How to write a successful operation and promotion plan?

In the process of making the plan , I discovered a phenomenon: although my colleagues have rich work experience, many problems still arise in the process of writing the plan.

First, let’s talk about some problems in making plans :

1. To save trouble, just find a ready-made promotion plan to modify

Although directly applying templates is quick and convenient, the promotion focus and suitable channels are completely different for different industries and products.

For example, APP products are more suitable for application stores, and when they are placed on Baidu search, they are mostly in the form of APP downloads. If the template applied happens to be the promotion plan for second-tier e-commerce customers, the promotion method will be completely different.

2. Start writing without an outline

In some other cases, when receiving the solution requirements, people do not think about it briefly and organize an outline first, but just start writing. Halfway through writing, they realize that this solution is an implementation solution and does not require a large amount of industry data, resulting in a lot of useless work.

3. Not considering whether the content is meaningful

The most common response to this question is to cite industry data. Although citing authoritative industry data may seem intimidating. But after careful consideration, I found that this data has no guiding significance for formulating a promotion plan.

For example, when colleague A was making a plan for a financial client, he quoted the content in the following picture. During the report, the client asked, please explain what this page is trying to say. Colleague A was stunned on the spot.

4. Black hole in details, start adjusting the aesthetics from the first version

This problem often occurred to me when I first started to make plans. As soon as I hear that I need to make a plan, I will quickly check the main color of the client's official website, and then find exquisite background templates from thousands of PPT libraries. For each page, I will carefully adjust the fonts and animations. When it was almost time to submit the manuscript, I found that I had only completed 1/3 of the plan.

What’s even more frustrating is that if the leader is not satisfied with the style when reviewing the manuscript, all previous detail adjustments will be cleared with one click.

The reason why the above problems arise when making promotion plans is that we lack a code of conduct and a framework of thinking.

No matter how experienced a marketer is, if he fails to transform his experience into a systematic methodology or thinking framework in a timely manner, it is still easy for unclear logic to occur when making a plan.

I have thought about this question for a long time, and have summarized my experience from the past three years into three principles and a thinking tool . I would like to share them with you here, hoping that they can give you some thoughts and inspiration, so that you can avoid detours when writing promotion plans.

Three Principles

1. Mind map first

It is recommended that before making any plan, you must first think about the overall logic in your mind and make an outline . Simply put, the table of contents and sub-titles of the entire plan should be organized in the form of a mind map. This mind map will help you stay on topic when making a plan, and your thoughts will be clearer and more efficient.

2. Reject meaningless content

Every paragraph in the plan should serve the ultimate promotion effect. If it has no guiding significance for formulating a promotion plan, please delete it without hesitation.

For example, as shown in the figure below, we can see from big data that the company has fewer female users, so the proportion of female users should be increased in subsequent promotions.

3. Don’t rush to optimize the visual effects before the content of the plan is finalized

How to achieve better promotion effects is the ultimate significance of the plan. If the content cannot be implemented, no matter how beautiful the visual effects are, they are just empty talk.

Golden Thinking Tool-1W2H

As mentioned earlier, we must think briefly and make a mind map before making a plan. The way of thinking about this aspect is very important. How to think? What dimensions to think about?

At this time, please decisively take out the golden thinking tool~ PS: Colleagues who have used it all say it’s good~O(∩_∩)O

Planning a promotion plan = logical thinking + creativity

The logical thinking part is the important part that guides us to stay on topic. Be sure to clearly define your promotion goals before making a plan.

I asked my friends what their promotion goals were when they were making promotion plans. Most of them answered me like this: exposure and traffic, the more the better!

Think about it, is this a good goal? Obviously not!

First of all, this is not the right goal.

Although what we are most exposed to in our daily work is to increase Baidu keyword bids and bring in more traffic, have we ever thought about whether the introduced traffic is effectively converted?

After all, what torments us most in our daily lives is: How can we get 100 conversion orders today?

Our goal is to solve the problem of how to achieve 100 conversion orders a day. Bringing in more traffic does not help solve the daily order conversion task at all.

Second, this is not a good goal.

A correct goal requires a correct timeline and a measurable data result.

The more the better? The boss must think that the more the better, so how much more is better? The boss suddenly came up with an idea and decided to achieve 1.3 billion clicks a day. I guess the poor marketing people can only ask the channel partners to increase the traffic, right?

So according to the logic of the golden thinking tool: the first step is to determine the goal, and the second step is to determine the logic. That is the question of what to do and how to do it. So how to do better requires us to keep trying to create more possibilities.

How to do it specifically?

1. What to do - determine the promotion goals

If we want to do a good job, we must first learn to break down our goals and digitize them.

For example, the boss said that the online promotion department aims to achieve 50 million valid leads this year.

Look at the plan on the left. There are time nodes and specific task amounts that need to be completed in each channel every day. If the target is not met on a certain day, you know where to check and how far behind you are, and how to catch up with the target in a planned way.

What does the plan on the right mean by increasing investment efforts? When should we increase our efforts? The task has not been completed, what is the problem? How to remedy it? When there are no specific numbers to guide us, it is easy for us to lose our goals, do things without purpose, and become confused when problems arise.

2. How to do it - how to achieve the goal

In the first step, we determined the promotion goals, so in the second step we need to consider what method to use, that is, which distribution channels to choose, search engines, information streams, or app stores?

3. How to do better – creativity

After breaking down the goal, we assume that if we want to complete 1,000 valid leads a day, Baidu needs to contribute 600 a day, which requires 2,000 clicks. So in the third stage, what we need to consider is how to get 2,000 valid clicks. Should we add more keywords or change the creative presentation format?

