Analysis of course distribution methods: the entire process of event planning!

This article will review all the details of this community course activity and some of the reusable distribution methods, as well as some pitfall avoidance guides found during the activity.

Review format: based on the timeline of event planning .

Review content: the entire process of event planning + methodology refinement + guide to avoiding pitfalls.

Expected harvest:

1. Comprehensive understanding of the refined event planning process;
2. Familiar with distribution risk control in the WeChat ecosystem ;
3. Reuse the experience summary of each link in the practical activities;
4. 10 community management pitfall avoidance guidelines.

Scope of application: knowledge payment industry or distribution activities using courses as bait. The background of this project is that "Knowledge Planet" hopes to expose the "Knowledge Planet" brand by planning a popular community course and attract new users to create their own planets on Knowledge Planet.

The estimated sales volume of the course was 10,000 copies, and the final sales volume was over 12,000 copies, exceeding the target.

Next, we will review every aspect of the entire event for you in full accordance with the event planning timeline.

1. Develop an activity timetable

The promotion of this distribution activity mainly includes 6 modules:

1. Tutor follow-up: personal data/course outline/content polishing;
2. Event materials: posters, detail pages, etc.
3. Channel promotion : contact channels /determine plans/prepare tweets;
4. Distribution team: reward plan, team leader recruitment;
5. Technology development: Development of real-time distribution payment system;
6. Community management: community talk and volunteer recruitment.

We plan the module nodes into a complete time schedule according to the project's time schedule:

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Developing an activity time schedule is helpful to promote project progress and improve execution efficiency.

2. Activity Process

The distribution process of this event uses the course registration page we developed ourselves, adopts first-level distribution and 50% commission. At the same time, the commission earned by distributors can be deposited into WeChat wallets in real time, giving users timely profit feedback. This is similar to the Zhihu reading club and Himalaya course projects we have done before.

The distribution flow chart of the entire course is as follows:

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Main process①: User purchases course - follows the official account - enters the communication group - the robot automatically replies - the user shares the poster and earns registration fee.

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Main process ②: Users purchase courses - follow the official account - enter the official account - check the rankings - users share posters and earn registration fees.

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At the beginning, this course was not promoted through any media channels. Instead, it was promoted through the personal traffic of a small distribution team. Therefore, the page visits were not particularly large, and the overall number of user purchases also increased at a steady rate. But because of this, this course was not banned by WeChat, and the system did not have any fatal bugs, and it was able to successfully attract new registered users brought in by the distribution of old users of Knowledge Planet.

But even when the weather is calm, we still need to prepare for a rainy day. Based on our previous experience with distribution courses, we prepared these risk controls in advance:

1. Pay attention to two key pages: the course details page and the group QR code (to prevent being blocked and problems with the WeChat group );
2. Prepare an extra version of the official account reply script to replace the running distribution version script at any time;
3. The menu bar of the official account can be modified to "class channel" at any time;
4. Cancel the real-time account arrival template message notification at any time (to prevent being blocked);
5. You can hide the distribution button on the details page at any time, or change the "Earn ￥19.5 instantly" in the copy to "Share knowledge".

3. Confirm the course details

There are 5 steps in total.

Step 1: Determine the course topic

This was a very interesting brainstorming process. For example, the five of us spent six hours in the conference room, screening and eliminating more than 50 topics together with our friends from Knowledge Planet. We also consulted Captain Flying Fish, who gave us a lot of reference opinions and suggestions, before we finally determined three alternative course topics.

They are:

1. How to create a million-selling paid community ;
2. You may not be able to write 100,000+ posts, but you can create a community that earns over 10,000 yuan a month.
3. The first community open class of Knowledge Planet after Tencent’s investment .

The principle to follow is simple: be direct and easy to understand.

Step 2: Determine the course instructor

This event was initiated in the name of Knowledge Planet, so we screened the top 10 star owners of Knowledge Planet. Based on the direction of course selection, we conducted a public opinion survey to evaluate the top 10 active and high-quality star hosts, and then asked the friends from Knowledge Planet to help contact the tutors overnight. Finally, we selected several tutors, namely: Guan Jianming, Yiren, Qi Junjie, and Shao Yunjiao.

