How to promote an event well?

With the rapid development of various industries, it is really important to carry out a good operation activity now. The New Year is coming soon. How to seize this year-end opportunity and how to plan a successful and beautiful operation activity in a short time, this article will reveal it to you!

Overall activity introduction

Activity background: CCB Dragon Live is a live broadcast app strategically created by China Construction Bank. It is used by financial institutions to conduct online training, investor education and other live broadcasts for CCB, helping to improve marketing efficiency. The Long Live Mini Program was completed and officially launched on December 3, 2021.

Purpose of the activity: The client hopes to import traffic to the Long Live platform through this operation and convert it into fans of the fund company's institutional account, thereby increasing the popularity of the Long Live platform and helping the fund company continue to reach fan users.

Development cycle: From December 3 when the product department received the relevant requirements for this event to December 20 when the R&D department completed the delivery of all requirements and officially launched the event, it took 10 working days. The work involved close cooperation among multiple departments such as product, design, R&D, and customer success to ensure the progress and quality of the event.

Activity effect: The number of participants exceeded 400,000 within 24 hours of the launch of the activity, and 50% of the original target number of fans was achieved within one day. The entire event lasted for 11 days, with a total of more than 900,000 participants. Eight major organizations broadcast 11 shows with a total of more than 15 million viewers and more than 5 million fans converted, with the effect far exceeding expectations.

How to successfully plan a large-scale operational event in a short period of time? The following summarizes the pitfalls we encountered, the difficulties we encountered, and the experience we accumulated in this process, which will be elaborated in five aspects.

1. Demand communication should be clear

The development cycle of this activity is tight and the development tasks are heavy. Therefore, ensuring that the activity requirements are clearly communicated and avoiding task rework due to misunderstanding of the requirements is a key factor in whether this activity can be launched normally.

1. Promote flat communication

In the early stages of a project, the project leader will communicate with customers about requirements and then convey the requirements to the product department. Due to the long communication path of demand, the deviation in understanding information will be further amplified during the process of demand transmission, resulting in distorted demand. And if the product department has doubts about the requirements or has other ideas and wants to get feedback, they must first communicate with the project leader and then wait for feedback from the customer. This back and forth results in a lot of time being wasted.

As the project cycle was very tight, after realizing that the current demand communication path was too lengthy, the project decided to directly let the product department and customers connect with each other. This not only allowed them to directly collect the customers’ true thoughts and goals, but also improved the frequency and efficiency of communication between the two parties. Demand was gradually confirmed and executed through frequent exchanges.

2. Ensure internal information alignment

In order to ensure the progress of the tasks, a new system was piloted within the project: internal information alignment meetings twice a day, morning and evening.

• Project morning meeting: With the project as the main body, the product department and the R&D department participate together. The R&D colleagues mainly synchronize the latest progress of the project and the difficulties encountered, so that the product colleagues can be fully aware of and respond to them.
• Project Party: Led by the project leader and attended by all project members, the project leader needs to synchronize the latest information obtained from the customer demand side, and each project department reports on the work at hand to achieve comprehensive information disclosure and exchange; if any problems are encountered during the project, they can also be raised and discussed at the meeting.

3. Correctly respond to changes in requirements

In this project, due to time urgency, customers often did not think through many requirements when they were proposed. This led to frequent changes in requirements, which dampened team morale and affected the pace of project progress and launch nodes. When requirements change, it is unreasonable to accept or reject them blindly. We need to find a balance in order to deal with the requirements change correctly:

• Change the ideology within the project: Changes in requirements are inevitable, and all changes in requirements are to make the project more perfect - only by realizing this can we rationally view and analyze the reasons behind each change in requirements, and thus more reasonably evaluate the necessity of changes.
• Full and in-depth communication needs: The relationship between products and customers is not only the recorder and provider of needs, but also a partner. When customers make demands, the product needs to fully understand the motivations and reasons behind the demands, proactively help customers plan solutions, predict possible situations in advance, and ensure that the demands can be fully resolved.
• Reject unreasonable changes in requirements: When a change in requirements is not technically feasible, or is found to be unreasonable after product evaluation, or may affect the project progress and launch node, we must have sufficient confidence to explain the reasons to the customer, reject the requirements or implement them in stages.

2. The activity should be interesting

At the beginning of the project, in order to gain more time for R&D, the product department completed all demand planning and document output in just one day. However, due to a lack of sufficient understanding and thinking about the needs, the first version of the activity design failed to gain recognition from the demand side.

The unsuccessful start also made us reflect deeply and concluded that the first version of the solution did have many shortcomings:

• The tasks of all organizations are straightforward, giving people the feeling that they are completing tasks mechanically. The pace of the activities is dull, lacking climax, and the gameplay is not interesting enough.
• All tasks are one-time tasks. Users lack the motivation to continue participating in activities and are prone to churn after their first participation, resulting in weak growth in the later stages of the activity.
• Key elements such as event rules and event sharing are missing. The entire page design is too monotonous, lacks marketing incentives, and has little appeal to users.

After referring to the marketing methods of large platforms such as Alipay and Taobao, and conducting in-depth discussions and communications with the demand side, we re-examined the activity path and determined the new version of the activity plan:

• Increase fun: Introduce collection gameplay, package the agency tasks into 8 small red envelopes, and unlock them after completing all the tasks under the agency. After the user unlocks all the agency red envelopes, he can also obtain additional benefits.
• Control the rhythm of the event: In addition to the 8 institutional red envelopes, add a final round of big red envelopes, use the 666 yuan cash red envelope as a marketing gimmick, design the climax of the event, and guide users to participate in the whole process.
• Sediment users: Added guidance for users to follow Long Live Assistant. For users who churn after participating in the event, they can be contacted and awakened a second time through WeChat service account messages.
• Enriched layout: New elements such as the main venue banner, live broadcast window, and program list have been added to enrich the entire event page, allowing users to access and watch the live broadcast from more entrances.
• Style upgrade: re-polish the event copy, add screen animation, optimize the main visual, and make the entire event page more in line with the marketing tone.

