YouStudy.com Education Expo Leverages the vFairs Virtual Events Solution to Match Universities with their Global Target Audience

Highlights

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.

The Challenge 

Keeping this objective in mind, vFairs had to customize and deliver 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 to match their intended young audience with academic degrees and programs of interest.

The event aimed to target the right age group, offer bilingual support for attendees from Britain and the Middle East, and offer an engaging platform where students could gather and organize the right information. 

The Solution

vFairs was able to build a virtual event platform that closed the geographical gaps between British universities and Middle Eastern students. The platform had bilingual support for attendees from around the world and offered other great tools for effective communication. Here is how vFairs offered solutions to all the faced challenges.

Effective Targeted Event Marketing

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.

Custom Registration Form for Increased Enrollment

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 perspectives 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 the greatest likelihood of attending their campus.

Bilingual Platform to Accommodate All Attendees

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.

Organized Information with “Swag Bag”

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 the 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.

Continued Engagement with Various Networking Options

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.

Instructional Videos for Navigation Support

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.

The Result

A large volume of registrations were generated by sending out emails to 50,000 targeted individuals. The event hosts then shared the information of these registrants with booth exhibitors so they can better figure out the appropriate leads for them. This resulted in a highly engaged virtual event where students and exhibitors both got what they were looking for. 

Students also benefited 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.