How to plan marketing activities for those festivals that are “difficult” to leverage?

Holiday marketing planning has obvious advantages over advertising for brands or products: low cost and good results.

Compared with advertising with a clear profit-making purpose, marketing event planning seems to be more humane, with higher consumer participation, and it is even possible to directly market during the event planning process, thus killing two birds with one stone.

Especially during holidays, marketing planning activities seem to be more cost-effective and easier to operate than directly taking advantage of holiday promotions.

For example, Alipay’s “Collect Five Blessings” event during the Spring Festival every year is a grand carnival participated by hundreds of millions of people, which has a huge positive effect on the company’s brand value.

However, not all holidays are suitable for activities or marketing, such as Army Day, Party Founding Day, and the just-passed "100th Anniversary of May Fourth Youth Day".

On this "Spiritual Civilization Construction Day", it seems not so good to talk about ways to make money, and the activity planning is basically in the form of "listening to reports, giving lectures, and discussing experiences" within the institutional units.

During this kind of festival, it seems that businesses should be self-aware and stand aside to avoid trouble.

Festival marketing is actually a "panacea" for brands. It can be applied wherever it is needed. You just need to know when and what kind of event planning to do, that is, to have a clear idea of ​​event planning.

Let’s talk about the specific methods to clarify the ideas of event planning.

1. Overall planning, the soul of the planning case

Holiday marketing planning must be timely, effective and error-free. First of all, you need an overall idea, that is, to make an overall plan. Good preparation is half the success.

The overall planning plan needs to clarify seven points: theme, purpose, object, time, place, process, and budget.

First of all, theme, purpose and object are of paramount importance, and the three should be highly consistent. When planning marketing activities during festivals, the theme is of course the festival.

For example, the theme of this May Fourth Youth Day is naturally activities related to youth. At the same time, the target audience has also been limited, with young people as the main target of participation.

The purpose of the event can be extended on this basis, and we can think about how to narrow the correlation between the corporate brand and the theme of the event, and to narrow the communication relationship with the event objects.

For example, on the May 4th Youth Day last year, Tiantian Ptu and Crazy Face Changing cooperated to launch an H5 "My Youthful Photos in Previous Life", in which participants could see their handsome appearance in their previous lives.

The style of the entire H5 is nostalgic and retro, and the generated photos are in the style of the Republic of China, which is in line with the theme of "My Youthful Photos in Previous Life" and instantly went viral on WeChat Moments.

The product functional features of "photo retouching and face changing" were reasonably integrated into "past life photos", and at the same time, the holiday theme of "youth photos" was closely followed, which quickly became a viral phenomenon.

Secondly, the time, place, and activity process must be considered carefully. Whether it is day or night, online or offline, what the participants need to do all needs to be carefully planned.

Let’s take the May Fourth Youth Day as an example. If it is a daytime activity, it is recommended to hold public welfare activities to promote the new youth and new style. If it is at night, various forms of parties can be held to highlight the young people’s self and express their individuality.

What still needs to be paid close attention to is that it must be closely integrated with products and brands.

The national liquor Moutai’s poster copy for the May Fourth Movement was “Youth may be abandoned by time, but the burning heart is forever young”, while Jiang Xiaobai, which focuses on the young market, said “Discard the so-called lessons from the past, young people, to what extent can you be yourself!”

The last point, which is also the basis of all planning, is the budget.

There is nothing to say about how big the pot is and how much rice to cook. You just need to grasp the principle of "no waste, no stinginess". Frankly speaking, this is very conventional. It would be best if you can create big marketing with small cost.

The purpose of planning is nothing more than two: marketing profit and external publicity and promotion. Don’t waste money that should not be spent, and don’t be stingy with the money that should be spent. The final evaluation standard is the effect of the activity.

2. Planning reasons, an opportunity with a legitimate reason

For brands, holding events is for image promotion and marketing. This reason cannot be told directly to consumers and requires more convincing and motivating reasons.

The so-called justification for the action is that without giving a convincing reason, all actions seem to have ulterior motives.

The festival itself is a reason, that is, time is used as a reason. In addition to statutory holidays, there are also various artificially created e-commerce festivals such as Tmall's "Double Eleven" and JD's "June 18". These are "shopping festivals" created by various e-commerce platforms in order to give themselves a reason for event marketing.

You can also use social hot spots as reasons for planning. This is what we call leveraging marketing. The same principle applies to planning activities by leveraging social hot spots.

Social hot topics, celebrity gossip, etc. can all be planned in different forms of activities. For example, recently, Cai Xukun, who is already a popular star, was named one of the May Fourth Youth Representatives by the Beijing News. The collision of traffic and festival naturally caused a lot of hot topics.

Without waiting for the heat to subside, Cai Xukun walked into the hospital, put on a white coat, transformed himself into "Dr. Cai", fed medicine to a sick child, checked the eyes of an old man, listened carefully to the instructions of the supervising doctor, and carried out a good positive external publicity.

