Singapore – Independent identity provider Okta, Inc. recently introduced its new solution, the Okta Customer Identity Cloud, last November 11.
Powered by Okta technology Auth0, Okta Customer Identity Cloud is an easy-to-implement and customizable solution that aims to help businesses improve their customer experience while reducing security risks.
“Okta’s Customer Identity Cloud, powered by Auth0, makes it possible to improve the overall experience and keep customers secure at the same time, all while enabling app builders to focus on what is most important–innovating for their customers,” said Eugenio Pace, president of customer identity at Okta.
The solution includes two differentiated use cases for consumer apps and software as a service (SaaS) apps, as well as several product innovations for modern app builders to provide better user experience, reduced risk, and greater developer productivity.
The Okta Customer Identity Cloud for consumer apps will help organisations streamline registration and login across any device, stack, or platform. It is also expected to contribute to higher customer acquisition and retention, a better experience, and a fuller view of users.
On the other hand, the solution for SaaS apps will help companies get enterprise-ready, onboard new users, and manage authentication across business customers without diverting development resources away from their core product.
Kim Huffman, chief information officer at TripActions, shared how the solution helped the travel platform’s business.
“Okta’s Customer Identity Cloud has been critical to our success as we continue to scale and grow globally. It enables an easy, frictionless, and secure experience that’s vital to our customers,” she said.
Okta is a California-based identity and access management company trusted by brands such as JetBlue, Nordstrom, Siemens, Slack, and more in protecting the identities of their workforces and customers.
Sydney, Australia – Digital marketing agency Tug has been reappointed by Budget Direct Insurance in Singapore and one of its brands EasyCompare in Thailand, with an expansion of its remit to include content and UX.
Budget Direct Insurance is an online digital insurance company and part of an international insurance group providing insurance solutions worldwide. EasyCompare Thailand is one of its brands and is an online car insurance comparison website and broker in Thailand.
Tug was first engaged by the two more than 12 months ago to manage link acquisition and competitor analysis to boost their local search rankings. In addition to extending its initial engagement, Tug will also work on on-page optimization, content strategy, creation, and UX to further grow both brands in each country.
The agency said it will increase site engagement for the two brands by incorporating thought leadership pieces, data-driven content, and infographics to drive overall expertise, authority, and trustworthiness which are key factors for a successful SEO strategy.
Simon Birch, CEO of Budget Direct Insurance, said, “Tug has the capability and experience to deliver effective strategic thinking and implementation of search optimization, more than most in our region. I’m delighted we are not only continuing our relationship with them, but expanding its range of services to ensure Budget Direct Insurance and EasyCompare Thailand continue to be top of mind for consumers.”
Tug’s CEO Nick Beck commented, “Having built a successful partnership with both teams, we’re delighted that our engagement has been extended and expanded. As we continue to grow the Tug network across Southeast Asia, we look forward to establishing an on the ground presence in Singapore and bringing our expertise to more businesses early next year.”
Tug will be managing the business from its Sydney office, with plans to open a regional Southeast Asia hub in Singapore during the first quarter of 2022, joining its network of offices in Toronto, London, and Berlin.
Tug has also recently announced acquiring the SEO mandate of resto booking platform Dish Cult and also an extended remit for software firm LEAP to add global media business.
Five steps to gain a competitive edge in the race for student mindshare
As enrollment across higher education institutions continues to slow, many colleges and universities are painfully aware of the budget and funding cuts that can quickly follow. In an effort to stave off these downsizing exercises, the competition for new students has become fierce.
For the admissions and marketing departments tasked with driving enrollment and retention, the stakes have never been higher. And with the student and campus experience increasingly taking place online, schools understand the growing importance of the digital experience they deliver to both prospective and current students.
According to a study by higher ed enrollment and fundraising solutions, Ruffalo Noel Levitz (RNL), a college’s website ranks as the no.1 informational resource students use in their college search, while the same data showed that 76% of students will fill out a submission form on the school’s website to get more information.
Most marketing and admissions teams know they need to focus on enhancing their digital student experience; yet the biggest question is, “Where do we start?” With the sheer size and complexity of the typical college or university website and digital presence—not to mention the siloed nature of those contributing content—it can be daunting to figure out how to build a focused, high-impact digital strategy to drive enrollment and retention.
