How to plan a successful event promotion?

I believe everyone is familiar with event promotion in marketing promotion. As an operator, event promotion (event operation) is the most commonly used promotion method in our work.

After the Internet entered the 2.0 era, operations gradually drove products, the market became seriously homogenized, and various products began to copy and paste. This results in the weakening of the product's own advantages, and it has to rely on operations to stand out in the homogeneous market. At this time, the era of operations leading products has arrived!

If a product does not have obvious advantages or there are already comparable competitors in the market, then the operator can continuously plan activities to attract users.

Activities can also be divided into several categories, such as red envelope subsidies, hot marketing, fission growth, etc.!

Like the previous subsidy war between Meituan and Didi (red envelope subsidies), Vatti World Cup (hot spot marketing), New World View’s first public class (fission growth), etc.! I believe everyone still has an impression of it.

However, not everyone can plan a classic or even screen-sweeping event.

Many people don’t know how to carry out activities or allocate resources when planning them. Some are not even clear about the purpose of their activities. This is very scary.

So when the company gives you an indicator and asks you to plan an event, I think you need to list the following information points. When you have listed them all clearly, I believe you should have an overall idea.

1. Purpose of the activity

Why do we do activities? Of course, it is to improve a certain indicator of the company's business! Therefore, the purpose is very important. If an activity does not even have a clear purpose, then I think your activity is meaningless. The purpose is also the ultimate source, and we can reverse the activity process based on the purpose.

Different purposes of activities also represent different natures of the activities. For example, if you want to increase your fans through this activity, then you should plan an activity around attracting new users and fission. If you want to promote the stickiness and activity of your existing users, you should study the users based on their attributes, analyze their needs and conduct research, and then improve the product or plan a retention campaign to keep old customers.

In addition, a single event can only have one purpose, and it should be planned and executed around this purpose. If you want too much, you will lose sight of the original intention of the event, which will ultimately affect the effectiveness of the entire event.

2. Activity Theme

I think the theme of an event is actually derived from the purpose of the event, and the theme is also the core of the event. When users see your activity, the first thing that attracts them is definitely the theme of the activity. It’s like when you join a community. Before you join, you actually know nothing about it, and you don’t even know what the content is.

At this time, the only thing you can confirm and understand is the title. You can roughly guess what it is about through the social media title. The same is true for events. When you plan an event, the first thing users will see is definitely the theme of your event. Only when your event theme attracts them will they generate the next click, otherwise they will simply ignore it. This is why many operators organize special activities during festivals or when some hot news occurs.

3. Event Planning

When planning an event, creativity is the key. Nowadays, no matter whether it is a product or an activity, everyone’s gameplay and routines are basically the same, which will cause users to feel bored. The highlight of an event lies in whether your event is creative and innovative. Users will only participate when they feel curious and interested.

Whether it is planning or creative participation, you must first go deep into the user group to conduct research and understand the user's psychology. Only when you find a commonality among your target users can you leverage the entire group.

In addition, you can refer to previous good activity cases, reuse them, and then add some gameplay that is in line with the common characteristics of the user group. In this way, I believe that your activities will only be better than others, not worse than others!

4. Activity Process

When planning an event, the process must be simple. If the entry threshold of the event is high, users will find it troublesome and give up participating in the event. Invisibly, users are turned away. Some time ago, Google's AI smart "Guess the Picture Song" actually had a very high threshold, which led to many users finding it too difficult and it did not achieve large-scale coverage and screen swiping.

5. Promotion resources/channels

Promotional resources are an important condition for whether you can achieve the expectations of your event. Many activities actually have good ideas, but they fail to spread, resulting in failure to achieve the expectations of the event.

Before the event begins, you must clearly list all the resource channels you have and quantify the effects and indicators of each channel.

