The team at vFairs has been keeping busy innovating and leveraging technology to provide the best virtual event hosting solutions for our clients. YouStudy.com has been a new addition to our client roster with an interest in hosting an online education fair that connected Middle East based students with British universities to facilitate increased awareness and promotion of their academic programs.
Keeping this objective in mind, vFairs customized and delivered an entire event between the 26th to 28th of April 2016 that allowed Middle East based prospective students to not only explore their higher education options in Britain based universities, but also enabled universities powered with our custom designed booths to match their intended young audience with academic degrees and programs of interest.
With universities wanting the convenience of targeting the right age group and nationality segments including UAE, Qatari, and Saudi students, vFairs enabled showcasing institutes to meet enrollment objectives by achieving approximately 200-300 leads per exhibitor- a goal almost impossible to accomplish in a physical exhibition setting.
Generating a qualified lead of prospectives that supported both diversity and enrollment goals, the event’s custom registration form streamlined focused data collection so that universities could zoom-in on the students that promised greatest likelihood of attending their campus.
Successfully catering to British university representatives and Middle East based students meant a need to host an event that worked seamlessly in both English and Arabic languages based on user preferences.
The platform was equally accommodating towards visitors and showcasing universities across ME and Britain to ensure that communication was never an obstacle, and all event navigation and information exchanges strengthened audience engagement.
To help students keep track of all the information they collected from various university booths visited, this event was equipped with a unique “Swag Bag“, also known as My Bag feature.
From brochures, application forms, to any tuition structure related items that the students wanted to reference later, these documents could be added to the bag for easy retrieval. Moreover, all contents could be emailed to the user, or shared with multiple recipients for absolute efficiency and ease of sharing.
For students that were unable to speak directly to university representatives using the one-on-one chat feature, the “Email Us” option at the booths allowed them to send a personalized message to communicate their questions or concerns to the admissions staff.
Thus, communication channels remained open even when the university representatives had gone offline after the event’s defined hours of operation.
YouStudy.com availed Bayt.com’s marketing support to reach their intended audience; an email shot was sent to 50,000 users in our database that fit their desired profile including nationality and age. Moreover, banners on Bayt.com were also used to promote the event and attract attention towards driving registration and student attendance.
To help students benefit from the wealth of knowledge available, a video tutorial instructing on how to navigate the virtual event was available. For students that were new to this experience, this video provided exact guidance to help understand how to visit booths, collect information, and communicate with university representatives in order to fully experience the power of this virtual education expo.
With a large volume of leads generated, and students benefiting from the enhanced exposure to international academic programs at British universities, this event was another prime example where customization and the virtual platform connected users despite geographical and time zone differences to facilitate collaboration and networking. Stay tuned, we still have a lot more magic to amaze our clients with.