The reason for planning is to choose a right time, be in the right place, and do the right thing. Event planners need innovative ideas, strong coordination skills, and strong psychological qualities to highlight the highlights of the event.

3. Practical principles, basic laws of planning

In order to make subsequent actions feasible, event planning must be based on execution principles. So what are the specific operational principles that must be adhered to?

The principle of operability. This means that the activities must be executable, practical, and able to be evaluated based on their effectiveness.

Therefore, the activity needs to be within the scope of human resources and be able to produce favorable performance, with the benefits outweighing the costs, and finally being able to draw a conclusion as to whether it is a "loss" or a "profit".

Take the recent dispute between Cai Xukun and Bilibili as an example. Although it is not an event planning in the strict sense, it can help us understand what operability is.

Cai Xukun’s legal team sued Bilibili for infringing on his portrait rights, but in fact, even if Bilibili loses the case, can Cai Xukun’s image be restored?

Not only can it not be done, but it will continue to suffer heavy losses, so this behavior is undoubtedly meaningless and unworkable. In contrast, when Cai Xukun went to the hospital on the May Fourth Youth Day, he only had to spend one day, but what he received was positive praise from the official media. It can be said that he "made a fortune." This is feasibility.

The principle of innovation. Beautiful appearances are all alike, but interesting souls are rare to find. As for activities, festivals are planned every year, but what really matters is the creativity of the company's planning team behind the scenes.

When innovating, we need to pay attention to current hot topics, but we should not be too similar to those in the same industry, nor should we be too exaggerated.

For example, Dulux released a poster on May Fourth, and the copy contained only a mathematical formula "6*9=54".

Once everyone thinks about the "6" and "9", they will immediately smile knowingly, understanding the "connotation" of the copy, which is closely related to the product characteristics, erotic but not vulgar, and they will praise from the bottom of their hearts: "What a creative idea!"

It must be emphasized that innovation in event planning must be based on legality, must be created on a reasonable basis, and must seek the heart on a reasonable basis.

Legality, rationality and reasonableness are the red lines that any innovation cannot cross. Previously, Zhou Mouya’s advertisement was denounced by the society as "vulgar marketing and discrimination against women", which clearly showed the difference in terms of innovation.

The last is the principle of precise targeting. Generally speaking, marketing activities can be precisely targeted by targeting three factors: the subject of the activity, the purpose of the activity, and the audience of the activity, and the theme, content and form of the activity can be planned accordingly.

Many companies lament the difficulty in marketing holiday events such as the "May 4th Youth Day" because of this principle of precision: once these festivals are precise, they have nothing to do with business and marketing and become a matter of the system.

In fact, when precision is targeted at a specific activity purpose, appropriate interpretation of the activity purpose can be made. For example, the May Fourth Youth Day promotes the various positive and progressive spiritual outlooks of the new youth. So what are the positive traits that are unique to young people?

For example: lively and cheerful, outgoing personality, strong sense of innovation, etc. Then these become new themes.

It is very suitable for companies to hold theme activities that encourage young people to innovate and express their individuality, such as "Innovation Festival" and "Fashion Graffiti Party", which all meet the characteristics of precise targeting.

Marketing activity planning needs to be legal, reasonable and appropriate, but it should not go to extremes and be overly "politically correct", as this will lead to rigid thinking.

3. Planning rules, red lines that cannot be crossed

In the process of planning, there will always be some setbacks, big and small, and over time the planner will become timid.

In fact, there are some specific rules in event planning. Once you understand them, you can avoid detours and enhance the confidence of planners.

1. There is only one theme: Embedding multiple activity themes in one activity is often a taboo in event planning. Once a banner like "XXXX and XXXX" is hung up, it will appear full of complaints.

Especially the planning of holiday marketing activities requires a more distinct banner and the ability to summarize themes.

It just needs to be connected with the festival, product, and audience, but connectivity is not the theme. Multiple event themes can only cause the marketing to deviate directly from the marketing purpose and have the opposite effect.

Why do festivals like the May Fourth Festival cause so many headaches for businesses? It’s because there are too many themes. There are regulatory factors, commercial considerations, and finally, there are risks. Unlike shopping festivals like “Double Eleven”, the themes are simple and clear.

2. State the benefits directly: For activity participants, tell them directly what to do and what benefits they can get.

According to the data, the most effective marketing campaign planning is often the simplest and most technically-free discount promotion.

Consumers can know how much discount they can get by just doing the calculation, and all they have to do is pay.

The May Fourth Youth Day can also be very simple, that is, completely abandon the purpose of profit and directly do corporate publicity, so participants don’t have to think too much.

Many companies fall into a misunderstanding that as long as they hold an event, they must make money, otherwise what is the point of holding an event? Therefore, if you have too many concerns, you will speak in a roundabout way.

In short, for festivals, if you can do marketing, then do marketing; if you can’t do marketing, then hold activities; if you can make a profit, then make a profit; if you can’t make a profit, then do promotion.

As long as the planning is in place, there is no festival that cannot "take advantage of the popularity".

Author: Seven Princes

Source: PR Home