☆ Activity tips: Opinion polls are very helpful in selecting mentors and improving activity effectiveness.

Step 3: Determine the instructor's profile and course outline

Poster design requires the instructor’s personal information and course outline, so after confirming the instructor, you should obtain the instructor’s information and confirm the course outline as soon as possible. The output of course outlines is often delayed, especially after the preliminary outline is produced, it still takes time to polish and optimize the title . So try these tips to speed up outlining :

1. Prepare some course outlines with similar themes in advance for your instructor’s reference;
2. Confirm the course topic with the instructor within 2 days;
3. Remind your tutor to produce an outline at any time, because tutors are generally busy and need constant "fancy reminders".

☆ Activity tips:

1. In the early stage, the outline should be finalized as quickly as possible to make posters and detail pages, because if this link is delayed, it will affect the subsequent work and cannot be carried out. It’s ok even if there are some inconsistencies between the outline given by the instructor and the lecture content. Just make some minor modifications later.
2. Try to find more competing courses of the same kind and understand their selling points and key user pain points, which will be more conducive to the output of poster and detail page copywriting.

Step 4: Determine the teaching platform

The platform we chose for this activity is Xiaoetong . After determining the class platform, we quickly figured out some settings of the course platform (it takes about 3 hours). This will make the later configuration of class content more efficient, and will also allow you to become familiar with some of the more hidden functions in advance (such as free courses, setting instructors, etc.).

Step 5: Determine the estimated launch time

The key points to note at this stage are: the time for docking with technology must be seized and done in advance. For example: if the project is to be launched on the 5th, then confirm with the developer that it will be delivered before the 3rd. Everyone has a procrastination mentality. Once procrastination occurs, the project will not be able to go online normally.

4. Determine the poster prototype

In order to finalize the poster for this event, we went through these 6 steps and produced more than 30 prototypes:

1. Research/collect all similar courses on the market;
2. Refer to similar courses for selling points and focus on users' pain points;
3. Output themes and selling point versions of multiple courses;
4. Refer to the style of the fission poster library;
5. Output multiple poster prototypes;
6. Users vote, modify details, and finalize the draft.

Among them, we have summarized some ideas for your reference in "Competitive Course Research" and "Selling Point Extraction" :

• Go to some large micro-course platforms such as Lizhi Micro-course Search;
• Search keywords in official accounts/ friend circles , such as "community", to find relevant posters and promotional information;
• Search on Google /Baidu/ Sogou WeChat/ Jianshu /Zhihu.

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When determining the final prototype, we used the “dismantling method”. It is to break down each element of the poster, discuss with the team, and vote on the final version.

The elements of the split poster are as follows:

• Nickname & Introduction / Main Title / Subtitle
• Instructor/Course Outline
• Big name endorsement/ welfare module/ price module
• Poster Style

5. Determine the poster design

This fission poster design still follows the "6 elements of fission poster design" we summarized earlier:

These are the basic elements of poster design with good conversion rates that we summarized after designing many posters. You can use it as a self-checklist for posters. Through the previous topic discussions, we finally determined two poster themes , namely: "How to build a million-selling paid community" and "The first community open class of Knowledge Planet after Tencent's investment."

The designer provided 8 posters with red, white and blue background tones according to the theme:

We first conducted a color analysis on these 8 posters:

• White : eliminated, the visual effect in the circle of friends is not obvious;
• Blue : To be determined, it looks good and does not clash with the red that was all over the screen before, which might make people feel bored;
• Red : To be determined, eye-catching color. In the past, New World View and NetEase Xijing Class have used this “screen-sweeping red”.

Then, we asked seed users to blindly test the "theme and poster color" . After everyone voted, red received the most votes. Based on user feedback, we finally chose a red background poster with the theme "How to Build a Million-User Paid Community".