This 5-step guide explores how higher ed marketing and admissions teams can apply forward-thinking digital strategies to help siloed departments work in unison—and gain the buy-in they need from leadership—to drive enrollment and retention and support the success of their institutions.
1. Establish a benchmark for your digital marketing efforts
An effective digital strategy starts with taking inventory of your school’s current digital performance. After all, with budgets under pressure, marketing and admissions face increased scrutiny around the cost of digital tools and campaigns. Demonstrating need and proving results requires you to identify which metrics are the most important to drive buy-in from leadership.
Start by thinking about your digital marketing efforts and how they relate to the high-level ROI factors that leadership will use to assess them. These factors typically include:
•Volume •Quality •Value •Cost
From there, it becomes much easier to evaluate each of these factors across your institution’s digital presence—from webpages to SEO, paid campaigns, form submissions, and more.
Take note of poor performers
During this initial digital audit, make a list of the weakest links in your digital strategy. Is your content meeting student needs? Is your SEO strategy driving new prospective students to your website?
As you move into step two and begin to draft your digital strategy, these ‘poor performers’ can serve as a quick way to start delivering incremental progress through:
• Quick-win opportunities: Showing you where you can make small changes to drive fast, easy improvements to your digital student journey. • High-impact opportunities: Identifying the areas to apply limited resources in order to make the biggest impacts on key outcomes like site traffic, conversion applications, virtual tours, and more.
2. Align your digital strategy with your institution’s strategic goals
In addition to the inherent challenges associated with the numerous semi-independent schools, departments, and divisions, each silo in your institution’s ecosystem has slightly different objectives regarding its digital assets.
For example, some departments may have an internal application process to weed out students and keep class sizes down. These departments may need focused web content that delineates the application process, prerequisites, and other important preparation resources. Other departments, however, may suffer from a lack of awareness and need a stronger search and SEO presence to drum up student interest.
Despite these different sub-goals, every department’s objectives should still ladder up to your institution’s overarching strategic vision. Think of the way these two sets of objectives align as a sort of educational hub-and-spoke model. The departments represent the spokes, addressing their specific needs—but each one also connects to the university’s central strategy, keeping the wheel turning and your institution driving forward towards enrollment growth.
Start small—then scale up
After your initial website audit, you may find that there is a lot of work to be done. However, trying to tackle everything at once—across dozens and dozens of departments and divisions—is a surefire path to failure. Start with one gap, for example, that may be in terms of accessibility, SEO, and content, and then focus on that. As you demonstrate incremental ROI, you can build new initiatives into your digital strategy over time.
3. Create an inclusive digital student environment to match your inclusive campus
As digital solutions continue to replace many traditionally in-person student experiences, higher ed’s commitment to accessibility changes. Schools need to ensure their digital assets are truly accessible for all students and provide powerful opportunities to increase enrollment, engage students and support them on their path to graduation.
Without seamless accessibility to mission-critical webpages, initiatives in SEO and search won’t have the desired effect—making accessibility the perfect place to start your digital evolution.
Identifying accessibility issues
Bounce and abandon rates often serve as the ‘red flag’ that a specific webpage may not be meeting student UX expectations. But they also lead to as many questions as answers. So how do you turn these inaccessibility symptoms into a true diagnosis that includes actionable steps to cure UX issues?
To identify the underlying cause of accessibility and UX issues you may need to invest in tools that provide a deeper look at how users are interacting with a page. Behavioral analytics features like heat and scroll maps can empower marketing and admissions teams as they review user sessions and identify specific causes of user friction.
Armed with these insights, it becomes much easier to make the subtle adjustments that will enable more users to have meaningful interactions with your website—bringing them one step closer to enrolling in your institution, choosing a class, or declaring a major.
4. Improve SEO and optimize ad dollars with an empowered team
Most marketing and admissions teams know that SEO and paid search are valuable, but very few higher ed institutions have a real search strategy. Most schools fall into one of two buckets:
Set it and forget it
Many schools developed an SEO strategy back when they launched their website—when they had to write all the web copy, page titles and tags, and all the other stuff that feeds Google’s algorithms. They may have done a great job, but they’re not regularly evaluating and adjusting their search strategy.
Constant adjustment
Other schools regularly evaluate and adjust their search strategy. Sometimes too regularly. SEO is a long-term strategy—a bit like the stock market. You can’t judge performance based on a few days, or even a few weeks. Making constant, hasty adjustments is hardly better than having no search strategy at all.
