How to operate an event? Share 4 tips!

To operate product activities well, we must not only understand the purpose, type and elements of activity operations, but also understand the implementation specifications of the activities, such as the content setting and copywriting design of the activities, so that the activity operation plan can be truly implemented and promote the subsequent development of the product. In the previous article, the author discussed some relevant points of event operation. This article continues to discuss the implementation details of event operation. Let’s take a look.

In the previous article, the author developed the activity step by step from proposing reasons for the activity, conceiving activity elements, to determining activity principles. Here, we need to further explore the implementation details such as activity content, activity copywriting, and activity promotion, and continuously build a complete methodology for activity operations.

1. Activity content: The theme should be clear and the rules should be interesting

Many friends who are new to the planning industry will encounter this problem: it is difficult for event planning plans to achieve the expected results, or they don’t know where to start after receiving copywriting requirements. Even some event operators who have been engaged in planning work for many years, have read many masters' works, and listened to many big names' sharing, sometimes have an empty mind when they pick up a pen and don't know where to start.

As an event operator, the first thing you need to understand is: what are the needs of event planning.

For users, what they want to know is what the solution is related to and what information they can get from it. For the company, it is necessary to clarify in advance whether the required solution is ideological or execution-oriented.

So, what does standard event planning include? Let’s take a look at the copy for Xiaomi Home’s anniversary event. See the picture below for the promotional advertisement for Xiaomi Home’s anniversary event.

It’s my birthday on March 18th, give me the product you want!

For rice noodles:

As spring waters begin to flow and forests grow thicker, Xiaomi Home Beijing Wucaicheng Store celebrates its first birthday. I miss every customer who came into our store over the past year, I miss every one of you who shared your joyful moments with us, I miss every ordinary yet profound Mi noodle story, and I miss every touching moment related to Xiaomi. Xiaomi Home Beijing Wucaicheng store celebrates its first anniversary, and expresses gratitude and gratitude for every morning and evening with you.

——Xiaomi Home Beijing Wucaicheng Store

The above is the planning copy for the first anniversary store celebration event of Xiaomi Home Beijing Wucaicheng Store. We can easily find that the purpose of the event is to thank users for their support of Xiaomi Home and to conduct store anniversary promotions. Next, we will analyze the main contents of standard event planning by dissecting this activity.

1. Theme of the activity

The event must have a clear theme. Once the theme of the event is clear, there will be a focus when promoting the event, and users will be able to form a preliminary impression of the event at the first opportunity.

The theme of Xiaomi Home’s anniversary event is “March 18th is my birthday, give me the product you want”, which is very clear. When users see this theme, they will first think of store anniversary promotions, discounted products, many lucky draws, etc. Users will consciously pay attention to the relevant content of the activities, thus successfully attracting the attention of users.

For example, during the May 1 period in 2020, Maoyan launched the "May 1 Performance Promotion" event. Its distinctive event theme "Fill your May Day holiday with performances" fits well with the external environment, helping users relieve anxiety about long holiday plans. Especially during the peak travel season, it provides an option to avoid peak traffic and meets the cultural and entertainment needs of some users.

Standard event planning must have a clear theme, which is the premise, the first standard, and a necessary element.

2. Time of the activity

In addition to having a clear theme, standard event planning also needs to determine the time of the event, including the time the event starts, the time the event ends, the time the rewards are distributed, and the time the rewards are collected.

If there is no confirmed time, users will not know when the event will start or end. Even if users want to participate in the event, they cannot find the entrance to the event. Such an event is equivalent to burning money.

There are certain requirements for the timing of activities. Many traditional activities are generally held on store anniversaries and major festivals. For example, the Xiaomi Home Wucaicheng store in Beijing took advantage of Xiaomi’s anniversary day on March 18, and the specific time of its event was from March 18 to March 31, 2017. When users see the event copy, they can participate in the event and receive rewards on time in a targeted manner.

Here is a reminder that the time must be consistent with the theme. Sometimes, the effects of activities at different time points vary greatly. For example, on June 18, users will think of "JD.com 618", and on November 11, users will think of Taobao's "Double Eleven" event.

3. Description of activity rules

Standard event planning also requires a description of the rules. The description of activity rules, which is what we often call setting activity rules, is part of activity planning and the key to activity planning.

The rule description should be simple and interesting so that users can understand it at a glance. The description of the event rules for Xiaomi Home Beijing Wucaicheng store’s anniversary celebration is simple and interesting.

