiar with perhaps not they're not necessarily not visible here in the UK but there's no two ways about it here's an organization which is using digital technologies to crowdsource education so they're getting individuals, academics and practitioners and universities in the whole ecosystem of academia to be able to create their own courses which are accredited and formally recognized by universities and academic institutions but what they're doing very cleverly is crowdsourcing crowdsourcing knowledge basically and enable people to be able to create their own courses and then publish and deliver them and publish them on Udemy so it's a great way a great example of an organization crowdsourcing knowledge and using it to good effect to create and share those skills in the form of online courses and this university was only if you want to call it university I suppose it isn't really it's an online learning platform which is socialized it's democratized learning platform but despite the fact that it's only been going for about 10 years I think it was set up in 2010 so it's been longer than that now isn't it well no it's five years well I've got to get my mask right they've already got 7 million students and they're offering 30,000 course alternatives so if traditional universities aren't the path of least resistance and organizations such as Udemy are then we've got to recognize that there's new competitors out there in the world who don't necessarily have to go through this clearing process who are finding ways around it and they've got these new business models that enable students to be able to participate in a less painful way and the way that suits them so that's a great example of a new business model coming into the academia world and perhaps taking students away from traditional universities arguably I know I'm being a bit controversial here deliberately but to prove the point because it is happening we will need to be cognizant of it and here's another example as many so this is a new, a relative linear university, the Western Governors University so this is purely online and they can deliver these courses anywhere around the world and in fact they use intermediaries I believe in the UK that take the online courses that they create and white label them here in the UK so that's interesting and it means it offers a lot more flexibility doesn't it to those students because they can do it in a way that suits their own particular lifestyle and this is not just so occasional courses here as the previous one was this is in a formal academic courses as well and this university I believe was started up around 1997 so it's just been going for about 20 years but already they've got 60,000 currently enrolled students and more than 50,000 graduates so in the last just under 20 years they've arguably taken away students that otherwise would have gone traditional to traditional academic institutions so we need to be mindful of that and to make sure that we get things like the clearing process really working very well in order to give the students the path of least resistance to finding the right university in a way that they feel comfortable and giving them information to make informed judgments so that's all well and good so how are we doing this well it's complex isn't it like you know my heart goes out to you guys I work with the marketing department Oxford University where I just started to be an associate lecturer I have lectured there before as I mentioned but they're trying to formalize that now and that's been done and hopefully I'm going to be working with their marketing department as well to help them understand how in my experience some of the things that we need to overcome and not get completely blinded by I have to say so this is a slide which was created by God and I attended a presentation at one of those symposiums last year and they were talking about the enrollment opportunity in terms of the technology map now I don't expect anybody really to worry about this too much that if the point of the slide the message of the slide is that you can get very confusing and very complicated in terms of using digital for this enrollment or clearing process and if you're not familiar with the hype cycle the hype cycle high curve that's quite interesting because what that is saying is that there are always technologies where initially there is this initial hype like social media like perhaps Twitter and Facebook and mobile apps and whatever it may be there's always this initial hype and people get carried away with it and really hope that it's going to actually help transform their organization and then the reality bites in and the hype goes down and they feel a bit depressed about it because it's not delivering against the promise because it's always a bit more difficult to implement than they otherwise thought and then after a while it stabilizes, matures and these technologies start to deliver and we can see green here will be things like CRM enrollment or service orientated architecture and business intelligence and obviously gray is well established now there's gone beyond the hype and that's things like using social media of course and we know that's central to any communications and student engagement process that universities are now adopting so the point to that slide is that it is confusing and what I'm going to try and do is to help us stand back and think about well actually it's not that complicated when we think about what we're trying to do so this slide is taken from the world of the commercial sector but the same principles apply to academia I would argue and what we're trying to do in order to make sure we've got this clearing process before and during and after working really well what we're trying to do and those who studied marketing and you guys here actually marketing from day to day will recognize this but sometimes we get bogged down in the weeds and forget about high level standing back up in terms of what we're trying to do the end of the day this is what we're trying to do but during the clearing process we're trying to do this in a very condensed way in a short period of time but we can do it and what we're trying to do is initially make sure that we're able to harvest information and start to build up a single student view by getting this customer intelligence or student intelligence and starting to profile them