Introduction
Flinders University in Adelaide/Australia takes great pride in its truly multicultural campus atmosphere, with students from over 90 countries enrolled. Given the university’s global outlook, it’s no surprise that Chinese international students have been a key focus for Flinders’ recruitment team for some time, making up the biggest cohort of all their international students.
In 2018, Andrew Roddam joined Flinders International as the Manager, International Digital Recruitment with the responsibility to adapt the university’s international recruitment efforts to the demands of the digital age, ensuring a positive experience for current and potential students at every stage of their journey.
Lack of access to Flinders’ digital presence caused frustration
While Flinders University did already have a digital presence in China to attract and engage with Chinese students, Roddam and his team felt like they weren’t fully in control of their brand in China.
“The entire process was managed by a third party provider”, explains Roddam. “We wanted a system we could manage in-house, that we could update and control how the University was represented online in China.”
Sinorbis provided an easy-to-use solution
This sense of frustration prompted Roddam to start looking for a solution that would allow Flinders to manage and maintain their web presence in China and bring control of their brand back in-house. They decided to go with Sinorbis to create a new Chinese website from scratch.
“Sinorbis was attractive to us because the interface was so easy to use”, says Roddam. “The drag-and-drop page builder allowed us to build the pages very quickly. Even team members with little technical knowledge were able to create pages and manage updates as needed.”
To bridge the digital recruitment team’s gap in China-specific knowledge, Flinders International engaged a translator to localise their website content and asked their recruitment representatives in Shanghai and Beijing to check if the sites met the needs of a Chinese audience from a user experience point of view.
Implementing Sinorbis allowed Flinders University to have greater visibility of their digital presence in China. Tools such as search optimisation and analytics have also been helpful as the digital team are now able to track the performance of their digital marketing efforts in China.
