How to create a perfect hit event?

Being able to organize a perfect hit event is definitely not an easy task. It depends more on the operator’s grasp of the market, products, users, and timing. It is also important to understand the framework of the activity and have your own system for operational activities.

Around 2010, the battle between thousands of groups kicked off. I was fortunate enough to experience it. I once watched a movie for 1 yuan and bought 30 game coins for 1 yuan. There were endless promotional activities, and the discounts were getting more and more generous. Eventually the smoke cleared, leaving only Meituan dominating the world. The former pioneers and disruptors are nowhere to be found, and it feels like one came to the world for a short time, but all the unknowns and unsolved problems are gone.

The timeline is moving forward. In another real estate industry, group buying activities are in full swing. Group buying is required for buying a house and decorating a house. There are various group buying websites, such as City Group Buying Network and Tuanfang Network, with activities every week and surprises every month. At that time, I was working at Soufun (now Fangtianxia). In the decoration sector of a second-tier city alone, there were hundreds of group buying events every year. I have also led dozens of online and offline events, and have had successes and failures, completing the transformation from a novice to an expert. Below, I will briefly describe my limited experience in event operations based on time, and I hope it will be helpful to everyone.

Most marketing activities or operational activities are aimed at increasing exposure and revenue in the short term. The core of Internet products is traffic business, and the purpose of the activity is to attract traffic and convert it efficiently in the short term. However, in reality, many activities often pursue short-term exposure without follow-up and lack of centripetal force. From planning to implementation, executors often just do activities for the sake of activities, thinking that giving away gifts and gift packages is the perfect completion of the activity mission.

Clarify the goals of the activity

When carrying out an activity, all resources mobilized and all means applied are for the purpose of achieving the goals set previously. Taking my previous work as an example, the ultimate goal of an offline group buying activity is to recover advertising fees. From event materials, copywriting, promotion, recruiting, and finally to implementation, everything is for the purpose of recovering payments.

After clarifying the goal, we need to break down the framework . Once the goal is clear, we will know the key factors that affect the goal. Then further clarify the activities you want to do by analyzing the key factors.

For example, if you want to get money back, you need people to consume. If you want people to consume, they first need to go to the event site. If you want users to go to the event site, you need to have a powerful event policy and inform consumers...

Decomposition of key force influencing factors

After the event policy is finalized, start preparing the materials and copy for the event. User thinking is used here, and you need to fully understand the needs and thinking habits of this industry and users.

Here we will illustrate several aspects of the activity. For example, after the user registers, the operation staff must confirm the information with the user as soon as possible and introduce the activity policy in detail. The focus is on guiding the user to place orders in the store in advance before the event. Because the purpose of the event is to recover payments, it is unlikely that users will place an order for a product worth tens of thousands of dollars on the same day. When you hold an event, it is impossible for consumers not to compare prices from different stores. Going to the store in advance to understand policies and products is to allow consumers to compare in advance. Without good promotions or discounts, products will not be sold even with the best gimmicks.

Before the event, we need to confirm with the user in the store again. The "Influence" commitment consistency principle tells us that once you decide on something, your future behavior will be based on this matter consciously or unconsciously. Therefore, in the final telephone communication, we stimulate users by giving gifts when they come to the store, holding draws when they place orders, etc., and appropriately induce users to make commitments, come to the store on the same day, and gather popularity.

Of course, the activities in the above example are not comprehensive. Some activities are held for sales, some for brand, and some for popularity. The purposes of activities vary. The key point here is to tell everyone that you must have activity goals and break down the goals reasonably until they are broken down into specific actions that can be executed based on actual conditions.

Now let’s talk about the activity operation of online products. From this to that, we can see that now for many online operation activities, the operators have no clear purpose, and they carry out activities just for the sake of activities, which is completely separated from their own products. The result is predictable.

Nowadays, many event operators are saying that events are becoming increasingly difficult to organize, with large investments and minimal returns. Users have become numb to the overwhelming activities of various products, and scanning codes to receive red envelopes can no longer arouse users' little passion. The Internet industry is updating and iterating too quickly, but most of the user needs have hardly changed.

