3 cases to help you improve your event operations

In this article, the author starts with three cases and discusses: How to create popular activities by conducting human nature analysis and understanding user needs during activity operations ?

Why can WeChat use red envelopes to leverage Alipay’s payment status? Why can Douyin grab users’ time in the social red ocean? Why can Ant Forest bring user energy from online to offline and give ordinary payments special meaning?

All these things are complex and unrelated. However, beneath the ever-changing appearances, there is something in common, which is human nature. The development of operational work is a profound insight into human nature, and requires upgrading the deep pain points of human nature.

Like the beginner's chapter, in the advanced operations chapter, Zhu Zhu will also refine this operational thinking through a series of content. Today, we will start with three cases and talk about how to create popular events by understanding human nature during event operations.

Without further ado, let’s get straight to the case.

1. Three activities, three scenarios, three results

The following three activities: free drinking water at community drinking points, Dragon Boat Festival rice dumpling making activity, and scanning the QR code to get free drinking water.

The specific event details are as follows:

If we distill the three activities, we can easily draw the following conclusions:

• Scenario 1: Free purified water → popular scene → successful event;
• Scenario 2: Wrapping zongzi online → Short launch cycle, fast user growth → Successful activity
• Scenario 3: Scan the QR code to get the glasses water → No one gets it → Activity failed

Why did some of these three ordinary activities succeed while others failed? So, where is human nature reflected in these three activities, and how does it influence the activities?

2. Humanity Analysis of the Three Activities

The most written explanation of human nature is: the psychological attributes that are common to all human beings.

In operations, we often need to summarize the most prominent characteristics of human nature: love of novelty, love of praise, blindly following trends, enjoying exclusivity, being competitive, and being greedy for bargains, etc.

To understand human nature is to skillfully infiltrate the characteristics of human nature into every link in the operation of the event, like the spring breeze that moistens everything silently. This will help us tap into the unique characteristics of each event, stimulate its vitality, and achieve twice the result with half the effort.

Next, we use the human characteristics summarized above to sort out the three activities at the beginning:

We clearly found that these three activities also captured one or two characteristics of human nature, but why are there still successes and failures?

The reason for failure lies in the way of combination. A clever combination will arouse users' desire to participate and stimulate their motivation to spread and share. Otherwise, it will backfire. Therefore, insight into human nature is only the first step to a successful event, and the following matters also need to be noted.

3. Things to note when understanding human nature

1. Must be based on user portraits

Let’s go back to the case and review the user portraits of the three activities.

Based on the previous table, let’s analyze these three activities in detail:

Scenario 1: Free purified water

Firstly, the gimmick of "free trial" is in line with the human nature of the elderly in small towns who live frugally and like to get bargains; secondly, the traditional way of participating by touching the ping-pong ball to draw coupons after receiving water is simple to operate for this group; at the same time, they have plenty of time to line up to participate in the event after dinner.

This event took place in my hometown, a small fifth-tier county town. For several days in a row, my parents would take buckets to fetch water on time after dinner, and when they got home they would discuss who had drawn the voucher with the larger face value.

Scene 2: Making Zongzi during the Dragon Boat Festival

It is the Dragon Boat Festival, and making rice dumplings is a hot word during this period. Therefore, we planned an interesting and easy-to-spread activity based on the product features and combined it with festivals. The user group is programmers in science and engineering.

The features of the product are broken down into the steps of making zongzi, and users can follow the steps to complete the process.

Features of this event:

1. The method of obtaining the activity results by clicking online three times is simple and clear, with low user participation cost, which conforms to the universal human characteristic of "liking simplicity and fearing complexity";
2. The online hands-on participation is fun and novel for science and engineering students who only write code and do not engage in operational marketing work.
3. The most important point is that different "zongzi" can generate different praise languages ​​according to gender and position, which is in line with the human characteristics of everyone liking to be praised and customized.

This activity was planned and executed by our team. In just 10 minutes, the number of backend users doubled, and the user group discussed it hotly. Curiosity drove many users to operate it several times in a row to get different compliments. The success of this event is inseparable from the insight into the multiple characteristics of "human nature".

Scenario 3: Scan the QR code to get glasses

This activity makes use of the universal characteristic of human nature: “being greedy for bargains”, but why did no one participate in the end?

To address this issue, we need to analyze more detailed user portraits:

First, as mentioned in the table above: this group consists of urban white-collar workers with high income and strong spending power. For them, whether a bottle of eyeglass water worth a dozen yuan is free or not is not very attractive.

Secondly, the way to participate is to scan the code and fill in information to register. The operation process is cumbersome for the user group and easily causes privacy concerns.

Finally, the event took place at the end of the working day, and everyone knew each other when people came and went in front of the company gate. No one wanted to leave the impression of "taking advantage" in front of their colleagues. In addition, the "scan and get free gifts" activity format was started many years ago and has no appeal to this group of young people.

I saw this event after get off work. I observed it for 30 minutes and found that no one was attending.

Then I thought that if this activity was modified to "Scan the QR code to buy eyeglass water for 0.1 yuan", the effect might be different. There is only one word difference between buy and give, but the psychological feeling it brings is different.

Through the above three activities, Zhu Zhu believes that it is necessary to gain insights into human nature based on user portraits. In other words, it is necessary to analyze the unique human characteristics of the target users, and focus on their characteristics while taking into account the general characteristics when carrying out activities. In this process, if the characteristics and commonalities conflict, the characteristics should be chosen over the commonalities.

2. Keep the participation process as simple as possible

"Love simplicity and hate complexity" is also a very important human characteristic, which basically fits all product user portraits.

This point can be summarized in specific activities as follows:

• The event page has clear copywriting and is easy to read;
• The activity rules are clearly stated and easy to understand;
• The participation process is familiar in format, with few steps and simple operation.

To sum it up in simple terms, for online activities, there should be fewer clicks and fewer jumps; for offline activities, there should be less waiting and less changing of locations.

4. How to understand human nature in activities

1. Conduct user analysis and refine user characteristics

Based on this, we should not only do a good job of product data analysis and rely on objective data for analysis, but also strengthen communication with users and use UGC to intuitively analyze user characteristics. Understand more detailed user characteristics such as age, preferences, psychological traits, etc., to draw a good user portrait and summarize and refine the "characteristics".

2. Make use of common “generality” ideas

• I like simplicity and am annoyed by complexity. I like to design activities that are simple and easy to operate.
• Love exclusivity and enjoy uniqueness. Make some customized operations on activity copywriting and display format to give users a sense of private customization and exclusivity.
• Like novelty and avoid repetitive forms of activities. The same creativity can be presented in different forms. For this, you can communicate well with the product or R&D department and let them help you “put old wine in new bottles”.

The editor has divided the elements of an event, calling objective and controllable factors such as event budget, time nodes, location, and event format "hard factors"; and subjective factors such as creative gimmicks, participation links, and visual copywriting are "soft factors."

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Author: Zhu Zhu

Source: Zhu Zhu Life Laboratory (ID: ixian888)