About DATA Asia

DATA Asia was a virtual tech expo conducted for attendees across Asia to empower them with the technological tools and essentials to improve their businesses.

The one-week event combined exhibitions, keynote speeches, forums and webinars, and activities like lucky draws and treasure hunts. The virtual exhibition booths featured digital solutions providers such as Visa, Easystore, EasyParcel, Exabytes and more.

Attendees from various business sectors attended to obtain the best digitalization solutions for their business, network, and learn digitalization insights from keynote speeches.

Challenges and Solutions

As an event that was conducted entirely in the virtual space, replicating the engagement and participation of a physical event was a concern, especially when many still didn’t believe in the effectiveness of virtual engagement. As it was also conducted during the height of the pandemic, extra care and effort must be made to attract both exhibitors and attendees to participate in the event.

Using the right features and activities are key to garnering successful attendee participation in virtual events. Here, we offer a further insight into how DATA Asia combined various virtual features to encourage engagement from attendees and to create attention-grabbing experiences.

• DATA Asia was conducted in a 2.5D virtual environment with interactive halls and booths. The goal was to replicate the environment of an RPG game, where visitors were able to explore exhibitions with an immersive and fun experience.
• Special personalized touches were included. Each visitor has a customizable avatar, with their name and company displayed throughout the event to facilitate networking. Visitors also had personal virtual namecards where they may drop them at booths to exchange business information and provide exhibitors with leads.
• Event activities such as lucky draws and virtual treasure hunt were used to encourage visitors to explore and engage with event features, with “missions” such as browse booths, watch keynote speeches etc. These work as incentives to gain more visitor engagement.
• Exhibitors were offered three booths sizes, which were Mega, Giga and Tera with varying sizes and marketing materials permitted. Visitor engagement were measured based on number of visits, clicks, views on posters and videos, and virtual name card drops.

Achievements and Outcome

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, brochure downloads etc.

Conference views showed great response, with over 27,000 conference views recorded. Peak livestream views ranged from 471 to 607 views, with the peak number of impressions reached at 15,151 views.

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.

Based on the insights shared by 1,256 SME owners who attended the event, the top three areas of interest for SMEs in Malaysia were online marketing (25%), e-commerce (18%) and iOT (12%).  The services sector has the biggest need for digital marketing resources (26%). This was followed by retail (23%) and manufacturing (23%).

Learning Outcomes

The success of DATA Asia showed that virtual exhibitions can 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.