Here are some tips for finalizing the poster:

1. [The design of the poster should be determined as soon as possible] because the details page and banner images are designed based on its style;
2. 【Element Disassembly Method】Disassemble the copy and style of each position of the poster, and then determine the specific copy and style. This is the most efficient way to determine the final poster;
3. [The text on the poster must be checked] This time, the word "健" written by Professor Guan Jianming was not found to be wrong until one day after it was widely circulated, and it was changed in time;
4. [Users’ voice is big data ] Whether you agree with it or not, the title copy that users think is good is the effective copy;
5. [Real-Scenario Test] Post the poster to your Moments to check whether the visual effect of the poster is obvious, how your friends interact with the poster, whether you can see the title without clicking on the poster, whether the code scanning is smooth and bug-free, and other process details.

6. Detail Page Design

The design of this course details page is similar to other courses in the past, but we have added two parts to the conventional structure:

1. Real Cases (Look at the People Around You)
2. Real effect (XX people have established the community)

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The main function of the details page is to encourage users to place orders, and the theme of this event is "doing paid community courses", so the universal pain point of users is "wanting to make money." Therefore, we use "before and after comparison", "use more numbers to explain", and "real successful cases of people around you" to hit users' anxiety, and finally further stimulate their desire to trade through "recommendations from big names" and "number of people who have built planets".

(The details page corresponds to the disassembly diagram of the AI ​​DA model)

The purchase conversion rate of the final details page was 34.10%, while the purchase conversion rate of NetEase’s New Year’s courses at the same price was 25%, an increase of about 9%.

Here are some tips on detail page design:

1. [Avoid long paragraphs] Don’t write too much content at the beginning of the details page to elicit the pain points. Try to refine the pain points and state them in 3-5 sentences;
2. [Check the content of the details page] The details page has a lot of text, and punctuation and text are prone to errors;
3. [Tutor profiles should be brief and concise] The content structure of tutors' profiles should be unified, and the most essential content should be combined into a consistent length profile;
4. [Store PSD files] To prevent the designer from being unable to contact you temporarily, ask the designer for the PSD file of the design draft after the finalization to prevent temporary modifications and provide the technical configuration online in time.

7. Promotion process, time and nodes

Channel promotion process:

1. Determine the channel promotion plan and the rewards available to channel partners;
2. Screen previous channel resources and select effective channels with high conversion rates for cooperative delivery;
3. Contact the channel manager (one week in advance), prepare the tweet, and schedule the time for the channel tweet;
4. Record channel promotion data.

PS: When talking about channel cooperation, the document should be illustrated with pictures and texts as much as possible (it is best to attach a poster), which can increase the probability of cooperation.

Event launch time: The original estimated launch time of this event was June 12, but taking into account the impact of the holiday (June 16 is the Dragon Boat Festival , and users are "not interested in learning" before the holiday and "not interested in working" after the holiday) , it was finally decided to skip the holiday period and set the launch time to June 21.

Three key points of distribution promotion: The total number of orders brought by this distribution promotion is 12,255, among which there are three particularly important key points:

The first promotion node: At 8 pm on June 21, 16 distribution teams (350 people in total) began the initial promotion. The first wave of screen swiping appeared in the circle of friends, with a speed of one full group every 6 minutes.

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The second promotion node: Starting at 8:30 pm on June 21, planet celebrities Spenser/Wu Ruga/Guan Jianming and others began to support. Combined with the long-tail traffic brought by the distribution team, a total of 5,751 orders were sold in two days.

The third promotion node: The channel official account started promotion at 8 pm on June 25, with a purchase conversion rate of 34.10% and a distribution share of 94.86%, indicating that the vast majority of users purchased through distribution, and fission was successful.

8. Community & Live Broadcast Room

(1) 6 community operation pitfall avoidance guides

A total of 159 groups were established for this event, and 8 volunteers were recruited. The course fission used was explosive fission + wetool. We also encountered many pitfalls in community operation during this event. Here are 6 pitfalls to avoid:

① Unable to join the group: The company network is disconnected and the robot cannot reply and switch the WeChat group live code in time.

Solution:

1. Note on the group landing page : If you cannot join the group, please add WeChat XXX. Guide users to add groups manually;
2. Scan the code to view at any time;
3. Keep the communication group at the top of your phone and pay attention to whether the latest group has too many people so that you can discover problems in a timely manner.