know who they are what their interests are what particular topics that they're interested in studying whether they're a star student or not where they are what their location is and whether they're a high value or low value international students or otherwise and what they're worth to your organization and digital marketing platforms do this now Sitecore does that picks up this information builds up a profile of any interaction any student might have with your digital properties I keep using the word property because I'm not just talking about website here I'm talking about omnichannel marketing so that's mobile it's about email it's about social and of course it's about your integrating your CRM your transactional data with your unstructured data as well with your social data and the systems does all this now without you having to recruit lesions of staff to make this happen because I know you guys in the world of academia quite often there's only a couple of you if you're lucky doing this you know this digital bit so you need a technology that automates things and makes your life easier as opposed to building a Frankenstein system bolted together in different technologies that makes your life impossible to do this so the other thing what we're trying to do then is to be able to having known who our students are is to be able to communicate with them in a real-time interactive multimedia way that we can measure with no geographical boundaries with infinite reach so this is using web 2.0 isn't it that's the you know the social part of it in many ways it's the ability to be able to interact and have two-way digital conversations but to be able to automate that because you can't do that you know you're clearing and emissions teams can't have thousands of conversations every day because there's a 50% bounce rate arguably just at the moment hopefully that's not happening to you guys but what we need to be able to do is to make sure that your students or your prospective students when they come online they're able to get the information they want they're able to self-serve which means they're happier because they get the information that they need to be able to make informed decisions and the right decisions about your institution and it means there's less burden on your organization to have this mad panic period whereby you're having to field lots of information maybe physically with your help desk and service centers to be able to do that so this is making this is making digital your best communicator to your students before and after they become enduring through that life cycle and then this is about engagement so the last piece what we're trying to do is that having known who they are and having the capability to be able to create content once and publish it anywhere across all the digital channels it's about then having online digital conversations in an automated way that sends relevant content to those students based upon their demographics and psychographics preferences and parameters and to weave these three things together to be able to then get advocacy and in your case it is to be able to acquire and convert them during the clearing process obviously retention and other things like it will be in our subsequent webinars so if we get lost down in the weeds and think about Christ we've got all these different technologies and how the hell do we do this well at the end of the day that's what it boils down to getting the intelligence, using the technology to be able to communicate with relevant information in an ongoing way so engagement is about personalized content on your website you know who people are and what they're looking for when they come onto the site because you've got this intelligence already it's about then also having ongoing engagement plans so things that trigger off social media messages or email messages which are absolutely relevant to those particular individuals so you're having personalized conversations but it's done in an automated way and that way you get your conversions and that way you're serving those people immediately they're getting that information during this compressed period of clearance so that's all well and good but what we need is a plan in place to make that happen and we're coming up to a poll now so let's see if we can get ready for the next poll and this is about ok so we're going to use this technology but how do we make sure it's delivering against the promise how do we best apply it how do we make sure we're applying the technology to meet those marketing and operational objectives making money and saving money I suppose next poll here here are the questions so are we able to get this poll running guys yep just one sec there we are can you see that full no for some reason or other I can't see it but it doesn't matter so if you could just talk us through when we get the results coming through yeah absolutely it's an interesting one isn't it I just wondered whether you've seen any changes I suppose in terms of the importance of digital marketing or coven strategy in relation to the overall business strategy and whether you see a digital strategy in terms of being able to help bridge that for organisations looking at digital transformation yeah that's a really telling question it's a great question and that's why I think we've got this poll here to see whether that bears out what I'm going to say whatever the poll says maybe contrary to what I'm saying but you know I deal with organisations across all sectors and what I'm seeing is a pivotal point just at the moment where I think board of directors the main stakeholders and corporations have started to recognise that digital is central and pivotal now to the success of their organisation and it's now not an IT project it's now not a middle management marketing project at an operational level where it's just running a series of campaigns and it's not just about a website this is about transformation this is about having a strategic digital plan that's aligned to the overall marketing communications plan at the university that then drives that university meets its business objectives and operational objectives you know whether it's reaching new markets, new audiences launching new courses sooner rather than later getting better engagement improving customer satisfaction and experience and managing that whole process but there's still a big but