Meydan Free Zone wins two awards at the Marquee Awards 2026 for Performance Marketing and SEO

Meydan Free Zone has won two awards at the Marquee Awards 2026, presented by Martechvibe, taking top honours for Technical Excellence in Performance Marketing and Technical Excellence in SEO. The winners were announced at a ceremony held at Hilton Dubai Palm Jumeirah on 10 September 2026, where 24 organisations were recognised across 20 categories. Meydan Free Zone was one of only three organisations to win in two categories.

The winning campaigns were led and run in-house by Meydan Free Zone's marketing team. Both submissions were judged on commercial outcomes rather than marketing activity alone, reflecting a shift within the organisation towards treating marketing channels as revenue infrastructure tied directly to license sales.

In Performance Marketing, Meydan Free Zone was recognised for rebuilding its paid media around CRM-verified opportunity and closed-sale signals rather than raw lead volume, so that investment optimised against outcomes recorded in the sales pipeline. Between January and June 2026, blended sales conversion rose from 13% to 23% while cost per sale fell by 63% and media spend by 71%, with paid return on ad spend peaking at 13.49x. Over a 14-month period, the work has been credited with AED 156.3 million in revenue.

The SEO award recognised work that treated organic search and AI-driven discovery as a single revenue engine. By rebuilding site architecture, scaling long-tail business activity pages and structuring entity data so that Meydan Free Zone's propositions are surfaced accurately within AI-generated answers, the campaign lifted organic sessions and impressions by approximately 166 to 169% and raised Domain Authority from 23 to 47, with organic channels delivering 3,812 licenses and AED 82.5 million in revenue.

"We set out to make Meydan Free Zone easier to find and easier to act on, whether a founder starts with a search engine, an AI assistant or an ad. Those used to be separate jobs, and treating them as one is what produced the results behind both of these awards," said Anisha Sagar, Head of Marketing and Communications at Meydan Free Zone. "It meant a year of rebuilding foundations, from site architecture to the way our channels connect to the sales pipeline, and that is work which shows nothing for a long time before it shows everything. Winning in two categories, judged on commercial outcomes rather than campaign activity, is a real endorsement of the team's discipline and of the way we intend to keep working."

The two categories reflect Meydan Free Zone's positioning as the UAE's only 24/7 digital free zone, where licensing, payments and member services are delivered end to end through its own platform. That digital-first model gives the marketing team direct visibility of the path from first search or ad impression through to a license issued, which underpinned both award submissions.

"The competition for founders is global, and it is increasingly settled before anyone gets on a plane. Entrepreneurs are comparing jurisdictions from wherever they happen to be, at whatever hour suits them, and forming a view long before they speak to a single person," said Jay Shaholia, Chief Operating Officer at Meydan Free Zone. "We built this business to be found, understood and acted on in exactly those conditions. Recognition for that work is welcome. The real measure is the number of companies now operating in Dubai that might have been started somewhere else."