The story of how an Informa Connect show in Dubai was turned around into an award-winning event.
After a lower-than-desired attendance and NPS score in 2021, organisers of the Najah Education Series – the UAE’s largest education fair –bounced back a year later by winning Best Consumer Show Marketing Campaign at the EN Awards in London. Informa Connect’s Sarita Lakhiani tells EW about how the Najah team turned it around in style with an innovative, content-driven marketing campaign.
Organisers of Dubai’s Najah Education Series experienced a low attendance and Net Promotor Score (NPS) in 2021 due to Covid restrictions and were affected by a ban on students attending exhibitions.
The event’s organisers at Informa Connect, including consumer portfolio head of marketing Sarita Lakhiani, responded with a bold campaign that engaged its Generation Z audience through strong data-driven techniques.
Its new strategy resulted in a 193% rise in pre-registrations to over 25,000 across both Najah events and a 185% increase in attendance. The event saw 378% more school groups attending and attracted over 180 exhibitors from 20 countries. The event also saw an average 40-point increase in Visitor NPS, with Najah Abu Dhabi up 61 points.
“Our goal was to not just come up with strategies, we wanted to make a lot of data-driven decisions to drive engagement with Gen Zs. The younger generation has completely different habits and interests to the previous attendees we have catered for,” says Lakhiani. “We wanted to make sure we understood what their motivations were and base our campaign around that, instead of just doing what we usually do.
“Gen Z are digital savvy, have strong ethics and are sceptical of traditional forms of advertising. They know when influencers are promoting something that isn’t as good as it seems, and they don’t want to buy into anything dishonest. They want to buy into something authentic.”
The Informa Connect team surveyed education industry trends and this showed students felt overwhelmed with choice over study options and were left frustrated by a lack of guidance. The Najah team responded by coming up with tactics to address the challenges the students were facing.
“The most important thing was gaining our stakeholder’s trust back,” says Lakhiani. To build this back after the difficulties of 2021, Lakhiani says her team constructed an innovative content-driven marketing campaign, which crucially focused on the students’ needs.
Campaign success
The success of the campaign also saw organic website traffic of 115,809 unique users; a digital conversion rate of 45%; and a database growth of 189%. The campaign not only built up the students’ trust, it also helped the event reduce the cost per attendee. This was critical at a time when the UAE was experiencing its highest rate of inflation for seven years.
To overcome inflationary pressures, Lakhiani says her team optimised digital campaigns using relevant content to increase engagement and reduce PPC costs; changed printed materials to sustainable digital resources and leveraged economies of scale through bookings for multiple events.
Lakhiani says the event’s marketing strategy involved an innovative and integrated approach, which harnessed digital and traditional marketing techniques, including above-the-line marketing, PR, SEO, email campaigns and social media to engage in effective ways. “With growing competition, we focused intently on each target audience, including students, parents, teachers, and postgraduate applicants, to differentiate and tailor our campaigns.”
Knowing your audience
To resonate with its digitally savvy audience, the Najah team used featured articles on ‘trending topics’ to place advertisements which were featured in the digital versions of leading newspapers. They also created a parent-student social media series with interviews on topics important to Gen Z students and used a wide range of formats including posts, videos, GIFs, reels and stories to engage the audience.
“Our digital content was tested in various formats for each audience,” says Lakhiani. “The campaigns were optimised for the best performing and the messages were constantly refined.” She adds: “The most important thing is that we tried to make our event sustainable, which is important to Gen Zs who are often environmentally focused. We also tried to work with People of Determination [The UAE’s term for people with disabilities] and gave them opportunities at the event.”
Overall, Lakhiani says the combination of quality content, creatively designing the experiences through different touchpoints and dynamic digital marketing efforts resulted in a strong performance. The event saw a 32% boom in revenue, with Najah Dubai revenue up 45.3%, as well as a 64.7% saving in marketing cost per attendee.
“Our success with Najah is a testament to how modern marketing techniques can deliver excellent outcomes for complex scenarios. There are always creative solutions to be found.”
Creativity
As for exhibition marketing in general, Lakhiani has nothing but positive remarks: “Creativity is required in more than one way. This is not necessarily the same creativity you would need when you work in an advertising agency. It’s rather the creativity that you need to design attendee and exhibitor experiences before, during and after the event. That is a kind of creative work on multiple levels: meeting design, interaction design, web, advertising, email marketing, social media, print advertising, sponsorship campaigns… there is
no end for creative ideas.”
Lakhiani doesn’t expect digital media will ever replace face-to-face events but sees the two as a “partnership made in heaven”.
“People want to meet in real life, they want to know if they can trust a person or a vendor or exhibitor, and that trust cannot usually be built by digital media alone. That said, events are the perfect playground for digital extensions of real-life encounters.
“Nothing ever stays the same. Every event is different, and re-inventing the wheel is part of our fantastic journey as event marketers. ‘That’s how we always did it’ is a sentence that I believe you won’t hear from great event marketers.”
