How to plan and promote an excellent event?

Whether you are doing user operations, new media operations, or user growth. Whether you are a new operator who has just entered the Internet industry, or an operations supervisor or manager who has worked for several years, you will find that event management is a very important skill for operations.

• If you want to add new users and meet your KPI targets at the end of the month, you might want to hold an event.
• If you want to increase the number of followers on Weibo, WeChat and Douyin, would you think about organizing an event?
• If you want to increase user activity and retention indicators, you might want to hold an event.

The importance and effectiveness of activities are deeply rooted in the minds of many operators.

But when it comes to organizing the same event, you will find that some people have clear ideas, and they know exactly what needs to be done for an event and can do it easily; while some people do not have a complete plan, and their plans are messy and unsmooth, or even they act at a loss at the last minute. This is actually the difference in the level of activity planning capabilities of operators.

At this point, many people may have questions. Brother T, the company has a special event operation position, and my career plan does not develop in the direction of event planning. Do I still need to deliberately improve my event capabilities?

My answer is yes.

because:

1. Many companies do not have dedicated event operation positions;

2. Once you have mastered the ability to plan events, you can complete many activities independently, in a short, fast and effective manner.

Well, today, I will share with you my experience in event planning and operations. This article will break down the process of planning an event one by one, and strive to combine theory with practice.

01 Clarify the main purpose of this planned activity

In summary, the purposes of the activities can be grouped into three categories.

Brand promotion, traffic acquisition, and conversion payment.

Among them, brand promotion activities may be more exposed to students working in marketing, while operations partners may be more exposed to the latter two types of activities.

The main purpose of activities such as attracting new customers, PUSH recall, and 50% off for group purchases is to acquire traffic ; while the main purpose of various coupons and discount coupons commonly used by e-commerce is to convert payments .

A good activity can only have one main goal. All operations of the entire activity serve this main goal. There may be multiple goals involved, but there is definitely only one overall goal.

When you receive a work order from your leader, you need to improve a certain indicator of the product, such as the daily increase in the number of new followers of a public account.

Don’t think about solving the problem through an event right away. First break down the goal and see if there are other solutions.

For example, let’s analyze what new channels were added previously? Is there still room for improvement in these channels? Whether new effective channels can be found, etc.

Before you start an activity, ask yourself a few questions.

• Is this activity necessary?
• What is the goal of this activity? What problems do we need activities to solve?
• Are there any resources available for this activity?

If the answer is yes, OK, then let’s get started.

02 Clarify the main target of this activity

I have seen many activities with poor results, and they all have one thing in common, that is, the object of the activity is very vague and not clear enough.

When shooting arrows, you should aim at the target, and when doing activities, you should be targeted. Only by targeting the right target can we achieve good results.

Especially for some small activities that aim to improve a single indicator, you must not be greedy. The activity targets a wide range and lacks focus. It may seem big and comprehensive, but in fact it lacks refined operations for real target users, so the effect of the activity can be imagined.

1. Who is the target of our activities?

If you are doing a new user acquisition campaign, the target users are those who have not downloaded and used the app.

If you conduct a recall campaign, the target of the campaign is lost users;

If you are running a paid campaign to promote conversions, the target audience is those users who perform frequent operations but will only pay when the final push is in place.

Clarifying the activity object is the basis for subsequent operations.

It would be best to create a user profile of the activity target, and design different activity paths and gameplay according to different ages, cultural levels, user habits, etc. I won’t go into detail here, but will give a detailed introduction later.

2. What are their hobbies?

The essence of the activity is actually exchange. We use rewards in exchange for users' registration, usage, time, activity, payment, etc.

Then it is very important and easy to understand to cater to the needs of the target users. Only when your rewards are attractive enough to the target users can you achieve good activity results.

3. Where can I find them?

Once you know where to find the target audience, you can determine which channels to use.

In fact, the ultimate purpose of these questions is to be responsible for the results of the activities.