1. Users receive a "door card" to experience products in four areas (smart kitchen, future living room, travel space, and office location);
2. The user collects stamps from 4 regions (a MiTu stamp);
3. After collecting all the stamps, users can go to the B1 Xiaomi Home store to participate in the lucky draw. The rule description is self-explanatory.

Once you have mastered the above three points, you are not far from becoming an event planner who can plan a standard event.

2. Event copywriting: The text should be thoughtful and the framework should be clear

Event copywriting is a very important part of product operation activity planning. Planning and designing excellent copywriting is necessary execution work. Good copywriting can bring many benefits to product activities, such as warming up the product and deepening the user's impression.

Normally, product event planning must have a theme. In addition to being reflected during the event, this theme also often appears frequently in the event copy. In this case, the activity copy must make users want to read it. If users don’t like to watch it, no matter how much the product operator or event planner “happiest themselves” it will be of no avail.

Let’s take the copy of NetEase Cloud Music’s Cloud Village Night Talk event as an example to see what kind of copy users want to see, and analyze how to make the event copy something users want to see.

#云村夜话# ​​invites the villagers with the most interesting stories in Yun Village to share with you the stories hidden in the hot comments and sing the songs in the stories for you. Villagers who successfully connect to the microphone can get a Yun Music vinyl VIP. If you send comments in the live broadcast room, you will also have the opportunity to get a small vinyl VIP gift.

Based on NetEase Cloud Music's consistent style of being thoughtful, we analyze what kind of event copywriting users want to see.

1. Clean and beautiful copy is most likely to catch the eye

No matter what kind of campaign copy, there is only one purpose, which is to let users see it and take it to heart, thereby attracting users to be interested in the product or brand.

In fact, many companies have not achieved this point alone. Most of the event copywriting is "self-satisfying", thinking that users will like it, but this is not the case. Users don’t even want to read those exaggerated, impetuous, and commercial copywriting.

Event planners should remember: people are visual animals. Only by catching people’s eyes can you win their hearts. Clean and beautiful copywriting like Xiangxuan is the easiest to catch the eye. All the hot reviews from users of NetEase Cloud Music, every paragraph and every text, is like a story. The literary and artistic style is prominent, but not at all artificial, clean and beautiful, and the overall grasp is just right.

How to create such copywriting? First of all, we must have a literary and artistic heart. Secondly, the writing style should be clean and concise, without any dragging. Finally, the words used should be beautiful and popular, not weird or artificial.

It is recommended that event planners seek inspiration from more literary and artistic websites, Weibo and other popular communities, and explore the preferences of young users. In addition, the copywriting needs to be fresh, unique, clean and neat in layout and typesetting, so that people will feel comfortable.

2. Incorporate emotions into products

No matter how beautiful the copywriting is, it should be based on product operation, and event copywriting cannot be separated from the product. If the promotional copy is not combined with the product, although the users may be moved, they will not be able to extend their purchasing power to the product. Good copywriting also needs to be combined with the product and incorporate emotions, so that it can truly enter the hearts of users. Just like the hot review stories on NetEase Cloud Music, they all correspond to related songs or singers on the music platform.

When we plan the copy, we must fully integrate it with the product. If there are not many words, we can choose to use pictures to portray the product.

3. The copywriting framework should be clear

The power of campaign copywriting lies in using short words or real stories to achieve the purpose of product operation. The purpose may be promotion, new product launch, special offer, etc., so it is important to have clear thinking.

First, design a good title. If the title is not designed well, users will not be able to directly see the theme of the event, thus reducing their interest in browsing and watching.

In addition to attracting user participation, a good title also allows people to see the basic outline of the activity at a glance. So designing a good title is very necessary. NetEase Cloud Music has done a great job in this regard, inviting users with popular reviews to share their stories and singing the songs in the stories for you, which further strengthens the emotional bond between users and the product.

Secondly, design a good promotional graphic. Promotional pictures are an indispensable part of event planning, and they are event copywriting in the context of mobile Internet. A good promotional picture can attract users to read the copy and enter the product operation circle to a great extent.

Finally, present a good event background. Some event copywriting will use fancy sentences at the beginning to explain the background of the event, which is actually unnecessary. NetEase Cloud Music did not take this approach, but instead used real stories to directly reflect the product's culture, quality, and background.

Of course, not all event copywriting needs to learn the implicit approach of NetEase Cloud Music. You can also use concise language to express and describe the background of the event, allowing users to quickly enter the product marketing activities.