whilst there's this recognition of the lights coming on I'm saying that there's no real plan because people haven't done this they haven't set out they haven't really gone down this road before and putting a digital strategy together so they don't know what the road map is it's not a well trodden path and this is where we come in because I work with many organizations in helping to set out what that path should be for their organization so they learn quick and implement quick and perform successfully and get some quick wins in there so there's attorney I think we've we're coming to a tipping point here I have to say well we've got the poll results up now as well and 67% are coming in with we have a strategic plan aligned with our overall objectives and around the first 33% have a tactical plan but thankfully no one says we don't have one so that's good news well I mean that kind of substantiates what I'm saying in a way and I'm really delighted that we have they have a plan you know 60% have a plan to achieve those overall objectives because that would deliver results and the other point though I would argue is have you got with your plan have you got the right level of investment so I deal with organizations who say right we've got a plan and we're putting 200,000 pounds into it but there's no return on investment there's no business case being put in place so arguably they should be putting 2 million pounds into it not 200,000 pounds so are they putting the right level of investment into it and are they able to measure and get the attribution from the return on investment so that's the next step it's not only having it aligned to those objectives but also making sure it's the right proportional level of investment that actually really is going to deliver so yeah but that's really encouraging and that kind of verifies the fact that I think we are on a tipping point in this respect so I'll show my screen again and we'll move on thank you everybody for voting can you see my screen now yep we can thanks Paul so I'm just going to sum up how I think some organizations are putting together a digital marketing strategy and also how they I'm going to be talking about that in another webinar how you can put an objective business case return on investment model together that substantiates the right level of investment and to be able to measure that and review that accordingly so you guys and this is not me teaching you to suck eggs because I understand that you know this already but when you're putting any plan together you start off by understanding where you are in your market so you understand what the current situation is and you might do something like a pest analysis like acronym could be rearranged in any particular order and you would do a market audit in a SWAT and you would look at some of the threats I've just mentioned new engines are coming into the market and out of this you start to formulate a digital marketing plan or a plan, an overall plan for the institution and you'll look at some of your primary corporate objectives and by the way these are up there by way of example I'm not saying they're definitive but they're by just to be clear just to say we can still see the poll slide I'm not oh so that hasn't moved on no sorry so I don't know why that would be let me see you can still see the poll slide show my screen sorry I can see your pointer but it's still the poll slide can you see that now there we are thank you alright thank you I did click show my screen but obviously it didn't work so the point I was making here is that you do this you do this evaluation as to where you are in the market and where you want to go and you look at your overall primary business objectives corporate objectives and it could be things like attracting the right students increasing income, increasing researching grants and all these various things that you would want to do and they're stated no doubt in your charter as a university and where we tend to to fall down sometimes because we're working in this whole new world of digital marketing it's this correlation of of marketing goals and how they actually drive those overall university objectives and I think this is the bit that we can work harder on and what we're able to do is this bit of attribution because I put this hash sign in terms of these kind of marketing goals because now we're working in the world of digital we can track trace and measure it and we've got this elusive problem that we've had previously about attribution measuring the outcomes of our marketing activities we can now do that and we've got this concept of engagement values and scoring and we can see what conversions we're getting with our digital marketing campaigns and our overall omnichannel marketing and communications activities so these marketing goals and no doubt this is what you do because you now 60% of you said that you're aligning your marketing goals to these overall university objectives which is fantastic and I put one up here for clearing as an example so one of those would be that they want to attract the right student profiles and increase enrollment while focusing on clearing and how many more people can they get through clearing how can they reduce the balance rate that was previously mentioned so this last roll up here in terms of this animation arguably is what a customer experience or student experience platform would do it's not a definitive list of all these capabilities and competences but if you've got a unified platform this is what it would comprise of it would have experience management giving you an opportunity to optimize and manage that and to do that in an omnichannel way primarily around the technology and obviously enables you to implement processes but then of course you need the people to measure it and I think where technology companies like Cycora fell before in the past is that we haven't helped you understand the correlation between the capabilities of this technology which is most useful and usable now there's a real return and investment on it correlation between this capability and your marketing goals and the overall institution objectives so let me give you an example about clearing so what you want to do is to increase enrollment and income but you want to get the right level of students and you might do that during the clearing period because everybody is saying that's becoming