The Client: UP Education

UP Education is a leading provider of tertiary education in New Zealand. They provide training courses under 22 different mastheads across Australia and New Zealand. With an aggressive growth trajectory, UP Education plan to acquire and integrate more brands over the coming years.

The Challenge: Launch multiple new sites, fast.

Every brand under the UP Education umbrella operates its own website, providing marketing content plus onboarding and engaging students. Over the years, these sites were built across multiple platforms. Launching new sites as they acquired and integrated more brands became complicated and hindered their ability to scale rapidly. 

For UP Education to meet their growth targets, they identified the need to pull all of their brands into one CMS. They identified Contentful as the secure platform to help them deliver engaging experiences for their students. However, with the rate UP Education needed to continue to scale, creating a custom front end for each brand was not viable. They needed a way to duplicate, build, and launch whole sites from scratch without involving developers.

Why UP Education chose Octana and Contentful

Consolidation

• Central control of their brands under one CMS helps avoid errors in their content and allows updates to critical compliance pieces in one location to ensure consistency and accuracy. 

• Content repeatability without the overhead of custom coding front ends each time they launch a new brand.

• Launch new sites faster by reusing or duplicating content using Octana tools like Transporter.

Marketing-friendly tools

• Octana's content authoring tools, like SmartUI, allow UP Education to stand entire sites up quickly and easily without the support of developers or designers. 

• Marketing can "own" every one of their unique websites through low-code/no-code tools.

Cost

• Less reliance on custom coding reduces the up-front cost of launching new brands and sites. 

• Create, edit, and manage the entire suite of brands in-house through Octana's no-code tools reduce the total cost of ownership of running and maintaining so many individual sites. 

A highly scalable system and the ability to stand up new sites quickly and cheaply were important factors for UP Education. They needed a quality solution that could meet their page speed requirements, comply with cybersecurity policies and integrate with their existing MarTech tools while remaining agile and flexible enough to allow for their rapid growth. Octana gives them the tools to add new sites quickly and predictably while remaining cost-effective as they repeat this process over numerous sites and brands.

"Adding new sites can now be achieved in days, not weeks or months, with a predictable fixed cost and timeframe allowing the organization to respond quickly to new market opportunities."

Successful outcomes

• New sites can now be launched almost entirely by the marketing team.

• It takes a matter of days for UP Education to create and launch a new site, using a combination of new and repeatable content. 

• This reduced time to launch for each new site has enabled UP Education’s scaling strategy.

• 10 of their brands are supported by Contentful + Octana, with the flexibility and scope to continue easily adding more. 

• Easy content authoring has reduced the need for marketing to engage developer resources as they evolve the site to meet new campaign requirements.