Awards
How Najah Education Series reached out to Gen Z
The story of how an Informa Connect show in Dubai was turned around into an award-winning event
fter a lower-thandesired attendance
A 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 contentdriven marketing campaign , which crucially focused on the students ’ needs .
Campaign success The success of the campaign also saw organic website traffic of
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www . exhibitionworld . co . uk Issue 4 2023 35