Automechanika Dubai 2018
The 21st century is set to change the makeup of what’s on our roads more than any time since the car overtook the horse as the preeminent means of travel. So Automechanika Dubai, the international trade fair for the automotive industry, 1-3 May in 2018, has long been one to watch.
Tech savvy and tuned in, Messe Frankfurt, behind the global Automechanika (AM) brand, stays in steep step with the wants of the show’s Dubai stakeholders.
That means identifying how to accommodate and to service their wants, watching behavioural trends through capturing purposeful exhibitor and visitor data.
Messe Frankfurt Dubai’s team called on D2i’s Engage platform, which it had seen flying high at Farnborough International, at UCAS and at Diversified Business Communications.
They were impressed with the system’s capacity for facilitating complex data campaigns from multiple touch points right through an event cycle and the tools it delivers to analyse that intelligence, properly productively.
To solve the Automechanika Dubai challenge D2i implemented online and on-site solutions. SmartRegister, E-Net and SmartLead capture data for the event management software, which provides the level of detail required by the Messe Frankfurt marketing team.
In 2018, more than 30,000 visitors submitted information, via SmartRegister, about the products and services they wanted to find out about at the event. And 2,000+ exhibitors highlighted exactly what they had to sell, in terms of kit or practice, via E-Net.
In turn, D2i’s SmartLead data capture service recorded which visitors had interacted with each exhibitor.
The intelligence captured in that year one was astonishing. Analysed by a dashboard it showed:
- Whether exhibitors attracted their intended buying audience and the percentage/numerical success rate;
- If visitors found the products & services they wanted to review;
- What visitors actually discovered at the show compared to their stated ambitions during the pre-registration process and if was there a positive or negative correlation.
Messe Frankfurt Dubai benefited from the process in several ways:
Re-Bookings: It provided the sales team with information to improve the ROI for AM exhibitors, helping them to secure re-books during the show while reducing sales attrition.
Retention: Sales team also used the intelligence to help exhibitors who did not attract their intended audience; indicating how they could improve the results of their participation at future events: better messaging, stand design, location, pre-marketing, sales strategy on the stand, by way of a few examples.
Driving Visitor Attendance: The organiser’s marketing team used the system’s spoils to highlight how successful pre-event messaging had been, in terms of driving correct visitor groups to the zones/sponsors best suited to their wants from the event.
Identifying New Commercial Opportunities: It also put the marketing team in a position to identify categories of product and service of a higher level of interest in fact than stated within the pre-reg process. That intelligence helped forge content and marketing promotion to push pre-registration numbers for the next event while targeting communication at exhibitors who provided the produce/service to increase YoY expo sales. It also served to identify content streams the audience wanted that were underrepresented in the programme, helping to shape the sessions for next time.