increasingly important so how do you do that? Well what you do is no doubt you are doing this whether you're doing this in an automated way I don't know but clearly you need increased capability because that's what you've said we're seeing what we're able to do within our digital platform to look at personas and do our market segmentation so we start to be able to define what students we want to attract we start to want to know whether we want to pick particular students or focusing on a particular courses and topics they want to study what caliber they are whether high value, low value where they're coming from what geography they're coming from what we're able to do then is to optimize dynamically visitor journeys on those digital properties to make sure they're getting the right content using our rules based engine so this engine here will say if this student is looking for a course in digital marketing and they want to do that in Liverpool and they want to get finance and also they're coming in from India whatever it may be then the content will recognize this based upon those criteria the rules will say that this is this journey it recognizes the implicit and explicit behavior of that particular student show them this information so that gets this conversion what you're able to do using a database that we've got now the Mongo XDB but you've probably got your own but it's harvesting all this information all of the time and what we're able to do over a period of time is to pick up a single view of the student or start to build up their profile and we can get the analytics to help us understand who they are and what customer journeys they're going on and how we can optimize that and then we've got this concept of the goals and engagement value so as we as they go through this customer journey we're able to measure and trigger particular goals that says that if they've downloaded a video or signed up for something or rang up your help desk or triggered something that takes them on that journey for them signing up to be a student with you enrolling then you can measure the that journey and the value that journey is bringing to you and to that student so that's the attribution and then what we can do following that is to have these ongoing personalised engagement plans so if a student on a particular part of that journey is particularly interested in more information about the module module guide or high level module guide on digital marketing they can get that instantly so the system will say right based upon this condition that they're interested in that particular course and they want the module guide and send it to them via email and then in two weeks time follow up with another email to say how did you get on did you want to speak to us about it whatever that engagement profile is so this is knitting together or what historically has been disparate technologies under one unified platform to make this a seamless process so you don't get that bounce rate and you do get those conversions and then you can do this multi variant testing thing so you can optimise content very easily and see what's working and what isn't working as people go through those journeys and you can do this without lots of technical staff because you don't need to be technical to be able to create content and set up these rules and you can do this across all these different channels so I went to Prince an interesting one I know that some universities now publish out brochures based upon the explicit interest that a student has expressed by visiting the digital properties so if they're interested in MSC and digital marketing and they want to find out more about it they will get that curriculum not a big thick brochure or prospectus on the whole university but something which is personalised to them which gives them the right information that they require but also saves the university a massive print cost so that's where you get the omnichannel capability and of course you start building up a picture of the student because you're then integrating the system easily with your CRIM system and you start to build up this profile of the student which means you can build an engagement plan and start to have these digital conversations with them to get those conversions so we can see here we can build up this profile, this is a profile card or we call it the X file X folder, experience folder in other words so the system is harvesting all that information so when somebody comes online we're starting to build up this 160 degree view or even 180 degree view of what Peter is and what his interests are and we can see according to pattern matches because we put these profiles and segments within the system so it tells us who he is that he's an undergraduate and is particularly interested in biosciences in terms of a profile we've decided that perhaps we've got different personas that we've got here there could be multiple ones and his best matching in terms of his behaviour is that we know he's a star candidate because his A level grades are just outstanding and he's an international student so he's probably worth more to us than other students in that context and we can see his behaviour things that he's done and also we can see the value that he is is worth to us and his behaviour online as well so number of visits, what he's been looking at and what call to actions he's done so recent campaigns what has he responded to he wanted to find out more about an open day for science students and also he's inquired about financial advice for international students so that would be a trigger in your engagement value that I was talking about earlier on if somebody is asking for information about that and you're able to service him online and giving him that information he requires, you're getting him closer to that conversion to then going through that clearing process of making a decision to go with your university and it builds up all this information you don't have time to go through all of this with you today and you can build up a profile card within the system that enables you then to have this viewer this student to be able to then get them through clearing much more efficiently make them feel happy and confident that they're making the right choices and there are organisations starting to do this Canada tends to be a country where they're a little bit further down the line with