2019 Complete Plan for Online Event Promotion!

How to plan an online event? Even those who are just starting out in operations will probably write an event planning plan. However, often after an event is completed, the results presented are vastly different. Some activities may cost 10,000 yuan and gain 100,000 users or 1 million yuan in orders; some activities may cost 10,000 yuan and only bring in 1,000 users. Why is this? This article explains in detail how to plan a complete online event.

Activity Objectives

When doing anything, you must first set a goal, and the same applies to doing activities. So how do you set goals? First of all, we need to be clear about what is the purpose of this activity? Is it to attract new customers, promote activation, or increase revenue?

Goals are often complementary to each other. For example, while promoting activity, corresponding income will also increase. However, it is necessary to find the focus and refine the purpose as the core of the entire event design in order to achieve the effect of the event.

Some people may ask, now that I have clearly defined the purpose of the activity, I still don’t know what the appropriate goal should be? If the goal is too high, I’m afraid I won’t be able to achieve it; if the goal is too low, my boss won’t agree. I suggest comparing the data before and after the event within the past year to see the growth during the event and before the event. For example, if the number of new users during the event increases by 50% compared to before the event, then set the growth of 50%~60% as the goal for the next event. If there is no historical activity data, then generally speaking, a 30% growth rate during the activity is more reasonable.

Activity object

Due to differences in product attributes, event formats, event goals, and even promotion channels, the target audience will definitely be different. Therefore, before conducting an event, you must understand the target audience of the event. Understanding the audience is not as simple as knowing gender, age, and region, but seeing the essence through the phenomenon, analyzing users' personal information, purchasing preferences and other behaviors, and combining them with the characteristics of the product itself to ultimately determine the target audience for the event.

Event Time

We often say "everything is ready except the east wind", which means waiting for the opportunity. Now that everything is ready, when should we launch the activity to achieve the maximum effect? Generally speaking, there are three opportunities for activities to take advantage of.

Traditional holidays

For example, the Spring Festival, Lantern Festival, Chinese Valentine's Day, etc., these holidays have one thing in common: the time is fixed. Their predictability and inevitability greatly facilitate the activities to take advantage of the momentum, and there is enough time to make adequate preparations for the activities in order to achieve the best results. It should be noted that if you want to carry out activities on festivals to commemorate ancestors, such as Qingming Festival and Zhongyuan Festival, you must be very cautious to avoid causing disgust among users.

E-commerce big promotion day

For example, Taobao’s Double 11 and Double 12, JD.com’s 618, Suning.com’s 818, Amazon’s Black Friday, etc. After a certain period of time, users have become very familiar with these promotional days, so taking advantage of e-commerce's large-scale promotional days to hold activities can greatly reduce the time of educating users and achieve twice the result with half the effort.

Hot Events

Unlike the holidays and promotional days mentioned above, hot events are divided into two categories: predictable and sudden. Predictable hot events, such as various new product launches such as Apple's and Xiaomi's, and large-scale events such as the World Cup and the Olympics. Although these events do not occur every year, their time can be known several months in advance, thus leaving us with enough time to prepare. As the name suggests, sudden hot events are things that happen suddenly and cannot be known in advance.

Activity Form

The goal and time set a framework for the activity, while the form of the activity is to find the most attractive method for the activity objects within this framework. There are four main types of activities that are currently commonly used.

subsidy

The first step in this approach is often to gain scale and be accepted and used by a large user base in a very short period of time. A form of activity that is frequently used by life service products.

Take Meituan Takeout as an example. When you order takeout, you will get a red envelope. If you share the red envelope, both you and others can receive it, which will attract more people to use their products and allow those who share to stay longer. Recently, Meituan Waimai has optimized the way to play with red envelopes. When sharing, it will show which red envelope is the largest. Firstly, it enriches the gameplay, and secondly, users know clearly which one is the largest, which can guide continuous sharing. It has to be said that this form of subsidy has indeed brought a large number of new users to Meituan Takeout.

topic

Rely on the power of the media and word of mouth from users to make the product or service a topic of conversation among users, and achieve the effect of the activity by encouraging users to provide positive topics. Fitness apps and food apps often use this format for activities, such as Food World’s #I’m serious about eating breakfast# and Haoqing’s #I’m a food expert#.

game

By playing games, you can embed product information or get product discounts. This form of activity is most widely used by e-commerce. For example, Alipay launches a series of mini-games to obtain coupons on Double 11 every year.

Discount

The simplest and most user-attractive form of activity. Products offer certain discounts or promise certain benefits to attract users to buy more products, or even products that were not originally on their shopping lists. Similarly, e-commerce companies also make extensive use of this form of activity. For example, Suning.com’s “818 Carnival” directly offers discounts on some products; Tianyi User Center’s recharge activity promises the benefits of a “Yunnan trip for two” to attract users to recharge.

It is worth noting that no matter which form of activity is adopted, the following key points should be paid attention to:

Try to be fun

The purpose of an activity is to attract users to play and achieve the purpose of the activity during the process of playing. Therefore, no matter what form the activity takes, it should be as interesting as possible to attract as many users as possible.

Smooth experience

From the time a user enters the activity page to the time the activity is completed, according to the funnel principle, each step will result in approximately 50% loss. Therefore, the operating steps of the activity should be simplified as much as possible. It is best not to let users choose which page to go to, but to directly guide users to continue participating. In addition, the overall process design should also be as smooth as possible to reduce user loss at each link.