3. Event promotion: Create momentum online and heat up the event atmosphere

Activity promotion refers to the process whereby a company integrates its own resources and, through creative activities or events, makes product operation activities a topic of concern to the general public, thereby attracting media coverage and user participation in the activities, thereby achieving the goal of enhancing product image and promoting product sales.

Complete event promotion mainly includes four important parts: resource integration, communication path planning, event design, and data monitoring. In planning the communication path, first of all, we should understand the ways of promoting the event as much as possible, in other words, understand the channels for promoting the event. The most effective channels are those that are suitable for promotion. No matter how good the activity idea is, if there is no strong promotion channel to support it, everything will be useless.

What are the methods for operating and promoting activities? Next, let’s take a look at the promotion of Xiaomi’s 10th Anniversary Film Festival “Our Times” event. The promotion page is shown below.

2020 marks the tenth anniversary of Xiaomi's founding and the tenth year that Xiaomi and Mi fans have known each other.

There are so many wonderful stories in the past decade. We have selected moments from some of these wonderful stories and made them into a photo album, and would like to share them with you.

Thank you for the power that dreams give us, thank you for the motivation that rice noodles give us, and thank you for this great era. Our journey is to the stars and the sea. In the next + years, we will work harder.

The above is the promotional copy for Xiaomi’s 10th Anniversary Film Festival “Our Times” event. The number of readings of this copy on the WeChat official account has exceeded 100,000. In addition, it is not only released on WeChat official accounts, but also on its official channels and other platforms. We can specifically analyze what are the channels for event promotion.

1. Channel selection

Internal channels, or official channels. It includes: on-site resources, official media, news self-media, video self-media, communities, and groups.

External channels have complex content and cover a wide range of areas. Since most of them are paid models, they are often called paid channels. Including: advertising alliances, DSP platforms, search engines, browsers, navigation, news media platforms, app stores, and mainstream platforms (such as WeChat, Weibo, and Douyin).

Due to space limitations, we will not elaborate on each one here, but only list two of the most familiar and easily accepted promotion methods.

2. Promotion methods

1) WeChat public account promotion

The convenience of WeChat marketing has led many companies to open WeChat public accounts, where they can push information about the company and its products.

When companies are promoting their products through events, they can also push some pre-event promotional graphics and texts through this platform - provided that these graphics and texts are interesting and vivid, and introduce the content of the event to users in a sincere tone, so that users know why this event is worth participating in. If the pictures and texts are very creative, they can also encourage users to share them spontaneously.

For example, JD.com promoted its “618” event on its WeChat subscription account one month in advance, and began “bombarding” it with information about the event on May 17; Tmall promoted the Tmall Super Games during the opening period of the Olympic Games. Some companies have also opened up the shopping process on WeChat, which also helps event promotions to achieve conversions quickly.

2) Weibo promotion

Weibo promotion is based on the massive number of Weibo users and can widely convey information to potential users. When companies are promoting their products, they can use the Weibo homepage and place two event banners (banners, slogans) on the homepage. Users can click on the pictures or links to go to the event page or product page.

Companies can also initiate topics related to the event through their official Weibo accounts to heat up the atmosphere of the event and encourage netizens to forward the Weibo posts with their own topics.

IV. Activity Implementation Plan: Online Interactive Promotion and Offline Brand Maintenance

When planning an event, from creativity to execution, product operators need to communicate and interact with different departments. If you want the activities to develop in the desired direction, you must take the initiative to express and communicate.

Usually, the ideas for an activity are divided into two main parts: creative plan and execution plan. There are both connections and great differences between the two.

The execution plan is based on the creative plan. The creative plan often only needs to express the basic ideas and thoughts of the activity, while the execution plan needs to present the details of the activity in detail. The activity execution plan is a great test of the product operator's skills. Activities are mainly divided into online activities and offline activities.

Below we will briefly talk about how to understand the event execution plan through the case of Huawei P20 mobile phone event promotion. The promotional image is as follows.

In June 2018, Huawei released the revolutionary graphics processing acceleration technology GPU Turbo at the Honor Play new product launch conference. GPU Turbo has four major features: high performance, more power saving, high image quality, and cooler play. It can make the phone run games more smoothly, without frame drops, and with higher definition image quality. Once this technology was released, it quickly caused a sensation in the digital and gaming industries.

