How to write an event plan? 4 basic elements to prioritize

The event background, purpose, theme, and time are the four basic elements that must be considered first in a high-quality event plan :

1. Event Background
2. Activity Theme
3. Purpose
4. Event Time

In order to make you take my point seriously, let me share a tragic case here.

In November 2014, right after I joined Tieba, I took over an event called "Who is the Most Extravagant in Tieba?". It was a project arranged by the leadership from top to bottom. As I was new to the job, I didn't have a very good understanding of the background and purpose of the entire event. I only knew that the general goal was to increase the "total T-bean consumption" (Tieba's virtual currency) of Tieba.

The result is that in the specific activity planning, we neglect to formulate stimulus strategies for converting new users into paying users and incentive strategies for increasing the average order value of paying users . Ultimately, the entire event planning was too thin, and the effect of improving the core data indicator "total T-bean consumption" was not particularly ideal.

Therefore, my suggestion is that no matter what type of event you are planning, it is best to prioritize the four elements of background, goal, theme, and time . Only in this way will you be able to plan the details of the event more systematically and comprehensively.

1. What is the background of the event?

Good event planners usually like to write a sentence like this at the beginning as the background of the event:

“May 31 and June 1 this year coincide with the 28th World No Tobacco Day and the implementation of Beijing’s strictest smoking ban. Before and after this, topics related to smoking control and smoking cessation will surely attract widespread attention from society and public opinion.

In order to better promote and disseminate the brand proposition of Tieba "Go to Tieba to find an organization", we plan to leverage the opportunity to spread the organization of smoking cessation groups within Tieba - "Quit Smoking Bar", so that more people can know and understand the Quit Smoking Bar, and let more target audiences enter the Quit Smoking Bar. At the same time, the overall brand image of Tieba can be enhanced through the packaging of public welfare and mutual aid type Tieba. ”

You may feel that this opening is too official and clichéd, but don’t forget that the core value of an event plan is to use it to convince yourself, your leaders, and your colleagues to support your work.

However, whether they will support your work often depends on the background description in the event plan (about 150 words). We need to tell leaders and relevant colleagues why we should do this event and what value this event has for the product in the remaining time.

The background of an event is to tell everyone "why we should hold an event" . As the most basic decision-making starting point for event planning, it can be a conclusion drawn from market observations and predictions, or it can be a trend utilization of product data and insights into target population preferences. Specifically, event planners can find out "why we should hold an event" from the following four perspectives.

1. Write the event background based on the product

There are many product data that can be affected by activities, including download volume, daily active users, monthly active users, and retention rate . If you are operating an e-commerce product, you can also have sales volume, order volume, conversion rate, average order value, and repurchase rate. If you are operating a community product, you can have post volume, interaction volume, likes, and reposts.

When you find that the above product data has dropped significantly or want to focus on improving a certain data indicator of the product, you will usually consider planning an event (the background of the event comes from this).

What needs to be noted here is that the various data of the product are closely linked. While determining the key data that the event planner wants to improve, you also need to think about how to optimize the related data through the event . For example, the improvement of transaction data is definitely inseparable from the improvement of traffic , average order value, repurchase rate and conversion rate.

Transaction amount = traffic * conversion rate * average order value * repurchase rate

Let’s take an example of a content campaign background that uses product data as a starting point.

"Since May, the new user retention rate of the product has dropped by nearly 5%. The operations department hopes to adopt an activity strategy to provide new users and low-frequency users with an efficient scenario for understanding and exploring the product, thereby improving the retention of new users and promoting the activity of low-frequency users."

2. Write activity background based on hot topics

If your public account pictures and texts usually have only 1,000 readers, if you include hot Internet keywords , you can easily reach more than 2,000 readers, and this does not include the reading volume of secondary reposts and disseminations. This is the value of leveraging hot topics in public account operations .

Similarly, taking advantage of hot topics to plan events also has a very significant data improvement effect. For example, you can look at these two sentences of event copy .

"Send you a 20 yuan coupon"

"I want to buy a gift for him/her on Valentine's Day , so I'll give you a 20 yuan coupon"

Although both are giving out coupons, the latter will definitely have a higher coupon collection rate. The reason is that hot spots can bring the event closer to users, making users feel that this matter is related to themselves. The event planning background case mentioned at the beginning of this chapter is to use the Internet hot spot environment to prove why you want to plan "Quit Smoking" related activities.

In addition, hot spots can be further divided into two categories. One is predictable, such as the Spring Festival, Valentine's Day, Double Eleven , and Mid-Autumn Festival; the other is unpredictable, such as the Chinese men's football team entering the World Cup and Xi Mengyao falling at the Victoria's Secret show. The former is what event planners need to focus on and utilize, while the latter depends on the overall flexibility of the company. Frankly speaking, unpredictable hotspots are not suitable for planners to consider.