Common Misunderstandings to Avoid

At this point, let me share a few common problems encountered by colleagues:

1. [Misconception] Want to try all promotional products

Each media company continuously introduces new products, but not every product is suitable for its own industry.

Take the creative display style of Baidu search as an example. Although there are now various display forms such as Xingxingtong, showcase, multiple sub-chains, and direct hotspots, each form can be used in combination with each other. Although it has a significant effect on increasing exposure and clicks, has your conversion volume really increased?

2. [Misconception] Blindly following the trends in creativity

I remember that a friend of mine had a company that made video APPs. After the news of Sora Aoi's wedding was released, the company's optimizer immediately followed the trend and changed the creative idea of ​​the information flow to "Sora Aoi's wedding, the AVIs we collected over the years", and also added some beautiful pictures of Sora Aoi.

The CTR of this creative idea is nearly 20%, and it took more than 50,000 yuan in one hour. What a gratifying data! Finally, let’s take a look at the conversion: 34 registrations, with a registration cost of nearly 1,500 yuan. (Don’t ask me what happened to the optimizer later o(╯□╰)o)

3. [Misconception] Blindly pursuing download volume

Another client, who makes a calendar APP, found that when he was using 360 Assistant to launch the app, he found that the red envelopes had a large volume and low cost. Regardless of the optimizer's objections, he was determined to put the entire 5k daily budget into the red envelope. Nearly 5k downloads a day, and the cost hit a new low of 1.2 yuan per download. The client said, it’s a good thing he didn’t listen to the optimizer.

Later, the next-day retention rate was 3% (normally the retention rate for general advertising channels should be between 25% and 30%)

How to do better?

1. User research

The market is constantly changing, and user portraits are not static.

For example, there was a client in the maternal and child care industry who, when working on Toutiao, targeted a group of female users and launched the "anti-radiation clothing" creative campaign, which generated high click-through rates and good conversion rates.

However, about half a year later, the clicks and conversions for promoting the anti-radiation clothing idea to this group of customers were not satisfactory. After racking my brains, I suddenly realized that these pregnant mothers have already given birth, so of course they are no longer needed! In order to verify the idea, we pushed diapers to this group of users. As expected, the sales are very good! (I was shocked at the time-_-||)

2. Pay attention to the latest media developments

The iteration speed of advertising products of major media is also very rapid. We also need to pay attention to the latest changes and latest products in each distribution channel. Others don’t know, but we do. Others haven’t done it, but we have. So we can enjoy the dividends of being first to market.

For example, when the Baidu Xunke style was first launched, few people knew about it, let alone used it. The author has a client who is in the restaurant franchise business. He made a decisive investment and the number of messages per day increased 20 times, while the cost was reduced by 5 yuan per message.

3. Launch test and data feedback

Many people don't do any testing and just start working on it. For example, recently a friend's company had a game client. When the optimizer Xiao C was working on it, he didn't test the creative style and directly launched the ordinary style. Later, he spent nearly 10,000 yuan, but only 34 were activated. After diagnosis, it was recommended to adjust the delivery style to APP download style, and the activation volume was indeed greatly increased.

Whether it is the SEM we are familiar with, or the information flow and DMP that have emerged in the past two years, effect testing must be carried out when launching. For example, when making the APP download style of Shenma Search, there are two forms: 1) normal download style; 2) advanced download style.

The visual area occupied by the advanced download style is obviously larger than that of the ordinary style, so the click-through rate should also be higher than that of the additional style.

After testing, it was found that the click price of the advanced style was 8.74 yuan, which was 1.52 higher than the additional style, but within an acceptable range. The click-through rate increased by 665% compared to the additional style. This is the launch test.

Although advanced styles can bring more traffic to the website, will there be missed clicks or impulse clicks that cause the traffic quality to be lower than before, and ultimately reduce the number of downloads? Through testing, we found that although the click price of premium styles was higher than that of additional styles, the final cost was almost the same, but the number of downloads was twice that of additional creatives.

For future launches, we decided to give priority to advanced styles. This is a scientific conclusion drawn from the iteration of data feedback.

4. Data monitoring and timely adjustment

There are thousands of distribution channels, and not all distribution channels and promotion methods are suitable for us. Therefore, we need comprehensive data monitoring to observe the conversion cost and quality of each delivery channel at any time. If you find that the current situation cannot be changed after optimization, you must stop the loss in time. Quickly change to another method.

After talking about so many daily mistakes and practical cases, and analyzing the correct approaches, I just want to tell you that as marketing promotion personnel, all our work and guidelines, whether it is planning promotion plans or actually implementing them, are ultimately goal-oriented with effective traffic and effective results.

Summarize

Finally, let’s summarize the ideas for making a good marketing plan:

1. Plan a good marketing promotion plan = what to do + how to do it + how to do it better;

2. Digitalization of promotion objectives;

3. How to achieve the goal?

4. What methods can be used to make the selected method more effective?

5. User research;

6. Pay attention to media trends;

7. Launch test;

8. Data monitoring and direction adjustment;

9. Budget and effect estimation.

At this point, the idea of ​​the entire promotion plan is basically complete. The next thing is to put it in the PPT. I hope this sharing can bring some thoughts and inspiration to everyone~

Related reading:

1. 10 ways to increase APP download and registration rate!

2.App promotion: preparation before listing on app stores and other promotion channels!

3.How to choose keywords for APP promotion? Come quickly!

4. APP channel promotion evaluation model: How to bring better quality volume?

5. Understand the APP promotion process in one article

Author: Tuan Tuan

Source: Feiyue Operation Diary