The best approach falls between these two extremes. You want to build a search strategy that ladders up to the brand values and differentiators of your institution. Put tools in place that make it easy to monitor search performance. And if you’ve built a solid strategy, you’ll want to take a long-term perspective on judging and adjusting that strategy.
Identifying SEO champions across the institution
Before you start identifying keywords, make sure you have SEO champions across the schools and departments in your institution. These champions help you drive compliance with SEO strategy, ensuring that every web page is going through the same SEO lens.
Take a student-centric perspective to choose keywords
It’s likely that each school and department within your college or university will have its own set of unique keywords and key phrases. To help ensure keyword quality, it’s important to make sure they’re all starting from the same student-centric perspective:
• What questions are students asking? • What search terms are students using? • Where are students searching from?
Get everyone using the same tools
Picking a single, intuitive tool to use across all departments and schools will not only reduce administrative and IT burden, but it will also provide organization-wide visibility, and measurable progress toward your SEO goals.
5. Foster an identity that replicates the campus experience
With higher ed enrollment on the decline, it’s no surprise that most of the attention from marketing and admissions teams focuses on attracting and engaging prospective students. But student retention is equally critical to a school’s success.
Invest in your ‘digital campus’
Colleges and universities invest heavily in their physical campuses. But they should also be continually investing in the ‘digital campus’ to keep pace with expectations and drive satisfaction among the student body.
Deliver a mobile-optimized experience
Students today expect to pull out their smartphones to get an answer or complete just about any task. Make sure your students are able to access the digital assets—course materials, campus information, and other resources—they want from their mobile device. Moreover, make sure that your digital experience is just as great on a mobile device as it is on a desktop or laptop.
Give students real-time connections
We live in a world defined by instant gratification. Fair or not, students bring the same expectations to the ‘digital campus’. When they want help or need an answer, they want to connect with someone right now—and frustration mounts with every passing minute. Integrating chat boxes and other real-time communication tools make it easy, fast, and intuitive for students to connect with professors and admin to get the support they need, right when they need it.
Keep marketing conversational
Today’s higher ed students see right through ‘marketing speak’. Yet marketing teams must still reach out to engage students with offers—whether it’s course enrollment information, campus events, and opportunities, or other services. The key is to make sure your marketing communications use friendly, casual language. Messages should feel like they’re coming from a helpful peer—not a lecturing parent, and definitely not a salesperson. Think of your tone and language like the landscaping and other aesthetic features of your physical campus: They have a big impact on the ‘feel’ and experience of your digital campus.
Figuring out where to start (or where to focus) can be the toughest part of improving your college or university’s digital presence. But by following the actionable steps offered in this guide, you can begin building a high-impact, forward-thinking digital strategy that’s geared toward the outcomes that matter most: driving enrollment and protecting student retention. Just as importantly, these achievable strategies will help you realize measurable results and build powerful momentum behind your digital initiatives.
Join us as we bring you an in-depth webinar on how you can improve online strategies, one that’s able to deliver a seamless and intelligent digital experience that would effectively accelerate student recruitment efforts as well as improve student retention. Register here.
Manila, Philippines –Business development veteran Joven Barceñas has recently joined international-wide UX and digital development agency Adaptis as its head of growth.
Prior to Adaptis, Barceñas was most notably the regional head of advertising and sponsorship sales at Lighthouse Independent Media in 2018, the publisher of Singapore-based Marketing Magazine.
For his new role at Adaptis, Barceñas will be responsible for the firm’s business growth through business development and marketing, and also to improve processes within the function. Adaptis is a collective of digital development studios strategically located in Europe and Southeast Asia, providing experience-led technical capabilities to global clients.
On his appointment, Barceñas said, “With almost a decade of exposure to media, marketing, and technology, I always wanted to discover what I can do and learn more in the tech space. I am very excited to be a frontrunner in humanizing technology through the apps and websites we create.”
Barceñas also shared to MARKETECH APAC that while the role charges him to focus on the company’s Australia, Singapore, and Thailand markets, his role “has no boundaries,” and that whenever opportunities strike within Adaptis’ other markets, he is more than ready to grab them.