Shortly after the launch of GPU Turbo technology, the Huawei P20 mobile phone specially cooperated with the "Wild Action" game IP to plan a marketing event about the "Huawei P20 Wild Action Women's Team Competition", allowing more consumers to personally experience the smooth mobile gaming experience after the upgrade of this new technology.

The high sales volume of Huawei P20 is not only due to its excellent quality, but also to a series of promotional activities. If you want to promote your event effectively, you need a good execution plan. So, what kind of activity execution plan is the best? Let’s analyze it in detail.

1. Best online event execution plan

Online activities: refers to activities initiated and mostly conducted on the Internet. This includes posting information about activities on the Internet and recruiting participants. Its advantage lies in the zero-distance contact with users, turning passivity into activeness.

Complete online event planning requires an effective implementation plan to maximize the effectiveness of the event. As shown in the figure below, an effective online activity execution plan includes the following contents.

1) Purpose of the activity

First of all, the purpose of the activity must be clear (such as enhancing the brand image, increasing product sales, increasing downloads, platform activity, etc.). Only with a purpose can there be a direction. For example, the purpose of the Huawei P20 Wilderness Action Women's Team Competition online event is to increase product sales and enhance brand image.

2) Event promotion

The activity needs to be warmed up and guided in the early stages. Online activity promotion can be roughly divided into two types: on-site promotion and off-site promotion. The event implementation plan should clearly indicate the channels for event promotion, such as WeChat public accounts, official Weibo, etc.

Taking the Huawei P20 Wilderness Action Women's Team Competition as an example, while attracting hundreds of teams to sign up, the Huawei P20 mobile phone also integrated all resources to carry out all-round screen-sweeping marketing for this competition, not only covering social media such as Weibo and WeChat, but also through live broadcasts, bringing huge attention to the Huawei P20 mobile phone.

3) Activity feedback

Remind users after the activity is completed and offer encouragement. The winning users who participated in the event will be announced publicly, and real-time feedback is required on how many gifts have been taken and how many are left.

4) Expected results and goals

The expected effect of the event can be considered from the dimensions of number of participants, PV (visits), UV (unique visits), downloads and forwarding volumes. Goals can be set in segments according to the course of the activity, which helps to make appropriate adjustments to the differences in goals during the execution of the activity.

5) Activity Notes

Event notes are the key to the event execution plan. The notes should be detailed and take into account all aspects of the event execution. Notes can be made on the event process, rules, and award settings, etc.

2. Best offline event execution plan

Common offline activities include physical store sales, social activities, etc. An effective offline activity execution plan should be combined with the process set for the activity and assign specific tasks to individuals to ensure that everyone knows what work they should do. The offline activity implementation plan mainly includes the following points.

1) Purpose of the activity

In the implementation plan, you must briefly describe the activity and state the purpose of the activity.

2) Time and location of the event

Staff must arrive at the site 1-2 hours before the event officially starts, familiarize themselves with the venue and prepare the materials and prizes for which they are responsible. In particular, staff responsible for sign-in must arrive early and gather event users. Remember not to let users feel unreceived, and make it easy for users to find the person in charge of sign-in and participate in activities.

3) Activity process

The activity process needs to be arranged according to the activities. The event process is very complicated, requiring many resources and involving many people, so event planning needs to be meticulous.

Taking the Huawei P20 Wilderness Action Women's Team Competition as an example, the staff need to be familiar with the formulation of the competition process, the maintenance of on-site order, the arrangement of various links, and make effective additions and deletions based on actual conditions.

Normally, the design of activity links has been basically completed after the activity plan is determined. What needs to be done during implementation is to clarify the rules of each link. It should be noted that the activity content suitable for users should be designed with user experience as the core.

4) Gift List

It is necessary to indicate the types and quantities of gifts needed for the event, note at which stage and where each gift will appear in the event, and hand them over to their respective persons in charge. If there are relatively many types of gifts, you will need to make a form and give it to the person in charge of each gift.

5) Emergency plan for activities

Generally speaking, offline activities mainly reflect the brand and service quality. Directly in contact with users and facing emergencies on site, the event leader needs to handle them promptly and effectively. If not handled properly, it is very likely to directly lose users and affect the brand image.

Therefore, in the activity implementation plan, unexpected situations must be taken into consideration and emergency plans must be prepared. Before the event starts, notify the person in charge of the link where problems may occur. If problems are found during the event, the emergency plan should be activated in a timely manner.

The common point between offline and online activity execution plans is that they both require clear purpose of the activity. Mastering these will help you to plan and implement the best event.

Author: Kenfai

Source: Kenfai