Online Promotion: How to plan a successful event?

How is a complete event planned and implemented?

When it comes to events, there are too many operators in the industry who do events just for the sake of doing them, without understanding the essence of the events. So today I want to share with you in detail how to plan and implement a complete event.

1. Why do we need to organize activities?

When I first started operations, the company’s products did not have many users. At that time, I idealistically believed that I could simply rely on an event to promote order growth and trigger user growth .

But the reality is: there were almost no problems with the creativity, planning and design of the event, and we even invested some advertising and marketing expenses to promote the event.

However, the entire execution process was full of loopholes.

Now let’s take an example: in a fission propagation activity, when user A enters the APP and opens the activity page, he or she can get a chance to stay in a homestay at a discount price of 9 yuan.

Participation threshold: User A must invite 3 friends to help him/her to be eligible for the event.

Taken independently, there was nothing wrong with the activity itself, but fatal flaws occurred during the execution of the activity.

First of all, the activity was participated in within the App and was targeted at App users. However, some problems arose during the execution:

1. When user B enters his mobile phone number to help A, when user B wants to participate, the activity has been interrupted. User B will jump to the App download page, and the entire download page is relatively low-level. The key is that it cannot be downloaded, which causes the user's participation threshold to rise by several orders of magnitude.

2. The user base itself determines the difficulty of activity fission. After doing several fission propagation activities, I increasingly feel that it is too difficult to launch an activity with just a small number of users.

There is a formula in Growth Hacker :

Custs represents users, K is the viral coefficient, t is time, ct is the cycle time, Custs(0) and Custs(t) refer to the initial number of users and the number of users at time t respectively. The viral coefficient K refers to the average number of other users that a user can bring. We can see that only when K is greater than 1 can a viral spread effect be formed and an activity can be spread.

Of course, the larger the coefficient K of an activity is, the better. This depends on the creativity of the activity itself and whether it provides users with sufficient interest drive or psychological satisfaction.

However, the basic users determine the scale of the entire activity and the number of people that the activity can ultimately leverage. You should know that the fission growth from 10,000 users to 100,000 users and the fission growth from 100 users to 1,000 users, although both are 9 times growth, the scale is completely different. This is the amplification of operational potential by the user base.

When you can influence 100 people, you are still very small;

When you can influence 1 million people, you can change a lot of things.

So, in the end our event failed, and we even ended up not being able to pay on the purchase page.

But a month later, competitors used the same tactics and achieved great success because they already had millions of users.

Due to the failure of this event, I later began to study how to control the role of products in different stages of an event, and began to consider whether it was necessary to do promotions and events.

After many failures and successes , I have summarized the following points and would like to share them with you for reference.

1. Clarify the purpose of the activity

2. Creative activity planning

3. Activity demand research

4. Activity planning

5. Activity execution and resource allocation

6. Activity operation optimization

7. Review of the entire activity process

1. Clarify the purpose of the activity

Why do you want to do activities?

When planning an event, think about why you need to do such an event? What is the purpose, how much resources should be invested, and what results can be achieved?

Many failed activities actually stem from the fact that the purpose was not clearly defined at the beginning. Is this event aimed at adding new users, promoting activation, or rewarding old users to increase loyalty, or is it a brand promotion activity to increase brand awareness?

Many students often want to achieve too many goals when doing activities, which makes the entire activity process extremely complicated. However, users never have that much patience to understand a complex activity, and the probability of activity failure will also be very high.

Below, I will use a practical case to illustrate these points:

Recently, our team planned an online sharing event for merchants. The ultimate goal is to increase the product’s popularity in the merchant community and attract more merchants to join our platform.

Therefore, all subsequent aspects of the event were planned and executed around this purpose. In the end, the event added more than 3,000 fans to the mini program and brought in nearly 100 new merchants. The number of merchants contacted by the event reached several thousand, at least doubling the brand's popularity in the merchant community.