As for the sci-fi marketing case of creating demand when there is no demand, we will not discuss it here. As ordinary Internet operators, we can be more simple. Keep a low profile, because there is always room for improvement.

Whose company is most accurate in following hot topics? Durex; whose company has the best copywriting? NetEase; whether it is New World View, JD Finance, etc., they have all been hot topics before. As the saying goes, one battle will make you a marquis, and one event can make your product well-known to the public. It sounds very simple, but what about the facts?

I have always believed that any company with a little bit of strength will have more than one set of marketing copy for an event. Any operations staff with a little bit of common sense would come up with two sets of operations plans and let the boss make the final decision! Why? Think about it yourself!

To tell you something outrageous, last year at Jay Chou's concert, there was an incident where the anchor became famous for shouting at her ex-boyfriend. The whole process took only a few minutes, but from planning to execution, she accurately predicted that Jay Chou would invite fans to shout at her, bribed the lighting engineer, and accurately directed the lights to the anchor. All the details and steps were rehearsed countless times in advance to achieve the 2-minute shouting at the concert. No one can succeed easily, and the same goes for event operations.

In the Internet age, following trends and iterations are commonplace. Once you launch a new feature, everyone will have it the next day. The walls of technological barriers have collapsed. The same goes for events. If someone else organizes a hot event and you just copy it over and over again, the effect will definitely be greatly reduced. Not to mention users' aversion and fatigue towards plagiarism, from the starting point alone, simple imitation is almost impossible to be effective.

Bodhisattvas fear causes, and ordinary people fear consequences. When we see other people's activities explode, we try to imitate their forms, just like practicing martial arts, imitating the water and the mountains, but we don't get the key points and may end up going astray.

The correct way to think about it is that we should think about why they want to do the activity? Why do they act in this way? What are their user groups and the users that their activities target? Using the logic of the golden thinking circle is to pursue the underlying “why”. The next step is to question the correctness of this form, such as whether it matches our products and whether it is in line with the overall tone of our users.

Having said so much nonsense, how should we start promoting Internet products? Many products have to come up with a long list of KPIs before launching any activities, such as DAU, new users, etc. Is data assessment important?

It is very important, but the premise of the activity is that the content of your activity must be closely related to the tone of your product , and the activity and the product cannot be separated. What’s the point of organizing an interactive event and gaining 200,000 new users, only to lose 210,000 users the next day?

Don’t separate activities from products

For example, if we organize an activity to offer red envelopes to old users who return, we must link it to our products at the end of the entire user activity path, and introduce new product features or new product activities, thereby improving retention and allowing old users to return and continue using our products.

To organize a good event, many conditions are indispensable, including environment, timing, budget, publicity channels, etc. Sometimes you really need a little luck...

After the event is over, the follow-up summary is also very important. We can measure and summarize from three dimensions, which is also the KPT rule.

• keep: Which operations in the activity are to be kept and can be applied next time.
• promote: Which operations in the activity need to be promoted.
• try: Which parts of the activity were not performed this time and can be tried next time.

As for the detailed explanation, I believe that basic operation personnel understand it, so I will not elaborate on it.

Therefore, it is definitely not that easy to create a perfect hit event. It requires more from the operator’s grasp of the market, products, users, timing, and more importantly, an understanding of the event framework, and having their own system for operating the event. Otherwise, after all the trouble, there will be no progress and everything will remain the same.

Many people question these useless methodologies. Of course, they only serve as a guide and direction. When you receive an activity request, there is no clear situation, and no one tells you what to do, these framework systems may help you find a direction.

Of course, what I have summarized is directly related to my own industry environment and product audience. No matter how perfect a methodology is, it cannot solve all your problems. You need to constantly summarize and practice it in practice, and finally combine the strengths of all schools of thought to summarize your own system.

Related reading:

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Author: Tong Liyu

Source: Tongliyu