② There was a problem with delayed class notification: The group messaging function of the explosive robot was a bit unstable. If there were too many groups to send a message, it would fail to send the message. As a result, paying students could not be notified in time on the first day of class, and we received a lot of negative feedback.

Solution:

• Plan what to send every day and schedule it accordingly;
• At 12 noon, the group message will announce the evening class;
• Group announcement at 5pm to preview evening classes;
• At 7:30, the group announced that the class was about to start;
• At 7:30, the template message of the official account will push the class notification;
• Switch Wetool group announcement sending.

③ There are many problems with advertising parties: The blacklist function can prevent one person from joining multiple groups, but the function is unstable. This results in advertising parties being able to refresh and enter multiple group chats multiple times, and they can only be kicked out manually one by one, which is inefficient.

Solution:

1. Communicate bugs with officials promptly and cooperate in solving them;
2. Consider using other live coding tools + Wetool together;
3. Turn on group chat verification in time.

④ The group name was changed and users could not be notified: The names of several groups were modified, resulting in the failure of batch push, and users did not receive class notifications in a timely manner.

Solution:

1. The community will pin the error to the top of the page, pay attention to the wrong name, and change it in time;
2. Explosion Fission has a function to automatically modify group nicknames. When using the tool, you should find out whether this function exists.

⑤ Problems arise due to insufficient establishment of the community atmosphere in the early stage: after students join the group, they are more often guided to receive benefits, distribute registration fees and class notifications, without conducting community ice-breaking activities and related topic discussions, resulting in the failure to activate community users in the early stage and difficulty in reaching subsequent notifications.

Solution:

1. Add "self-introduction + topic discussion" to community content push to activate users;
2. Use the Knowledge Planet mini program (welfare easter eggs + linking new friends) to attract traffic + promote activation, and at the same time direct traffic to the Knowledge Planet.

⑥ Problems with the collection of community information packages: The information documents are uploaded to Baidu Netdisk in the form of compressed packages. When users download the benefits, they mostly use mobile phones. After downloading, they cannot be decompressed and need to activate Baidu membership. Some students think that we are advertising for Baidu Netdisk and collecting membership fees, which generates some unnecessary negative communication costs.

Solution: Use tools in the WeChat ecosystem to guide users to receive content, such as the Knowledge Planet applet and Tencent Docs, so that users can view the content on their mobile phones.

(2) Personal summary of 4 live courses

① Problems with the content setting and traffic diversion in the live broadcast room in advance: The live broadcast room was not configured with the corresponding content, public account QR code, etc. in advance, and it was impossible to divert traffic before class.

Solution:

1. Prepare the content + class start time + FAQ for each instructor to prevent users from coming here without any reminders;
2. You can attach a public account QR code or personal account to provide a channel for answering questions + diverting traffic.

② Problems with the content in the discussion area were handled promptly: In the early stage, some users left messages in the discussion area, and there were some negative feedback.

Solution:

1. The discussion area of ​​the course platform is set to mute mode in the early stage, leaving personal or public accounts to guide the addition of solutions;
2. Hide negative content in a timely manner and contact users to resolve the issue.

③ There was a problem with the page being stuck when entering the live broadcast room: There were quite a lot of people attending the live broadcast on the first day, and some students reported that the audio was stuck or that the page could not be loaded when entering the live broadcast room.

Solution:

1. Before the class starts, we will warn you that there may be some lag, so we suggest you switch to a good network, wifi or 4G, to listen to the class;
2. Communicate with the course platform in advance to debug stability;
3. During the course, guide everyone to wait patiently for the instructor's voice and don't be anxious.

④ The problem of small number of students attending the class: the initial notification through social networks and official accounts was not timely enough.

Solution:

1. The community reaches users with group messages and group announcements at a certain time rhythm (noon, 2 hours before class, 15 minutes before class);
2. Display the class start time in each message content and remind users;
3. When arranging courses, put the courses with good reputation at the front, so as to attract more people to stay.

Okay, I hope this helps you all.

Source: Operational In-depth Selection (ID: YYjingxuan365)