3. Write an activity background based on competing products

Through in-depth observation and analysis of competitor activities, you can qualitatively determine the effective types of activities. If you can quantitatively provide performance data of competitor activities, I believe the background description you write based on competitor activities will be more convincing.

"Everyone wants to be the first to try something new, but not everyone has the courage to be the first." Making activity decisions based on analysis of competing products is more suitable for companies with market tracking strategies. It also conforms to the decision-making habits of most leaders: "Are there similar successful cases in the market?"

For example, when Baidu Maps ’ operations staff was planning year-end events, they wrote the event background like this:

Whenever the New Year approaches, competitors always take stock of the past year and post year-end bonuses, likes, bills, etc. on their social circles . As a map product with hundreds of millions of users, facing wave after wave of inventory craze, we hope to do a different year-end inventory. Combined with Baidu Maps' precise distance test, we invited netizens to test their commuting distance over the past year and share their "hard work index" to strengthen the emotional connection between users and products. (We have done both hot spots and competitive product research)

4. Write the event background based on the crowd

Sometimes we organize activities just to meet the needs of users, or to improve the behavioral data of a certain group of people on the product.

The former is when a large number of users make very strong petitions or when a certain trend appears in the data. We will regard the activity as a verification of the needs of this group of people. The latter refers to the activity of this group of people on the product, which has very large commercial value and core data driving effect on the product, so we are willing to plan activities for them separately.

Here is an example of an activity background based on the target population. College students can contribute millions of entries to Baidu Encyclopedia every year. If you are an event planner for Baidu Encyclopedia, the first sentence of your event plan should be:

"Encyclopedia university users have always been the key force in the production of Encyclopedia content. Last year, they contributed ** million entries to the Encyclopedia, of which ** million were high-quality entries. Planning a PK competition for entry editing for university users is believed to be very effective in increasing the number of new entries added each month."

5. Write the event background based on leadership needs

“ The president pointed out at the annual meeting that the core direction of our work this year is to increase the daily activity of our products”, “ The president mentioned in the internal email to all employees in the third quarter that all our operations will be assessed based on revenue data”…

It is also a good idea to write the opinions of senior management as the starting point of the event background, so that your event plan will be more likely to be approved. Because the leader’s views are at least a prediction of trends and the focus of resource investment. (Your leader will also be better at making project reports)

For example, this activity, which is based on the boss's point of view, is irrefutable.

"In order to actively respond to Mr. Zhan's suggestion to explore new models of community marketing monetization, we will organize an e-commerce content marketing summit to build a bridge for cooperation with e-commerce customers and ultimately create no less than 10 million yuan in revenue for the product.

2. Sound activity objectives

Careful students should have noticed that we have actually mentioned the value of the activity in the background part of the activity, but in the background part we only introduced the first-level activity objectives and indicators.

A more sound activity purpose should be composed of multi-dimensional and quantifiable activity indicators. These indicators can clearly let the leader know what kind of activity you plan to carry out and whether you have found the key factors that affect the success or failure of the activity.

At present, the more common activity purposes include attracting new customers , promoting activation, retaining customers, paying customers, and branding. The following data indicators can be achieved by extending each data item into indicators:

1. Under the operational purpose of "attracting new users", it can include adding new cookies, new registrations, and new downloads.
2. Under the operational purpose of "payment", it may include the number of paying users, the number of new paying users, the total sales, the total number of paid orders, and the average customer spending per person.
3. Under the operational purpose of "promoting activity", it can include the product's daily activity (peak) and monthly activity (peak)
4. Under the operational purpose of "brand", it can include Baidu Index, WeChat Index , Weibo Index, topic reading volume, and media dissemination volume.

At this point, there is a question that most students will be curious about, how to set a reasonable indicator value. Here are 2 indicator setting methods for your reference:

• What are your competitive product indicators? In fact, when you are doing an event for the first time, you can refer to the data of your competitors. If you only need the data to be 10%-20% higher than that of your competitors, it will be pretty good. Many trusts are very easy to fall into traps and self-denial. A very big reason is that people do not understand the market and set indicators too optimistically.
• What are your colleagues' metrics? For the same product and the same resource allocation, you should understand the data indicators produced by your colleagues. If their indicators are 10%-20% higher than his, it can be used as an initial goal.

Of course, for experienced event planners, they can actually make judgments based on past event data, and they are generally quite accurate. For example, the number of attendees set for the operator's year-end party in 2017 is to take the number of attendees of the party in 2016 as the base, multiply it by the number of users in 2017 that is higher than 2016, and finally get 700+ people.

Finally, regarding the purpose of the activity, we share a case for your reference:

60,000 new users

a. Channel introduction 58,000 people

b. User invites 2000 people

Number of investors : 600

a. New investment users 300

b. Old investment users 300

Investment amount: 5.6 million

a. Newbie bidding activity: 2 million

b. 0 Yuan Purchase Activity 1 million

c. Zero-dollar treasure hunt activity 1.6 million

d. Friend Invitational Tournament 1 million

3. Attractive activity themes

The theme of an event is a summary of the entire event. Using one sentence to let users know what the event is about is only the first and most basic effect of the theme. For example, the following "Keep having fun throughout the month and get great gifts" is a very common event theme.