Although it cannot be said to be a complete success, at least it is not a failed event.

So, how should we determine the purpose of the activity?

For any enterprise, the purpose of the activity is to be profitable, that is, to increase revenue tangibly or intangibly. The forms of activities vary greatly depending on the company and product. The key point is to address the current major pain points of the product, is it user growth, merchant growth or increased revenue?

Only activities that hit the key points of the product at this stage can be considered effective. For start-up companies, growth is often the most critical pain point.

2. Creative planning of activities

Once the purpose of an event is clear, the next step is to carry out creative planning for the event.

Take the online activities of merchants in the mini program "Micro Store" that I am responsible for this time as an example. Its underlying logic is:

By sharing the discounts of excellent merchants on the platform, we stimulate other merchants to participate in and share the discount activities, and expose them to more merchants who are interested in joining and those users who are not yet aware of our discount platform.

If merchants and users want to participate in our event, they can directly search for "Micro Store" in the WeChat mini program to participate directly, without having to scan codes and share and other complicated steps. And the main participants can receive generous prizes and participate in the lucky draw through the micro store - Huiquanshe. Everyone who sees it can enjoy it.

So the idea we finally decided on was this:

Only after completing the creative ideas for the event can we start the next step - activity needs research.

3. Activity Demand Survey

Why do we need to conduct demand research?

We have analyzed before that the main pain points faced by merchants are click-through rate and store conversion rate. If the platform comes up with an excellent case to share, merchants may be very interested in signing up for this event.

But this is just our assumption. In fact, after we came up with the activity idea, we didn’t know how many merchants would pay for it. So in order to reduce the probability of failure, we selected a number of merchants to ask them whether they were interested in the activity and what their interests were.

If the needs of the merchants indicate that they are quite interested in the event, then there is no problem with the creative stage and the next step is to make detailed plans for the event.

The demand research phase can help us effectively reduce the probability of activity failure.

If an activity is launched without research and testing, it is very likely that users will not be interested and only a few people will participate.

The result is: the operation spent a lot of energy to carefully plan, and the technical staff worked all night to implement the activity, but in the end it did not achieve the expected results, wasting both time and financial and material resources.

4. Activity plan

After the investigation, it is necessary to plan the specific implementation plan of the activity.

The execution plan contains the following elements:

The launch time and method of the event, the division of labor and scheduling of the event (page design, program development, etc.), the process of the event, the promotion and marketing of the event, the budget and other details.

For small events, a very detailed planning scheme is not necessary. But for large-scale events, planning and implementation plans are necessary.

To put it bluntly, an implementation plan can be carried out step by step. Only some details need to be adjusted, so the implementation plan needs to be as detailed as possible.

For example, our sharing activity this time involves the following aspects:

1. Demand research - select some merchants in the micro-stores for 1v1 communication to understand their pain points and attitudes towards the activities (provide improvement suggestions)

2. Confirmation of the activity theme and reward products - When we have made it clear that we are going to do such an activity, we must determine the specific plan and specific reward model of the activity in advance.

During this process, we informed users and merchants in advance, released platform announcements in advance, determined the theme of the micro-store activities, and then jointly determined some details of the platform rewards and participation in the activities.

Of course, in order to stimulate users' active participation, we will set up some benefit points for them as a condition for mutual benefit and win-win.

3. Backstage operation and settings - After considering the cost and effect, we chose the form of online platform (micro store-coupon club) rewards.

Although it does not have the strong interactivity and real feelings of offline sharing, online sharing has the following advantages:

(1) There is no restriction on the venue of the event - you can participate in the event online anytime and anywhere and receive gifts

(2) Diversified activities - these activities can be in the form of lucky draws, coupons, free meals from the big wheel, etc.

(3) Low activity cost - no need for venue and material expenses

(4) More suitable for dissemination - Our goal for this event is to reach as many merchants and users as possible, so online activities are more suitable for this reward promotion activity.