the adoption of digital marketing and communications just by the nature of their country, in a big vast country with a smaller population so the best way to communicate with people when you've got that kind of geographical landscape with people who are dispersed and digital becomes a great way of communicating in a very cost effective way so this organisation needed to do stuff so they got this disparate technology you know the balance rate was high they didn't engage with them and there was no integration with their CRM system and so they needed to do stuff so using the technology that I've just mentioned they did excuse the blurry slides here I took these from one of their videos that they showed the other day they started to do simple things like testing so rules based testing on particular content and personalisation based upon geography on number of times they've come on site so if we know that this is the third time they've been looking for doing a course in the arts and we know that they're particular they're coming in from India or whatever it may be we can start to show them personalised content immediately rather than having to rummage through a cumbersome website which makes them feel they're self-serving rather than having to call your institution to get the information they want because they're digital natives they expect to be able to get the information online immediately and then to be able to do rules based personalisation as indicated before so some of these simple tests they started to do with things like applying for your MBA this is one example and the system you don't need to worry about all of this to the left here just at the moment but they did a simple test saying so your path to MBA start your application today with one variation and the other variation on the same thing was your path to the MBA explore and connect and apply now so the fundamental difference between these two is one was shorter this was test A and this is test B and the revelation to them was this test when they started to run it over a given period of time and they set it up in 10 minutes you can create this test in 10 minutes you let them run for whatever period you want and then the computer system because it's machine learning will tell you what works they found out that test B was actually significantly more successful than test A which was a surprise to them so what they told them objectively with the information to prove it was that simplicity was better and we were talking about bounce rates well just through doing simple personalisation sorry testing not personalisation yet they decreased bounce rate by 17% so with a minimal amount of effort they were able to eat into that discrepancy also what they were able to do I mentioned analytics earlier on was to be able to see the behaviour of students as they were coming online and therefore provide them with relevant contextual information based upon their explicit and explicit behaviour and what they found was that when people were coming online what they were looking at as they navigated through these journeys was the first thing they were interested in was how much does it cost can I get in and how much can it cost so those are the pages that they were hitting and quite often it took them some time to get to those pages on the website to make that happen so they realised they needed to make that a priority and they made that more accessible to people coming onto their website so based upon the fact that they are a new student they're making an enquiry show them this information straight away for the first search not the fifth click before they get the information and then send them off in the journey I'm giving them information based upon their subsequent clicks so that started to work really well for them so this doesn't need to be rocket science the second thing they realised from the analytics that students were interested in looking at when they were going perhaps through the cling process was okay I can get in and how much does it cost but why should I choose this particular university so send them off once they've come back again and they're looking at the why send them off on their journey personalised journey which extols the credentials of your particular university rankings, financial times feedback and so on and so forth so that was straightforward, it didn't take much time to be able to put that in place but the conversion rate went up and the third thing they recognised from the analytics that students wanted to do was what will I learn and who from they're not guessing here, they know this objectively from all the analytics they get from the system straightforward information so you know three simple things, so then send them off in the personalised journey and send them in to the faculty and nudge them towards the content and the courses that they want to promote so if they've got a particular course that they wanted to promote more than another one then maybe nudge them to the MSC you know I don't know marketing as opposed to e-business perhaps because we realise it's more relevant towards them so that started to work really well as well so you know whilst it sounds very complicated and impossible not for me that's not the case, I believe there's only just two people in this university responsible for marketing and this is at the top business score in Canada I have to say and the other thing they started to do which was a little bit cleverer this is for the MBA course I have to say so it's not necessary for undergraduates of course, is that the system will recognise the URL that somebody's coming in from and looking at the website and when they recognise that it's the bank of Canada URL, an email account then they show them information pertinent to that particular place of work and they say hey if they are coming in from the bank of Canada and they can recognise that because the rules engine picks it up show them information pertinent to that particular business score curriculum which is to do with a financial MBA perhaps and also it shows them people who've previously come from their institution from their bank who've actually gone and done their MBA there and also tell them perhaps that they maybe didn't know this that they're the vice president of the university that is also the CEO or one of the chairman of their bank and they maybe they didn't know that either so this