Since its inception, Adaptis has grown through word of mouth – a testament to excellent client satisfaction. [My] priorities [for the role] are looking into the process and communications improvements from every aspect of client journeys with us – from prospecting to onboarding to project deployment. Part of the role is to create marketing initiatives to boost brand awareness for Adaptis. While I am doing these, business development activities are in place concurrently
Joven Barceñas, Head of Growth, Adaptis
Meanwhile, on his personal insights on the changes in the business development landscape amid the pandemic, Barceñas commented, “The most positive thing with virtual selling is that you can do 2 to 3 business meetings in 2 hours as it saves you time to travel from one place to another.”
He continued, “This means the business developers should have been more productive during these times. I think the main challenge is to effectively use the first meeting as an opportunity to build a better foundation of trust and relationship with new clients.”
Adam Eastburn, CEO, and founder of Adaptis, shared that prior to Barceñas’ appointment, the role was open to reach out to more companies to partner with them and to guide firms through their adaptation to changing human behavior and technology trends.
While the company has been successfully acquiring new businesses since its inception in 2013, it believes that it could contribute more to the industry by educating new clients on user experience and providing excellent work that users would love.
“The direction is always finding opportunities wherever and whenever. With Joven’s extensive regional business development experience, I trust that he will contribute to Adaptis’ growth, either opening up new markets or growing existing ones for us,” he said.
Adaptis has a presence in Europe and the Asia Pacific. They have offices in Switzerland, Singapore, Vietnam, and the Philippines. Their global clients include Kempinski Hotels, Toyota, Johnnie Walker, and more.
Manila, Philippines – Expertise is the name of the game in the workplace, but even that carries a challenge – often you are thought to be limited to your specialization and miss the chance for your voice to be heard in other valuable areas of the company.
In the field of user experience, designers aren’t an exception who are often left from the business decision-making process, but a principal product designer from Indonesia e-commerce Tokopedia might just have the perfect answer.
In the recently held UXPH Conference for experience designers last November 14 to 15 in the Philippines, Tokopedia’s Sonya Seddarasan presented a framework that can help UX specialists gain ample background of a product’s marketability, and therefore, get their foot in the “business” door.
Seddarasan has been with Indonesia e-commerce since 2019 where she works with multidisciplinary teams of business, data analytics, engineering, and experience designing.
“[There’s] a lot of culture [where] [UX] designers are being [passed down] requirements, and our job is basically just to empathize with it, and then give [back the result] to [the] product [team]. So you are actually missing a lot of the background work that has to done,” she said.
In her talk Using Customer Value Proposition as Revenue Model, she explained the structure of how designers can identify a product’s best revenue model with customer value proposition as the entry point.
Also called a viability assessment, the framework consists of three building blocks: identifying a product or service’s top customer value proposition, coming up with user personas, and then matching the latter to the best revenue model for the business.
With four to six key people in the team, the assessment simply involves asking the right trigger questions, brainstorming a list of the answers, and rearranging them based on priority.
With the existing product or solution as the baseline, Seddarasan said to ask three key trigger questions to name the top values it offers the user: what value does the solution offer, why should customers use the solution, and what problem is being solved for them.
With three priority values named, the target users are then identified. Seddarasan said to differentiate them based on four different tiers: their job, their age, their needs, and their behavior.
Similarly with a number of three user groups to focus on, the best revenue model – from pey per use, bundling, or subscription, among others – is matched to each persona. For the final step, Seddarasan said such questions must be asked: how much is the customer in a certain group willing to pay, in what medium are they likely to pay, and where can they find such medium.
In the UXPH session, Seddarasan said by applying such framework, designers won’t need to clamor for validation from stakeholders, whereas an intelligently informed business suggestion would naturally emerge via following the steps.
Seddarasan, having been in the design industry – with experience ranging from graphic and product design to UX – for more than ten years, is no stranger to receiving prejudice from other functional teams in the workplace.
“At the end of the day, you’ll meet different people anywhere, whether they’re accommodating or [not], but everyone has got the same basic behavior. If they know that you actually add up to [the company], no matter how small it is, as long as you know how to speak to them and how to negotiate your way around it, I think everything is workable.”
But despite workplace differences, Seddarasan said pushing for the immersion in business strategy is well worth the effort, for business knowledge could make or break designers’ longevity in the industry.
“UX strategy will be something that is an [asset] for us designers to be able to have a chair, to have a seat in the middle of business environment.”
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