Educational Fairs are one of the instruments allowing for effective communication with future students. Universities use a wide range promotional methods such as advertising, sales promotion, personal selling, public relations, representing tools for creating the marketing communication system. The most commonly used instruments include various forms of advertising (TV, radio, press, out-door, online, print materials), advertising gadgets, and online activity (university websites and their positioning, profiles on social networking sites).Often, the range of promotion instruments used by universities include various fairs such as career fairs, educational fairs, etc. However these require students to be physically present at specific venues at a certain time resulting in many students opting out of it simply because it is additional expense for them to commute or make travel/accommodation arrangements.

However, in order to take full advantage of the participation in educational fairs, universities need to be well prepared to attract the attention of the student who relay a lot on online information and social media. Universities need to reinvent the contemporary exhibition/promotion methods to suit the modern age student. Virtual technology offers many an options for universities world over to promote their brand to a wider geographical student community. By eliminating the physical attendance requirement, a virtual fair automatically increases the probability of student participation. This means the student can attend the fair at his/her convenient location.

Typically a virtual fair involves multiple universities at the same time giving a student a bunch of options to consider and compare for making better study choices. Each university is given a dedicated booth and each booth will be monitored by 1 to 2 representatives at all times. These university delegates can conduct regular webinars throughout the fair duration and in between slots have one-to-ne discussions with student participants. The complete control of the booth is with the representatives or moderators. They can choose to interact privately with students share documents or enable audio/video of a student to take the discussion further in the event a suitable candidate approaches the booth. Group chats, presentation white board discussions, etc are just a few of the tools available for university to interact with the participants during the event. Added to that are the various reports generated after the event completion which gives accurate statistics to the universities on the students who visited their booths for better analysing the admission probability for the upcoming intake.

Virtual fairs are truly an encouraging concept for promoting any educational institution. With minimum investment and the right kind of virtual platform you can leverage your institution easily in the international education sector