Inside Malaysia’s First-of-its-kind Virtual Tech Expo
Being prepared is the best form of defense, but few would have anticipated the strike of the COVID-19 pandemic. The detrimental effects of the pandemic have shown that rather than being a luxury, going digital is now a necessity for businesses to survive and thrive.
This is why Malaysia’s own virtual solutions company, Virtualtech Frontier conceptualized DATA Asia as a virtual tech expo to empower attendees, mainly SME players, with the technological tools and essentials to improve their businesses. Entirely homegrown, it was an ambitious project designed to break the boundaries of how we view online exhibitions and conferences.
DATA Asia was a one week event which combined exhibitions, keynote speeches, forums and webinars, and activities like lucky draws and treasure hunts. The exhibitions featured digital solutions providers such as Visa, Easystore, EasyParcel, Exabytes and more. With everything conducted entirely in the virtual space and a unique RPG-like user experience, it had everything set to heighten user engagement.
DATA Asia was set in an RPG-like Virtual environment, where visitors were able to explore virtual halls and booths.
Visitors were able to view livestream keynote speeches through the conference stage
Visitors accessed their personal terminal which guided them through booths, daily schedules and missions to win prizes.
Overall Event Analytics
The event attracted visitors from various countries across Asia, with the largest percentage (66%) from Malaysia, followed by Indonesia and Philippines at 10% each. Attendees from the service industry constituted the largest proportion with 52%, and 11% were from the retail industry. Furthermore, the event also gathered attendees from other sectors such as Education, IT and Digital, Healthcare and Finance.
In summary, the event garnered over 35,000 visitor traffic with 1.5 million impressions generated over the 7 days. Over 28,000 engagements were recorded in the DATA Asia virtual environment, which encompassed booth clicks, video views, downloads etc.
Based on the insights shared by 1,256 SME owners who attended the event, the top three areas of interest for SMEs in Malaysia are online marketing (25%), e-commerce (18%) and iOT (12%). Diving deeper into the respective business sectors these SME owners represented, it is revealed that the services sector has the biggest need for digital marketing resources (26%). This is followed by retail (23%) and manufacturing (23%).
Event Engagement Insights
Conference Views
Keynote speeches were conducted via livestream, ranging from a multitude of topics such as digitalization tips for SMEs, Digital Marketing, E-commerce and Fintech.
Conference views showed great response, with over 27,000 conference views. Participants showed very keen interest on topics such as Innovate Your Business with Cloud Technology and Building Credibility of SME Businesses via B2B eCommerce Marketplace. This shows that businesses beyond the retail sector are searching for the right solutions to digitalize their sales channel.
Booth Engagement
Exhibitors were offered three booths sizes, which were Mega, Giga and Tera with varying sizes and marketing materials permitted. Visitor engagement was compared across the three booth sizes, which were measured based on number of visits, clicks, views on posters and videos, and virtual name card drops.
Average engagement in the Mega size booth was 134.41 engagements. Giga booth measured a 64% increase in engagement compared to Mega booths, with 220.80 engagements on average. Whereas for Tera booth, engagement effectiveness showed a massive leap of 249%, with 469.42 engagements recorded.
In a Nutshell
Results from DATA Asia have shown that virtual exhibitions are able to increase user engagement through a multitude of activities. By incorporating more innovative virtual features, virtual solutions can spark growth in the events industry and generate larger engagement, traffic and networking by utilizing the vast online space.
As such, VTF will continue to be the nucleus in providing virtualisation platforms that will spark growth of digitalization for businesses and the events industry in Malaysia.