This is a random screenshot of an activity I took from my WeChat Moments. It is an activity page of a K12 education institution.

Let’s think about a few questions.

What is the main purpose of this activity?

The operation should be easy to understand. The purpose is to utilize the circle of friends of the activity objects to attract new members. But it is different for parents. The purpose of their participation in this activity is for parent-child learning + prizes.

Therefore, when planning an event, operations need to distinguish between our purpose and the purpose of the event object. We need to wrap our purpose within the purpose of the activity object, so that it can become a good activity.

Who is the target of this activity?

Is this a child learning English? Obviously not.

The target audience of this activity should be the children’s parents.

Since the activity is aimed at parents, why are the prizes the ones children like? Is it okay to directly replace the prizes with electronic products or cosmetics that the parents like?

Let me talk about my thoughts.

From a cost perspective, the cost of gifts that children like is much lower than those that parents like.

Judging from the content of the activity, this activity requires the cooperation of children and parents. The purpose of expanding the circle of friends is hidden behind English learning, so prizes are used to stimulate children to actively cooperate.

03 What needs of users can your activity meet?

In other words, why should users attend your event? Where is this bait?

Whether it is to meet the users' spiritual needs or to meet their material needs, it can actually be summarized in four words: profitable.

The purpose of an activity is to induce users to complete the actions you envision.

The strength of this inducement is worth pondering.

If the reward is too high, the cost will be too high, the final ROI of the activity will not be good enough, and it is easy to make users picky, and they will not come for small activities in the future (for example, Luckin Coffee gives me 28% and 38% discount coupons every day, and occasionally gives me 48% discount coupons, then I will definitely not look down on it).

If the amount is too small, it will not be enough to attract users.

Therefore , the third step in planning an event is to determine the appeal of the event and to evaluate whether the appeal is strong enough or too strong.

Of course, the intensity of this activity needs to be evaluated through the participation of the activity subjects.

For example, the reward for a single user of a certain fission activity is RMB 158.

Is this reward high or low? There's no way to evaluate that, right? Because you don’t know whether you will get 158 ​​yuan for every person you recruit, or you must recruit 20 people to get 158 ​​yuan.

This type of coupon is the most common form of activity for converting paid activities.

Induce the participants with benefits in the form of coupons. Users who appear on this interface must have the need to place shopping orders, otherwise who would visit Ele.me for no reason? Then, using discount coupons can not only stimulate conversions, but also increase the average order value, which is cost-effective.

04 What form does the activity take?

Nowadays, everyone receives a huge amount of information every day and is surrounded by various information, including a lot of activity information. In other words, everyone is numb.

Whether the form of the activity is creative, novel, and eye-catching will determine whether the activity can stand out from the crowd of information flows.

During normal operations, we should pay more attention to activities in various industries, optimize and organize them, and extract the essence.

In this part, I think we need to pay attention to several key points.

1. Whether the core path of the activity can be successfully implemented and whether the user experience in the entire process is good enough.

This is the key to the activity and the underlying foundation of the activity.

It is just like building a house. The smoothness of the core path is the solid foundation, and the subsequent activity packaging and gameplay optimization are the superstructure.

If the foundation is unstable, no matter how beautiful the house is, it will not be able to withstand the wind and rain.

2. Is the packaging of the event good enough?

Let’s take the K12 case we just saw, which has a very good activity packaging.

By packaging the content and form of the event, an activity to attract new customers was packaged into an activity where parents and children can learn English and receive prizes. This greatly reduced the psychological resistance of parents to sharing on WeChat Moments (reducing the cost of user participation, which will be discussed later).

3. During the activity, you can absorb some ideas from the game.

Whether the user's activity path is clear and definite, whether the introduction and guidance of each step are clear enough, whether the reward feedback is timely, whether there is a sharing mechanism to facilitate dissemination, etc.