Try to have complete control over the indicators. For example, if you want to organize an activity to attract new customers, the indicator of the activity is to increase sales conversion. Now you only have official accounts and social networks as channels, so you have to judge whether you can achieve the expected indicators of your event even if all these channels are fully utilized. If that doesn't work, then you have to explore other channels. For example, find other big accounts to promote each other, post on Douban Tieba, etc. If you have a budget, you can directly advertise. In short, it is best to quantify each channel and then it will be fine if the activity indicators are achieved.

For information on how to utilize resources and channels, you can read this article "How to Control Your Own Operational Indicators".

6. Seed Users

Before the event starts, no matter what type of event it is, it is best to find a group of seed users who can quickly help you spread and forward the message after the event is postponed. In fact, this is somewhat similar to the channel resources mentioned above, but the difference is that channel resources are where you can promote, while seed users are resources that can help you spread quickly.

People all have a herd mentality. When they see others forwarding and sharing, they will be attracted by their curiosity and want to see what the content is and participate in it.

If you can find some people who have a certain influence and popularity in the circle, or those who bring their own traffic, and let them be your first batch of users, I believe that the scope of the activity can be covered quickly. We can refer to the open classes of NetEase Xijing and Knowledge Planet. As soon as the activity was launched, you could immediately see a group of influential people in the circle forwarding and recommending it. Coupled with the content of the activity and the brand itself, it quickly flooded the circle of friends.

VII. Follow-up Services

Whether an activity can be spread by word of mouth and allow users to choose to forward and share it from the bottom of their hearts is tied to the maintenance of the service. Services can also determine the life cycle and effectiveness of your activities! The same applies to communities. If you create a community through an event, but do not pay attention to its subsequent maintenance after the community event ends, people will continue to flood the community with advertisements and block it. Then your event will be meaningless and will affect your reputation.

Like the first public class of New World, the initial fission growth was very rapid. The number of registrations in half a day was close to 100,000, and the coverage area reached tens of millions. However, it was forced to stop due to official suppression from WeChat. However, after the event was postponed, due to the fact that the internal preparations of Xinshixiang were not ready, users could not receive the courses in time after signing up and the APP server crashed.

The customer service in the community also did not respond for a long time, which made many users have a bad experience of this event and the reputation of the event was quickly damaged. However, due to his previous good marketing strategy and large coverage area, he was very successful in attracting new customers!

8. Time Control

The ability to manage time can best reflect an event's operation capabilities. Experienced event operators can basically control all the processes and details of the event very well when planning an event, including the time progress of the event process, when to launch the event, when to send out gifts, and when it will end, etc. Many people often fail to properly control time and details when planning activities, which affects the continuity of subsequent operations and ultimately leads to poor results!

The final accumulation of this aspect is still obtained through actual operation. Only when you have planned and have rich experience can you be confident about the entire process and progress of the event, and everything is under control!

IX. Event Closing/Recap

The last step is the conclusion and review of the event! If the main purpose of your activity is to accumulate users or promote conversions. When your event is over, you can review the entire process and results to see if there is any difference from what you thought at the beginning.

If the difference is too big from the expected result, then you should deeply analyze every detail and process of the following activities, retrieve all the data, see where the problem occurred or where it can be improved and perfected, and finally write it into a document. You can take it out for comparison and reference when you plan activities in the future!

Reviewing is not only for preparing for the next activity, it can also allow your abilities to be improved quickly through reflection!

10. Conclusion

We don’t do activities just for the sake of doing activities, so before doing an activity, we must make sure the purpose of the activity is clear. This is the only way to effectively carry out your work below!

After all, an event is only an effective way to acquire customers or promote sales in the short term. If a company does not improve its products and serve its users to the maximum extent possible, it will rely solely on events to maintain the life cycle of its products. Putting aside your marketing costs, the market is becoming more and more homogeneous, and the strategies used by various products are basically similar. If you don't innovate and improve, you will eventually be eliminated by the market.

Author: Liu Zhixing

Source: LZX's study notes (LZX_PM)