3. Risk avoidance should be comprehensive

In order to ensure that the event process is smooth and without omissions, after the event plan is approved, a full-process event simulation was organized within the product: each person played a real role in the event, acting out the actual customer participation in the event from beginning to end, so as to discover problems.

During the simulation, we listed the following risk points and discussed solutions:

Question 1: How to prevent links from being blocked when spreading in the WeChat ecosystem?

• Divert traffic to reduce the risk of being blocked: Use multiple link addresses for diversion, with different links pointing to the same activity page, reducing the traffic carried by each link, thereby reducing the risk of being blocked due to "huge amounts of visits and sharing of a certain link".
• Contingency plan after ban: Prepare 5-10 backup domain names in advance. If any domain name is banned, immediately add a new backup domain name to ensure that there are enough domain names in the backup library. If a link to a certain resource is blocked, all parties must respond quickly, immediately remove the blocked link and replace it with an available backup link.

Question 2: How to prevent the "wool party" from maliciously sending red envelopes?

• Use technical means to encrypt the red envelope interface to eliminate the possibility of using scripts to flood the interface.
• Add a mobile phone number authorization login process to restrict virtual number segments and blacklist users from participating in the event.
• The background monitors the rate of loss of activity funds in real time. Once it exceeds the warning value, the protection mechanism will be triggered. In serious cases, the activity can be limited or stopped after manual confirmation.

Question 3: This activity involves recharge and distribution of large amounts of money. How to ensure the safety of funds?

• Recharging a fund company's account only involves changes in information flow, and does not involve the transfer of actual capital flow; the fund company's activity funds are remitted to the designated merchant account through offline unified payment methods for subsequent distribution activities.
• The backend for recharging fund company accounts is only deployed locally. Even if the recharge backend and account password are leaked, they still cannot be accessed and called through the external network.
• A single recharge operation requires a mobile phone verification code from a senior company executive to successfully recharge.

After the event officially started, the three risk points mentioned above occurred to varying degrees. However, because we considered and prepared risk response plans in advance, the event was still able to proceed in an orderly manner when a crisis occurred.

4. Traffic guidance should be sufficient

The purpose of this event is to increase the exposure of the Long Live platform and drive traffic to fund companies. How to effectively guide activity traffic is an issue that needs to be considered urgently. To this end, we have adopted the following strategies:

Distribution channels are fully rolled out: Through communication and consultation with customers, we have confirmed that this event will be promoted simultaneously through six major channels, including CCB's main venue, cloud studio, CCB's official WeChat public account, the Benefit Season video account, CCB's video account, and participating institutions' corporate homepages, in order to maximize the initial user traffic.

Warm up the event in advance: The warm-up period is generally 5-7 days before the event. In this event, we made full use of the warm-up period to build momentum for the event by releasing a countdown poster every day and promoting it on traffic platforms such as WeChat Moments, Video Accounts, and Weibo, along with event copy. On the other hand, we will also keep the event link open to the public during the warm-up period, and the page will display the event countdown. Users can access and browse the page normally and learn about the event rules in advance, but cannot officially participate in the event. In this way, the event attracted tens of thousands of users during the warm-up period alone.

Realize traffic sharing: This event is designed to drive traffic to the institution’s live broadcast, and vice versa, the institution’s live broadcast can also drive traffic to the event page. Therefore, we added a jump entrance to the activity page in the lower right corner of the homepage of the agency’s live broadcast room, thereby connecting the live broadcast traffic and activity traffic and realizing traffic sharing.

Building self-propagation capabilities: In the activity gameplay, we designed a task mechanism of "invite 3 friends to receive red envelopes" to guide users to share and forward, so that the activity can produce a fission effect, use the existing stock to find the incremental, and further amplify the effect of the activity.

5. Data monitoring should be timely

Data analysis is an essential part of operational activities. We need to use data to monitor the entire activity, measure the effectiveness of the activity, and adjust the operational strategy. For data analysis, we did the following:

Plan data tracking in advance and organize the indicator system: Before the event starts, we should communicate with the customer in advance to confirm the analysis needs of the event, and sort out the indicator system based on the needs, plan the relevant tracking points of the activity page, do a good job in development deployment and tracking point testing, and ensure the reliability of the data source. If we want to compare and evaluate the user quality of each delivery channel, we need to pay extra attention to setting the channel_id of each channel delivery link in advance, and standardize the delivery and inspection when launching the event.

Establish a data monitoring and feedback mechanism: We can extract data and analyze it after the event starts, instead of waiting until the event ends. During the event, we can determine an appropriate frequency of data acquisition and feedback, regularly organize and feedback event performance data, help all parties understand the current status of the event, and adjust operational strategies accordingly. In this event, we will provide data reports to customers on a half-day basis.

Focus on analyzing the conversion of the core process of the activity: First, based on the purpose and plan of the activity, we refined the core behavior path of users after visiting the page. During the event, by calculating the conversion rate of each link on the core path, we promptly paid attention to the links with serious user loss and quickly made strategic adjustments. We then verified the effectiveness of the strategy through feedback from the adjusted data, forming a data closed loop. After the event, the overall user conversion rate is also one of the core indicators to measure the effectiveness of the entire event.

The project had a tight time frame and heavy development tasks. Although the activity was eventually successfully launched, there were still many shortcomings. The main reason for writing this article is to record the difficulties we encountered and the solutions during the entire project, so that we can accumulate experience and grow.

Author: MuMuMu

Source: MuMu