is building up trust, it's giving the information they want helping them to make informed decisions taking on that journey so very simple things that started to make a massive impact and they're doing this with no more staff that haven't needed to recruit you know lesions of staff so guys we got this poll next so to what extent are you using testing and personalisation techniques along the line that I just mentioned so perhaps you can take a look at that because these things are simple to do what I'm finding is that people aren't doing it but quite often they're doing it manually or it's too difficult to do because the system's not up for it so be interested to get your feedback on that how are we doing on the poll here guys well it's coming in with around 50% not at all right now we'll leave it open for a little bit longer to who else comes in you mentioned Digital Native quite a few times and it seems to me that students have a far greater expectation from the university now not just in terms of the quality of the course but how universities communicate and support the students so do you think the change in how students like to be communicated here is understood by within the sort of senior levels of the university from the impact of that I think again we're turning a corner it's a great question again I think historically they haven't but now they recognize they've got no choice in this because I was at university I did my master's only five years ago I was communicating with my cohort I get to say that via social media I'm not using email at all so if that's where students are hanging out you've got to talk to them in the place where they're hanging out and in recognition of that I'm seeing universities now starting to have a social media strategy so that's really important and yeah you know students because they are digital natives born into the world of the net generation that they expect to be able to communicate with their universities digitally and if they can't I think it gives them a negative perception of that university that university is not on the case so yeah I think that's a really good question well we have the results up now a third coming in not at all a third coming in with occasionally but it's a manual process and a third coming in with we use testing and personalization tools for some content but no one seeing it no one currently who's using personalization and testing is key to their digital strategy yes and that doesn't surprise me at all and here we have is a very simple thing to do I've given you an example haven't I with the Rotman University you've just started to do this and get some very significant results and I would say that the principal reason behind it is that historically the technology to do this was clunky and it did integrate with your website easily or your social media sites or your email sites and there's this problem of legacy technologies where all organizations it's not just universities of course they've got these disparate technologies and they're not integrated so it makes testing really really difficult but I think nowadays the technology is moved on you can do personalization and testing very simply without having to go to your IT team to get into HTML or to be able to analyze that important part isn't it is the fact that you want to be able to keep this in the hands of the marketing teams make it simple make it quick and easy to do so in the last five minutes we're sort of running long time now so we'll pass back to you currently we can see the poll slide still up but we can move on yeah there we go importance of mobile back back to you Paul thanks yeah okay so this is building on your question Tim about you know digital being really important and clearly mobile being vitally important and it's doing all the things that I've just mentioned that organizations can do you can do testing and personalization of course but you got about to do it in the moment where they are and what they are doing and of course the way you do that is to do all the things I've just mentioned but to make sure you're able to render that out in a optimal way and to have your content which is optimized and adaptive for those digital mobile platforms whether it's a tablet or a tablet or a phone or a smart TV now etc and simple things like this is Exeter University who are using this for their open days I don't know about you guys but when you go back to university I mean you're working in universities they have massive places and difficult to find your way around it could be quite intimidating so having a simple mobile app when people do come to your open days or even just to you know pop along and find their way around university it can be quite intimidating and also when you join university and you're finding your way to lectures I know that I turned up to lectures late because I just couldn't find the room so if you've got a simple mobile app and this is not rocket science that is using the same content that your other properties are using so you're not having to create specialist content for this create content once and publish anywhere and you could do this on your mobile device and I just put that up there by way of example because no presentation such as this could be absent of the importance of mobile so it's being able to make sure that you've got the capability to render adaptive content which is optimized for mobile devices and again this is all automated nowadays if your digital properties whatever that may be are not optimized for mobile then clearly you've got a problem but I suspect that most of you have overcome that by now hopefully you're doing this in an automated way and not having to you know create manually content or revamp content to be optimized for your mobile devices and creating your own apps there's no two ways about it this is really important and this thing this exit tool and I love it you know if only I had that when I did my masters that would have made my life less stressful at times running around the campus trying to find my my map you know location as to where the course was running but that's even before I mean I was at Oxford Bronx the other day and people were showing the new students the campuses and it was you know crowds of people walking around a massive campus and I'm not sure how much of that stuck in so you know it's just following on really beyond the clearing process