How to write an operational activity planning and promotion plan?

The article draws on the event operation in Teacher Han Xu's "Super Operation Technique", combines my own work experience, and summarizes my thoughts from my own perspective. I share it with everyone and hope it will be helpful to you.

1. First, you need to clarify the activity goals

Because the goal is the starting point of the activity, the subsequent planning and detailed execution are all centered around the goal. Without setting a goal, the focus will be lost in the subsequent execution, and the output effect of the activity cannot be clearly defined.

For example, in order to increase the number of UGC posts in the community, Keep decided to launch a "bottle cap challenge" topic event. After determining this goal, subsequent quantification, planning, and execution will be carried out around the goal.

Some products are launched just for the sake of launching an event, and without a target as a starting point, the effect is often not obvious.

The goals of activities are generally divided into four categories:

●New customers

For products that need user growth, activities can effectively attract new users, activate them and register them as new users.

● Promote activity

For mature community products, activities can be used to increase the number of visits and the number of community posts.

● Promotions

Commonly used on e-commerce platforms to increase the number of orders for a certain product

● Brand maintenance

Commonly used in some products with a large user base, activities are held to improve product awareness and education

2. Quantify activity goals and determine time

The previous step only roughly determines the direction of the activity, but the goal is vague and cannot be implemented. For example, between increasing the daily active users of the product as much as possible and increasing the daily active users of the product to 10,000, it is obvious that the latter is easier to split and implement .

In terms of time selection, you can use festivals or hot spots to boost the effect of the event, for example:

Alipay’s Spring Festival Blessings Collection Event

Weibo helps Wang Feng get on the headlines

Keep's bottle cap challenge

The effect will be doubled than usual. If you urgently need the activity to bring about results, it is best to launch it as soon as possible.

3. Determine the planning plan

This part is the core step of event planning. It is necessary to determine the event form and planning plan based on the product and users.

The activities include:

l Subsidy activities: such as red envelopes for food delivery orders from Meituan, and free taxi coupons from Didi

l Topic activities: such as Keep’s bottle cap challenge

l Prize-giving activities: such as the lucky draw for forwarding on Weibo

l Game activities: such as Alipay's Jifu activity, Baidu's map big player activity

In planning schemes, the following principles can be used as reference directions to ensure the quality of planning schemes:

①. Combine user needs and activity goals based on the product

Just like playing the game Honor of Kings, no matter whether you choose to be a jungler or a center, the goal is to push the tower and win; the same goes for activities, no matter what form of activity is planned, it is to achieve the activity goals.

The quality of the signal determines whether the pace of grabbing kills and pushing towers in this game is fast enough; the signal is like the user's needs. Choosing good needs that users like will often achieve twice the result with half the effort.

No matter how advanced your operating skills are, you cannot do without the mobile phone terminal; only when the activities are focused on the product will the effect be more meaningful.

NetEase Cloud previously held a "Graduation Message Wall" event, which also fits this feature.

(Pictures from the Internet, please delete if infringed)

First of all, this activity is based on NetEase Cloud Music. Whether users share the activity or post, it will have a great effect on attracting new users and promoting activity of NetEase Cloud.

Secondly, leaving a message to your alma mater is something that resonates with people. It can create an online atmosphere for a specific group of people to reminisce about their school days, which increases everyone's participation.

Therefore, this is a message-generating activity in which NetEase Cloud combines activity goals on the premise of meeting user needs.

②. Be attractive and interesting

We prefer to follow some joke bloggers and play games. These behaviors can bring us positive psychological feedback, and more importantly, they do not require us to understand or think . The same is true for activities. Users will participate in activities because they are relaxing and fun.

For example, this activity of NetEase Cloud Music meets the conditions in attracting users' attention and being interesting. For example, the comments below are easy to get people to leave comments and share.

③. Convenient operation and easy to understand rules

The more streamlined the operations and rules are, the better. Many people will directly close the page due to cumbersome operations and difficult-to-understand rules, and the bounce rate will be very high. Here is a principle: if the activity rules are designed in a way that requires users to think, it means there is still room for improvement.

