How to completely plan an event? Just follow these 4 steps

I believe that every event operator wants to plan an event that will increase the number of fans, super high conversion rate , and significantly improve user activity. However, reality is often cruel, and the results of most activities are terrible.

This makes me ask myself, is it really that difficult to plan a good event?

When running an event, you must grasp the key points and avoid desperately pursuing creativity, copying others, or making decisions based on your own ideas.

In fact, the most important thing in event operation is not how good the creativity is or imitating other people’s successful cases, but the “routine”.

Every event must follow the following steps: research, planning, execution and review.

1. Research

What is the purpose of the activity? Who is the user group that the activity is aimed at? What are the core demands of users?

The core of this is the formulation and breakdown of KPIs.

For example, if an e-commerce platform wants to hold a big promotion, it must determine the total value of goods participating in the event. The amount of goods combined with the sales rate can serve as an important basis for the event. If the inventory is insufficient, it is necessary to coordinate with various departments to make plans in advance. Then, we will break down the monthly performance and big promotion indicators, taking into account the monthly transaction KPI. The more big promotions you complete, the less pressure you will have on normal days.

To strike a balance between the two, we need to take an increment during historical promotions and sales as a reference value.

For example, NetEase Kaola has to do 10 billion in November, 5 billion in the three days of Double Eleven , and the remaining 5 billion needs to be completed in the remaining 27 days, so about 180 million needs to be completed every day. We need to consider the actual situation to see whether this is a reasonable value.

After the activity KPI is formulated, it needs to be broken down and implemented.

Break down the terminal UV indicators, and determine how many people are needed at each terminal, PC, APP, etc. during the event. Combined with the previous terminal conversion rates, we can reversely deduce our UV requirements for each time and monitor in real time. The user dimension is broken down into the proportion and number of new and old customers. The black card membership system was added in 2017. The accumulation and consumption of these highly active users and core users need to be tracked, and corresponding marketing plans need to be formulated.

Break down the categories. Each category will have a corresponding target share in transactions and activities throughout the year. Splitting the category goals, traffic , and customer order conversion will facilitate subsequent tracking of a single category and make corresponding adjustments.

The overall activity goals can be broken down into days and hours, and the completion of KPIs can be monitored every day and hour. Especially for big promotions like Double Eleven, the burst data on the day or a few hours before can basically estimate whether the activity can achieve the KPI, and subsequent strategy adjustments will be made based on this.

2. Planning

This part mainly gives specific instructions on how to carry out the activity, takes various details into consideration, and formulates possible emergency plans.

The ideas behind event planning generally include three points: look, think, and do.

1. Look at: event time nodes, industry conditions, what competitors are doing, own situation analysis, and user needs analysis.

For example, Double Eleven. November 11 is Singles’ Day, which is also a time node for changing seasons. Corresponding user demand will also be strong. Major online and offline platforms will hold corresponding activities at this time node, and users will easily be driven by this atmosphere.

2. Think: Each event will have a different focus. Combined with background analysis, you can extract the differentiation of each event from different dimensions, including price, goods, and services.

For example, on November 11, 2017, in order to highlight the concept of quality and authenticity of cross-border e-commerce , NetEase Kaola extracted the main nature of November 11 from the perspective of consumer consumption upgrading and proposed the theory of consumption evolution. With the nature and positioning of the activity, we can extract the theme and implementation, so everything needs to start from the nature and positioning.

In addition, innovation and new value extraction (activity catalysts) also play a vital role. For medium and large-scale promotional activities, not only transaction volume is required, but also the establishment of user confidence, user recognition, the improvement of spontaneous dissemination, influence among users, and users' expectations for the next event.

3. Do: Make specific event planning, including theme, sub-title, interest points and time.

Let users know the content of the event, what the event is, what are the differences, what benefits users can get , when, and what users can do.

In addition, in the process of event planning, we must also pay attention to the control of time points, which can be controlled from the following three aspects:

• From a global perspective : There will be different activities every quarter/month. Connect the activities in series to avoid overlapping price differences. At the same time, pay attention to rhythm control. For example, if two big promotions are too close to each other, they will be affected, such as Double Eleven and Black Friday.
• Looking at a single event : set the event duration based on the event KPI. It will be different for different events. For example, for ordinary promotional activities, 3 days of warm-up and 2-3 days of selling are enough. For Double Eleven, preparations will start at the end of October.
• Looking at the whole plan in detail : Communication activities will build momentum during the preheating period. During the preheating period, non-explosive products are often selected for advance purchase. In order to ensure smooth sales, some preparation is done on the atmosphere.

3. Execution

Throughout the entire activity, we controlled every link and successfully completed the activity goals.

After the activity starts, you need to monitor the data that needs to be monitored based on the KPI. Based on the monitoring data, it can be inferred whether the activity can achieve the KPI, and then the activity can be adjusted accordingly to make it run efficiently and ultimately achieve the KPI indicator.

In addition, operators need to conduct user operations according to the 80/20 rule, which is the key point to ensure the completion of the KPI of the entire activity.

4. Review

After the activity is completed, it is necessary to review it in a timely manner. Generally, the review includes four steps: review of goals, evaluation of effects, analysis of causes, and summary of experience.

• Goal Review : As the name suggests, goal review is to see whether the pre-defined goals have been achieved. However, in e-commerce activities, it is necessary to focus on reviewing the overall situation of the activity, such as KPI completion, UV, average order value, gross profit; activity status, such as the source of new users, repurchase of old users, preheating collection and shopping cart, coupon usage, etc.; category status, such as the completion degree, traffic, average order value and conversion of each category.
• Effect evaluation: The effect needs to be evaluated based on the monitored data, such as traffic, average order value, conversion, interactive sharing and communication, etc.
• Cause analysis: Based on the previous effect evaluation results, analyze the possible reasons for the result to see if there is a problem with the rules, traffic, copywriting , operations, etc. We need to find out in detail what happened at what point in time and who should be held responsible for it, so as to avoid making similar mistakes in the future.
• Experience summary: The last step is to summarize the experience. We should get used to summarizing the experience of each activity, presenting the gains and losses in detail, and proposing subsequent optimization directions.

The above four steps are the "routine" for event operations, and none of them can be missing. The specific steps in each step depend on the specific activities and purposes.

So, even if you don’t have a good idea, just follow the above four steps step by step and proceed steadily, then the activity you create can at least get 80 points.

The author of this article @小遥yao is compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!

Product promotion services: APP promotion services, advertising platform, Longyou Games