but when students see that you've got an app like this when they are going through the clearing process again it gives them some confidence that you're on a case and you're digitally savvy as an organization I'm sure you would agree so that's just a simple but great example of making that happen and then this I don't need to go through that but they actually also use their voting so again this is getting feedback all the time from students so getting ratings not just at the end of the year or at the end of the course but getting feedback from people all the time so they can tune and tweak things on the go and that's just saying that the students loved it then the use of social I mean there's no two ways about that we know that social is really important but so many so many students apparently were clear that they didn't they had chosen university didn't even have a Twitter or Facebook account so some things that could be remedied very quickly to be able to do that and overall there is a drift of course towards universities moving rapidly using Web 2.0 to get those digital conversations through those social channels which you should be able to do is to wherever you got your content in that central digital asset management repository or your media library as is the case within Sitecore you should be able to create that content once and then publish that out again to your mobile to your social site so you haven't got to employ additional people to make that happen and you've got consistency of messages and imagery branding across all your channels as well that's important and there's storytelling idea which you can do digital is great and I don't know how far you've taken it guys but here's Washington University I know Liverpool University I think that's Liverpool, not England I think we've got somebody from Liverpool I started to use things like Second Life that hasn't quite worked I don't think it's quite all my advocacy and evangelism about this whole new world of digital some things don't work too well but it would be useful at some point to know how you guys are using virtual communities, virtual worlds like Second Life but on principle to me that sounds fantastic so if I was going through clearing and I wanted to find out more about the university and so I'm a foreign student but that doesn't matter I could be up north and wanted to go to university in London I've never been there before in the past but if I can go around and do a virtual tour of that university that just gives me that extra bit of information and comfort, a reassurance about understanding who that university is but that's the tricky one I always think that Second Life is a bit spooky you kind of fly around it's almost like being on hallucinatory drugs when you're on Second Life anyway just to round off then because we're on time I think there's a bit more about how I work with edu-serve so we have a pretty good website ourselves I would have to say I'd ask you to download our book which is about putting a business case together for all of this because as I said earlier whilst we're embarking upon this journey of employing digital really well particularly for clearing and other things as well you've got to be able to show your investors your your board if you want to call them that the stakeholders what the return investment is and I have a really great methodology now for calculating in an objective way what the return investment would be for your people processes and technology for your digital strategy and a very comprehensive ROI calculator that I use with edu-serve to be able to then put a P&L together and I know market is on financial guides and accountants but we can help you with that but have a look at this ebook just go on to our website some workshops with edu-serve things like the possibilities what's the latest and greatest with the digital technology and how does it apply to our university where are the priorities and where are the quick wins and what strategies should be adopted so we run workshops or programs or one-to-one consultations with universities in that case to help formulate a strategy that everybody gets consensus to and then this business case thing is really important with the digital marketing's turn of age you can do this attribution and I can help you do that with edu-serve and then once you've got it once you start using this the technology that you've already got is to have an accelerate program to be able to get quick wins and then ongoing relationship with you guys to make sure that you're delivering against the promise that you've given people when you've put that business case together so we do that through consulting, workshops, training and online services in collaboration with one university not so long ago in fact it was probably about eight months ago who now decided to go with Cycle this is not a sales pitch but it is in a way I suppose and this was the headline of some of the objectives looking at the possibilities so to get a level set so get people from different functions with the organization not just in marketing but maybe in legal admissions finance one of the workshops I had a whole cross-function of people attending and to get a level set and a common understanding about what the possibilities were of digital and then to get this consensus and collective buy-in as to what needs to be done to get that impetus to make it happen which is always a problem isn't it guys trying to get the organization to get it you get it but it's always a problem helping you get everybody else get it and then to set out a plan to follow up on some of the things they want to do with the possibilities so I think I'm just turning over to Tim now in terms of following up well thanks a lot for that people and I hope everyone found it interesting so yeah obviously we're slightly well over now but just a couple of dates for your diaries as we said this is the first of three webinars so the next one we'll be looking at how you can use digital to help post graduates and then we'll get that alumni and then in January we've got one focus really on international students as well which is exciting we'll also put both Paul and I at University UK to some marketing event down in London as well on the 13th of October so they're happy for you to come along and join us there and thanks for your time and I think we will leave it there thank you very much