Hi everyone. We are back again. My name is Vaishali Dialani, and I work as a Senior customer experience strategist. My focus is to integrate emotions in the world of the broader MarTech stack, and that includes like side code and everything else. But we are very, very excited to talk about a project that's so close and dear to our hearts in the world of higher education and with us. We have Akshay  here with us as well today. Hey guys. My name is Akshay, partner here at Konabos as well as a composable architect. This topic is kind of near and dear to me. I'll let Vaishali introduce it. But for two reasons. One is my daughter's off to college next year. So we're going through the process of going through hundreds of college websites and two it's because we did a project with higher ed. So this is kind of interesting for me, the timeline wise, awesome. So it is a higher education where we talk about how students feel their first year experience to their graduation experience, to like, how education staff actually views the site, how website, how parents view the site. You know, people like ausha creating massive lists on what the website includes, what it doesn't include, and all of that piece. So I think digital transformation in the higher ed space at a very high level is super, super important, because there are, like, so many personas that require and cater different kind of content, are looking for different things. And it's very emotional piece, right? Like you said, it just weighs something so close to your heart, whether it's you're letting your students, letting your children go off to school, or, you know, finding residency and so many aspects of things. But I'm very curious to ask you, Akshay, why do you think is digital transformation very important for businesses? Yeah, so this business is actually a business which is going to university, and it's kind of interesting. It's no longer a website anymore, right? So what I found, which was interesting, when we are looking for colleges for our daughter is it's not just the website, it's so much online, offline, social media, email marketing, looking at intent college visits, capturing if they came to the college visit, things like that, webinars. So what I find is, from a business perspective, it's all about attracting new, new students, educating existing or upcoming students, and retaining students. And it's a function which is kind of become a lot more complex. You talked about digital transformation, which is what we work with this university to do, is it's an overall, holistic view of the entire business, not just marketing strategy, not just website strategy, it's a business strategy which courses are doing well, which need to be added, talking to the faculty, figuring out online, offline touch points, and it's actually pretty complex, but at the end of The day, giving the information to the people who want to join your university, keeping your existing students, and then providing a seamless experience, which seems to be the theme of everything we talk about, but that's what I you know. That's how it affects the business of being in higher ed How do you take it from a marketer's perspective? So you absolutely hit the nail. I feel like everything you said in terms of expectations, whether you're a parent or your daughter, as a student, are looking for certain things. And as a marketer, it's our job to kind of cater, that you know, whether it's making sure we improve your personalization, enhance your experiences, and say, once a student has, like, logs into a recruitment portal, what happens? What's the next step? 

What's the application process? Like, what kind of documents are required, or, if they're applying for FAFSA, then what happens? What kind of tuition, aid and fees are possible? Again, different fusion and different courses have different, you know, options available in terms of financial support that many organizations even offer. There's so many government aspects of things too, right in this whole piece and puzzle and that are very content heavy. How do you kind of make it more digestible for parents students to take that information in bits and pieces, whether it's an Instagram reel, whether it is, you know, putting small pieces of video content, creating YouTube videos, asking students to kind of give testimonials about their experiences. There's so much that goes into it, and having the right kind of CMS platform and dxp platform to help cater those experiences is super important, especially from the time of enrollment to student loyalty and retention and even after they graduate, what kind of Alumni Programs can we have for them. How can they continue to stay in touch with the university, and are the end of the day brand advocates, right? So how do you kind of enhance those experiences, too? So there's so much in that piece and puzzle. What about you from a technical perspective? Yeah, I think it is super tech. So every time I'm filling in the application. Questions with my daughter, looking at webinars or joining a group for prospective students and looking at the information. I'm always thinking of, what are they doing here? How are they doing that? And all I can tell you is, Omni channel, there is no longer just web anymore, because every piece of content that you're generating has to be used in multiple different channels. That's one even video. It's interesting. The shorts between Instagram and Tiktok and YouTube, and they kind of like push you through the journey. So the emails you get will talk about, hey, you know, we, we heard that you, you are. You want to concentrate on arts or biology, and they'll give you webinars. They'll give you a few options, so you can either join webinars, or you can click on existing videos, and you talked about testimonials. So your journey of a prospective University is going between web, social and think about the analytics. I'm actually trying to figure out, how are they analyzing all of these data points, because there's tags all over the place. UTM tags, right? And then to gage an intent. And how are they going to link this intent with when they're looking at the actual application? 

I mean, if your application is worthy, and then they don't see any intent, you haven't attended anything, and your intent is like one out of 15, for instance, as opposed to someone who's done all of the things and you are worthy, and you're at 13 out of 15. So I'm my curiosity has gone crazy when I'm doing all of this, but for me, it's a very technical challenge to make sure content is reusable. Regardless of whether it's text, video, audio. It doesn't matter what it is, being able to analyze and judge intent, I think, is really, really critical. So I think it's a huge channel. And at the end of the day, it is a business. You're trying to keep existing students in, you're trying to bring new students in as well. So I think it's kind of interesting. And what we've done for this university is really, really cool. I can't wait to see the analytics and all the things coming in to see how successful we've been. And I think you mentioned in one of the things, it's a journey, right? It doesn't stop once you release you have to keep looking at existing analytics and keep tweaking it until you get to where you need to. So anyways, I spoke for way too long. What's the takeaway? What's your takeaway from this? I think a website's no longer consumed as a website anymore. It's a combination and amalegation of, you know, a little bit of social media, a little bit of newsletter, a little bit of like email, a little bit of, like, visual photos, videos, and all of it you have, it's almost like a little Snapchat that people come to watch. They actually come here to kind of see what life at that university will be like, and if they are satisfied with it. So I think the importance of digital transformation is way beyond just making sure that the content on the website is uploaded or is absolutely right, but it's more about, how can it look, feel good, have a seamless experience, and also more personalized digital experiences. Because imagine the amount of universities that exist in today's day and age. Children like poor kids, they have too, way too many options. So how do you kind of a bring in student satisfaction and improve recruitment as well as stay competitive in this digital age, digital transformation is the way, choosing the right platform, choosing the right way to communicate and reach your target audience, is definitely what we would support and approach. What about you? Yeah, I think making sure your content structures are set up properly, reusable content, thinking omnichannel, finding the right place to put the right type of content. For instance, video, it might better serve you if you just use YouTube, as opposed to you hosting it on your own, CDN. It just from an SEO perspective, right? You have to think broader, and then just, you know, sometimes the amount of information on these university sites is very overwhelming. Trying to think of it from the student or the parent perspective, you want to give them bite sized information which is useful. So, yeah, I mean, I think looking at the whole thing as a business strategy and looking at it overall, is where I would start. Thanks again for joining us for this video. Hope this was useful. Bye.