A deeper activity theme should be able to attract users to participate in the activity. For example, the following theme "The Universal Taobao - Gold Medal Nanny" is what we need most. It has very strong crowd attributes and at the same time has insight into the real needs of target users .

Event planning is a complicated version of article writing. “People who can write articles will not be bad at organizing events.” This is the view I have always held after 4 years of organizing events. I like to think of activity planning as writing an article. An effective activity is like a soft article that attracts users to forward it. This is how we can compare activities to articles:

Therefore, when you set out to determine the theme for your event planning, my suggestion is that you need to think about it in the same way as you would think about a sharp article theme, and try to determine it by combining information from the following four dimensions.

Dimension 1: Population/Industry

Who is the target audience of your product? Or who is the target user of this event? The population information is segmented based on user age, gender, occupation, city, income, family situation, interests and hobbies, education level and other dimensions.

Dimension 2: Service/selling point

Each product service should have a corresponding target user usage story - what the user wants, why he wants it, what problems he encounters during the process, and what help our service provides him.

The selling point is the most differentiated or eye-catching one among your many services. It can be the priority element of your event theme.

Dimension 3: Hot Topics/Celebrities

Riding on hot topics and celebrities is the simplest and most brutal way to increase attention to an event. When planning an event, please be sure to think about which hot topics are happening simultaneously in the current time period that you can ride on, or which celebrities can be quoted in the topic.

Dimension 4: Pain Points/Resonance

All the great ideas and copywriting are not groundless. Only by deeply understanding the pain points of users can we really come up with solutions to their problems. Only topics that resonate with users can make users take actions (read, buy, spread, collect)

When thinking about the theme of an event, if you can approach it from any of the above four dimensions, you will basically pass. However, in order for everyone to get high scores, you can combine these four dimensions more systematically to conduct theme mining when determining the theme of the activity. It is recommended to try the 64-grid mining method.

Taking planning a Valentine’s Day event as an example, I can come up with a theme that meets the pain points of a specific group of people through the following steps:

1. In the center, write the direction of the event: "Operator's Valentine's Day Event"
2. On the positive axis of the X-axis, write target users, single operators, couple operators, and operating executives...
3. On the positive axis of the Y axis, write down service selling points, operation courses, operation peripherals, operation community , offline activities , free movie viewing...
4. Write down the hot celebrities in the industry on the negative X-axis, such as Robin Li , Alibaba , Mr. Xu, Mi Meng ...
5. Write down the user resonance and pain points on the negative Y axis, such as how to follow the hot spots, how to get rid of singleness, how to celebrate the holidays...
6. Then, in the table where the X-axis and Y-axis intersect, combine the keywords filled in the first five steps, start from any two (or more) keywords, boldly associate the picture and fill in the core keywords of the picture.

The whole filling process may be painful, but please keep filling it out, because your popular theme will appear in it. For example, after I spent about 20 minutes filling out all the forms, I got a useful article like "The Biggest Trick to Follow Valentine's Day Hot Topics".

If you think about the theme strictly according to the 64-grid method, you will find that once the theme is defined, the promotional copy of the event will also be solved, especially when you know how to take into account the reference standards for writing copy that is interesting, scene-based, and suspenseful.

For example, on Valentine's Day, if you happen to be running an e-commerce business for women, your theme could be "If you're staying out on Valentine's Day, remember to bring these 24 things with you."

4. Reasonable activity time period

We do not recommend a specific time here, we only explain the length of time users can participate in the event. Generally speaking , the longer an event lasts, the better, of course, provided that you have enough materials to support it. Normally, the activity period of e-commerce products is about 10-15 days, and longer periods like Double 11 will be up to 30 days. During this period, 1-2 new activity pages will be launched every day, and eventually there will be 7-8 activity pages on a certain day to improve different data indicators in a targeted manner.

Activities for improving the retention rate of tool products may be posted on the product page for a quarter. Community products’ activity cycle should be about 1-3 days if it is just a topic, and about 15 days if it is a content integration and dissemination activity, with different content topics promoted every day.

For long-term activities, another suggestion is to change the pictures on the promotional resources every 3 days, using different activity selling points to reach groups with different needs.

at last

Let's summarize the four most critical and basic elements of an event plan:

1. Don’t just do an event for the sake of doing it. You must find the underlying decision-making starting point, or background, for the event.
2. Find inspiration for writing the event background from product data, online hot spots, competitor activities, and target audiences.
3. Think about the theme of the event like writing an article title , and prioritize thinking about the theme of the event from the perspective of the target audience.
4. The longer the activity period, the better, but it is necessary to ensure that new activities are launched every 1-3 days.

This article was compiled and published by the author @陈维贤(Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!

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