After discussion, we finally chose "Mini Program-Micro Store" as the main event planning platform for our online platform.

After selecting the micro-store platform, we must set up the relevant pages according to the attributes of the platform.

4. Event promotional copy and posters - essential elements of online activities, promotional copy and posters. I will write about the copy and posters in the next article.

5. Event launch time and execution process scheduling - After completing the basic configuration, the corresponding event execution schedule should be made, such as the event process, how to plan the event, what the planning copy is, how many KOL resources to mobilize for the launch, the guidance settings after the user enters the store, etc. Although you don’t want to get into the black hole of details, every detail of the entire event process is crucial.

6. Relevant budget and result estimation of the activity - estimation of the budget, rewards and final effect of the activity.

7. Contingency plan for event failure - Every operator may face this situation, what to do if the event fails?

Therefore, in response to this situation, operations must have corresponding plans to try to avoid losses caused by failure.

5. Activity Operation Optimization

After the campaign is launched, the operation should not just wait for completion, but should find ways to optimize and adjust based on the data.

For example, when we first started the event, we launched it in our two business communities. Within 2 hours of the start of the event, the number of participants reached 500+, but the data subsequently began to show a downward trend.

This shows that the level of dissemination of the event is not high enough. As an operator, you should either expand the viral transmission coefficient mentioned earlier to make the event attractive enough.

Either the initial user base can be expanded and the number of participants in the entire event can be increased by reaching more merchants.

We have optimized both aspects:

The first is the initial user base: when we launch our own community, we create the phenomenon of social communication through merchant incentives and guidance. When merchants see that everyone is sharing and forwarding their own micro-store activities, and can get subsidies from the platform micro-store and rewards from the coupon agency, there is a high probability that they will follow suit. The theory comes from "The Crowd"

When an individual is an isolated individual, he has his own distinct personal characteristics. But when this person integrates into a group, all his personality will be submerged by the group, and his thoughts will immediately be replaced by the group's thoughts. When a group exists, it has characteristics such as emotionality, lack of objection, and low IQ.

The second is the activity diffusion coefficient: we increase the temptation of the activity.

We announced in the WeChat store that as long as users like and collect the store, they can get cash red envelope rewards, and the merchants with the most likes and collections can get support from the platform reward fund.

As soon as this reward was issued, the merchants who had already completed the task began to frantically look for people to forward and share it, through Moments, social groups, and 1V1 private messages, and the backend user growth ushered in a new round of explosion.

At the same time, in order to mobilize the enthusiasm of more people, we set up a popular ranking pop-up window in our micro-store, constantly creating anxiety for the ranking of merchants.

Once they find that their ranking has dropped, they will immediately organize a new round of screen swiping. Finally, the top three merchants can receive cash subsidies from the platform.

The exposure level of the entire event was more than three times that of the beginning.

The end result was that the number of merchants naturally joining the platform increased nearly fivefold every day, and the platform’s popularity also increased significantly. Even the account managers said that BD is becoming easier and easier, and currently entry into mini-program micro-stores is fully free.

6. Review of the entire activity process

After the event is over, the operation is not over. Regardless of whether it is a successful or failed event, a full process review is ultimately required.

The first is to discover and review the problems in the activity process to avoid making the same mistakes next time you do the same type of activity.

The second is to review and summarize the better points in the activity to see if they can be further optimized next time to make the activity more effective.

Third, for operating yourself, execution is not about improving your own abilities, but about reviewing the past. During the review process, we will think deeply about the purpose, reasons and results of each link, which will help us further improve our abilities.

Finally, I would like to give you some tips on how to improve your operational capabilities.

In addition to executing activities yourself, you should also participate in other people's activities, especially cases that are popular, to see what other people's ideas are and how they operate in the process. This can help you think and summarize quickly so that you can reuse them in your own products.

Source: Xiaoqiang Workplace Talk