Easy to understand

The rules for participating in the event should be as simple as possible so that users do not need to spend too much time to know what to do and what to get. In addition to keeping the rules as simple as possible, the description of the rules that guide users to participate in the activity should also be as concise as possible. Complete activity rules need to describe a lot of text, such as time, participation methods, prize content, precautions, etc. For the product, as complete a description as possible is, on the one hand, to allow users to understand the activity as detailed as possible, and on the other hand, to avoid liability; but for users, too much description will only scare them away. Therefore, in the activity rules, it is best to put the core information in the most prominent position of the page, and other descriptions only need to be there to reduce the user's reading cost.

Emphasize user interests

Users participate in activities in order to obtain certain material or spiritual rewards. Putting user interests in the most obvious position on the activity page allows users to obtain information about vested interests in the shortest time, which can better attract users to take the next step.

Guide sharing

Users’ participation in an activity often indicates that they approve of the activity. Therefore, guiding old users who have participated in the activity to share it is an effective way to expand the effectiveness of the activity. After all, recommendations from friends can often make new users feel more trustworthy than direct product marketing. There are only two ways to guide old users to share: one is to meet their spiritual needs, and the other is to meet their material needs. The specific method to be used can be measured in combination with the entire article.

Budget

There are many ways to organize activities that do not involve costs. You can either cooperate with merchants and have them provide prizes to promote the merchants during the activities; or you can attract users through unique ideas, such as the "Buy a painting for 1 yuan" charity event that went viral on WeChat Moments some time ago. What we are talking about here are activities that require costs. How should we make a budget? First, align with the goal. If the goal does not involve profit, you need to understand what range of per capita costs the company requires. As shown in the figure below, if the goal is to attract new customers and the company requires the cost of attracting new customers to be less than 5 yuan, the budget calculation formula is: Budget = Cost per Person * Target Number of New Customers.

If the goal involves profit, that is, increasing revenue, there are more factors to consider. First, you need to know the cost of the product; second, you need to understand what the company's gross profit margin must be above. For example, if the unit price of product A is 100 yuan and the cost is 80 yuan, and the company requires the gross profit margin to be no less than 10%, then the formula for calculating the activity cost of a single order is: (100-80)-100*10%=10 yuan. In other words, the original gross profit margin is 20%, and the company requires 10%, which means there is still 10% room for activity costs. In summary, activity budget = [(product unit price - product cost) - product unit price * company-specified gross profit margin] * target order quantity.

Promotion Channels

A good event also needs good channels to promote it. After all, even good wine needs to be promoted in a remote alley. According to the definition, promotion channels can be divided into paid channels and non-paid channels.

Paid channels, as the name suggests, involve paying money for promotion, such as search ads, big V reposts, or WeChat ads, etc. I won’t go into detail here.

In addition to the platform that carries the product itself, the more common way of non-paid channel promotion is mutual promotion of resources. If mutual promotion is done through WeChat official accounts, it is necessary to screen official accounts that are more relevant to the event, and then negotiate with the person in charge of the other party on the related work of mutual promotion resources, agree on the online time, exchanged user traffic, and how to make up for it when the amount is insufficient. It should be noted that the data of each mutual promotion channel must be effectively monitored, so that it can be reasonable and well-founded when calculating the traffic in the later stage.

Risk Monitoring

Before the activity goes online, it is necessary to predict in advance the problems that may be encountered after the activity goes online and take corresponding countermeasures. The following are some of the problems you may encounter during the activity:

What should I do if the activity effect is not obvious?

When the effect of an activity is not obvious, it is necessary to extract data from each link of the activity, determine which activity has a problem, and quickly optimize this link.

If the traffic is too little, you will need to strive for more promotional resources and extend the online time of the event.

If the traffic is sufficient but too few users enter the activity page, you need to distinguish whether the traffic quality is poor or the relevance of the traffic is not strong.

There are many users entering the event page, but the number of people participating in the event is too small. In this case, you need to consider whether the event threshold is too high, whether the event process is too complicated, whether the event participation rules are unclear, etc.

If the activity involves cash flow, the order situation also needs to be considered. If the order conversion rate is too low, it may be because although the activity can attract users to participate, it cannot motivate users to pay. Therefore, in the early stages of activity design, it is necessary to consider whether the activity can attract users to pay; during the diversion period, it is necessary to instill the concept of activity participation cost into users through appropriate copywriting.

What should I do if the event results exceed my expectations but the budget is insufficient?

Generally speaking, if the effect of an event exceeds expectations, it is a matter of great pride for the event planner and operator, as it means that the event is more effective than expected. However, the popularity of an event is often accompanied by the problem of insufficient budget. Then, you can lower the winning rate or apply for more event budget; at the same time, you can also use the event data to seek sponsorship from other businesses. After all, an event with good results is also an exposure for the sponsoring businesses, so why not a win-win situation?

What should we do if there is malicious activity?

Different activities have different ways of malicious brushing. Therefore, when it comes to the issue of malicious brushing activities, it is necessary to combine the product itself, take into account all aspects that may be brushed as much as possible, and use technical means to conduct relevant risk monitoring to avoid unnecessary losses.

Effect estimation

Effectiveness evaluation is equivalent to estimating the input and output of the entire activity. How much is invested, what is the per capita cost, how many people are involved, how much is output, how much profit is made, what is the input-output ratio, and what reference significance it has for subsequent activities, etc. In the previous article on risk monitoring, we have already mentioned the data analysis of activities, so I will not go into details here.

The above are some basic elements that need to be considered in the early stages of event planning. The preparation of an event also involves many aspects, which I will elaborate on one by one when I have the chance. If you have read this far, it means that you must be a person who is interested in event operations and is very patient. In the future, planning events will definitely go more and more smoothly.

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