Of course, it doesn’t mean that all gameplay needs to be included in the event. You can make adjustments based on the size of the event, the user population, and the type of event, and choose appropriate gameplay to integrate into the event.

05 User Participation Cost

User participation cost refers to the time, energy and money users spend on becoming familiar with an activity.

The cost of participation cannot be too high, otherwise users will simply not participate or will be lost during the process of learning.

There must be a participation cost, otherwise there will be a lot of freeloaders and the subsequent effect of the activity cannot be guaranteed.

On the basis of risk control, an activity should try to reduce the user's participation cost.

So, what are the main aspects of user participation costs?

1. Understand the costs

Is the activity simple and easy to understand? Does it conform to past thinking and usage habits? Think of your users as fools and don't let your subjects overthink.

If the path of the activity is deep, be sure to provide sufficiently obvious guidance in the product design.

Innovation in activity gameplay is important and can easily be popular, but we should not blindly pursue innovation and ignore the understanding and acceptance of the activity objects.

2. Monetary cost

Considering the money required to participate in this event. If the threshold is too high, it will not only block the freeloaders, but also block the target of the activity.

I don’t know if you have received it. When I participated in an Alipay event before, I received a 5-yuan Lamborghini car purchase voucher. WTF, are you kidding me, what is the point of this activity? Apart from becoming a pastime and joke for everyone after dinner, it is of no help to the brand or traffic.

3. Time cost

The activity should not be too long or too short.

The time required for users to continuously pay attention is too long to be remembered, and too short to have a good effect. Users will not pay attention to an activity for more than 3 days. If they have a strong desire to participate and the activity is very strong, it may last for a week.

In my opinion, this year's 618 likes collection activity lasted too long. As the activity came to an end, people were exhausted and many users dropped out midway.

My advice is that if you don’t have a product of this kind of national scale, you should not engage in such long-term activities. Otherwise, the effect will definitely not be very good.

4. Trust Cost

Big brands are well-known and are less likely to consider trust costs. But if it is a small or new brand, how to dispel the concerns about participation? It is a good choice to find a trustworthy person or brand to help endorse it.

Having trustworthy brands or people to help endorse, and making the activity rules as transparent as possible, can effectively reduce the user's trust cost.

I took screenshots of two event posters on WeChat Moments.

The left side endorses the event by providing a detailed introduction to the speaker’s background and honors, thereby reducing the user’s trust cost. The one on the right uses the words “10 million people” to increase the credibility of the event by showing that a large number of users have participated.

06 Conclusion

Excellent operations personnel and teams will integrate many activities into the product path, making these activities part of driving the product and users rather than separate activities.

Any activity, whether successful or unsuccessful, has the significance of review, and operations must continuously optimize details to improve activity effectiveness.

For new operators, they can gradually build their own operation system by planning and implementing simple operation activities. They can also develop testing and data capabilities to prepare for more difficult operation work in the future.

So, do you think event planning skills are important?

Related reading:

1. Activity operation: an inventory of mainstream gameplay such as group buying, bargaining, and distribution!

2. Three key points of event operation: How to increase users’ willingness to participate in activities?

3. Event operation: How to do a live broadcast sharing that can attract 10,000+ users?

4. What you need to know about event operation | The basic process of operating online events

5. Event Operation: If these 4 points are met, there is no event that cannot be done well

6. Event operation: How to run a good event? Share 4 points!

7. Event operation: 6 common types of event link title copywriting!

8. Event operation, complete analysis of the gameplay of flash sales

9. Analyze Pinduoduo’s event operation system and coupon gameplay!

10. 5 techniques for event operation and promotion, and coupon distribution!

11. How to warm up for event operation and promotion?

12. Event operation and promotion, how to use H5 to create a hot-selling product?

13.Product activity operation and promotion planning program!

14. Don’t know how to promote events? Here is a set of event operation templates!

15. A complete event operation plan!

Author: T Brother

Source: T Brother