The “Graduation Message Wall” is also relatively streamlined in terms of event participation and rule design.

For example, to participate in the event, you only need to collect the name of your alma mater and leave a message. The rules of the event are to leave a message on your alma mater's message wall and collect your alma mater's playlist. The reward for the event is the graduation moment of the school with the most collections witnessed by 400 million people across the country.

At the same time, it has also increased the number of NetEase Cloud's featured playlists to a certain extent and enriched the community content.

(Pictures from the Internet, please delete if infringed)

④. Can bring material or spiritual rewards to users

What can best mobilize user participation? Naturally, it is prizes. For example, in Jianshu’s essay writing competition with prizes, the richer the prizes, the higher the user participation. The activity budget and output ratio should also be considered when setting the prizes.

(Pictures from the Internet, please delete if infringed)

4. Preparation before follow-up activities

I remember someone said: "The outcome of a war is decided before the battle", which means the importance of pre-war preparation, and the same is true for activities.

To make a detailed event planning plan , you need to sort out the entire event process in written form to check for any gaps and omissions, including the timing and expected results of each link, event copywriting, the availability of resources, etc.

Operations also need to follow up on event needs, UI design, and RD development to ensure that expectations for the event can be achieved one by one.

At the same time, it is necessary to clarify how much budget and materials are available, the online schedule and data monitoring, and how much promotion resources need to be applied for, including internal and external channels.

Internal channels include on-site resources (websites, apps or advertising space), official media such as Weibo accounts, official blogs, communities and groups, etc.

External channels include advertising alliances, search engines, Weibo, WeChat and Douyin, app stores, etc.

5. Risk prevention

When organizing an event, you need to have a plan B and have a backup plan in case of an emergency.

Possible risks include:

▶Users are not very involved in the activity. Do we need to make temporary adjustments or just shut it down?

▶Too many users participating may cause server bugs

▶There is a loophole in the activity rules, which was found by users

▶External channel resources were not in place in a timely manner

▶ User feedback is inconsistent with expectations

6. Warm-up before launching the activity

Part of the reason is that users may not notice the event during the event time, which will reduce the expected effect of the event, so it is necessary to convey the event information and inform users.

The other half of the reason is that event preheating can whet users' appetite and continue to attract users' attention, which will help to create a hot spot after the event goes online and expand publicity.

The basic form of preheating is to tell users about the activity form, activity rewards and activity time through multiple channels.

(Pictures from the Internet, please delete if infringed)

For example, the 618 e-commerce event uses mechanisms such as countdown and flash sales to create a rush and exciting atmosphere, guide users' desire to participate in the event, and prompt users to place orders on the day of the event.

7. Keep a close eye on the results after the campaign goes live

The main task at this time is to monitor the activity data. When the data fluctuates abnormally or even declines, it is necessary to trace the specific reasons and make adjustments based on the current situation. Record and summarize the data of the activity to prepare for secondary dissemination and review.

At the same time, we pay close attention to user feedback during the event, guide and disseminate positive feedback to expand its influence; for negative feedback, analyze the causes and make temporary adjustments.

8. Announcement of event results

Pay attention to two points in this link:

1. Inform all participating users of the event results. Users need to have feedback on the event, which will help increase their participation in the next event.

2. The basic principle is that the results of the activities should be fair and transparent.

9. Activity review

Reviewing is a Go term that refers to replaying the game record after the game is over in order to check the pros and cons of the moves and the key gains and losses in the game. It is generally used for self-study, or to ask experts for guidance and analysis.

Just like Go, activities also need to be reviewed. After each activity is over, every process of the activity, from determining the activity goals to the activity going offline, needs to be reviewed again to find out the shortcomings and highlights, and then summarize the rules to guide the next activity to be done better.

The principles of review are roughly as follows:

●Review the goal: What was the original goal?

● Evaluation results: What are the highlights and shortcomings compared with the expected goals?

●Analysis of causes: What caused the failure/success

●Summarize the rules: optimize to the next step plan

Author: Brainstorm Operation

Source: Brainstorm Operation