How to plan an event well? 4 key actions!

When it comes to event planning , perhaps in many people's minds it only means forwarding for a lottery, collecting likes to get gifts, promotions with buy-one-get-one-free deals. In many integrated communication plans, event planning is almost a chicken-rib existence, indispensable but tasteless, and then people just deal with it casually.

So what is event planning used for? Just designing a promotion? Or use some unattractive prizes to induce users to participate in some boring and idiotic solicitations, forwardings, and likes?

So-called event planning means just thinking of an event theme, deciding the time and location, designing the event process, and finally getting some prizes, and that’s it?

A company's marketing activities should have three major functions:

• Strengthen the connection between brand users
• Deepen the experience of brand value
• Actions to accelerate brand consumption

This is also the standard for measuring the quality of event planning. It should be designed from three dimensions: user interaction, value experience, and consumer conversion .

To put it simply, participating in activities is about getting alive and moving.

• First, make the brand come alive in the minds of consumers, activate the brand experience, increase brand activity, and promote sales conversion.
• Secondly, in the design of communication routes in event planning, the brand can be put into motion, leveraging a wider user group to create social voice and influence.

Chinese people create characters that blend form and meaning. If we break down the word "activity" into two parts, we will find that the four attributes of water, tongue, cloud and force are the four key actions in event planning.

1. From the tongue - topic first

The biggest problem with offline activities is that they are limited by time and space.

Time limits the impact of an event. An offline product launch event only lasts a few hours at most. But on the Internet, we hope that its popularity can continue to attract consumers' attention for a week or a month. How can we do this?

The existence of space limits the number of participants in an event. Even if the location of your event is large, the number of participants will only be a few hundred, a few thousand or tens of thousands. This is already the limit. How can you influence the millions of people who are not present?

A few days ago, Smartisan Technology held a 515 new product launch conference at the Bird's Nest, with 37,000 participants. It is said to be the largest launch conference in the world this year, but only tens of thousands of people attended. The warm-up, hype, and continued fermentation before and after this conference are estimated to have affected hundreds of millions of people.

Therefore, activities are not only for offline participation, but also for online discussions. It is important to use your hands and feet, but it is more important to use your mouth.

Millions of dollars were spent on the event, but in the end, it didn't make any waves and didn't generate any voice on social media . Except for the people who were there, no one else knew what happened. That would be a complete waste, like walking in the night in gorgeous clothes.

Therefore, at the beginning of event planning, you need to design appropriate topics for consumers so that they are willing to pay attention to you, talk about you, and speak for you.

At 8 a.m. on July 8, 2016, the Xin Shi Xiang official account released a message that as long as friends in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou are determined to travel, Xin Shi Xiang will give out 30 round-trip tickets plus a 300 yuan hotel subsidy, allowing you to travel to an unknown city.

Judging from the actual information, the theme of this event should be "Travel on a whim", but the topic designed by Xin Shixiang is called " Escape from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou in 4 hours ". The meaning of escaping from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou originally had other meanings, but when used here, it contains more emotions than just leaving, and it can also make young people in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou feel more involved.

It took only 4 hours to escape from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, with only about 500 people participating offline (according to Xin Shixiang, the meeting place was sent to the first 500 people who responded to the backstage), and only 30 people finally made the trip. However, the hot topic of "escaping from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou" reached 13.22 million views on Weibo, and Xin Shi Xiang gained 100,000 followers as a result.

Therefore, while activity execution is important, the topic design prior to the activity is even more important.

The purpose of a company's event planning and event marketing should be to hype topics and increase exposure and attention. In fact, topics are not created for activities, but activities are created for topics. Never do activities just for the sake of doing activities.

Good topic design is related to emotions and positions, proposing an attitude to seek resonance and call for action; or it is related to identity and labels, linking to corresponding groups of people and attracting the attention of specific groups.

Tian Yukong, China's best advertising company for performance art, helped Gujia Furniture design a performance art project based on the brand concept of "Caring for the Family, Loving the Family" - "Lonely Sofa". The project was staged at Shanghai's landmark Global Harbor Plaza on August 8, 2016. 40 lonely wives stood on the sofa, holding up signs with text in their hands, calling out to their husbands who worked overtime every day, hoping that they would #National Family Day, No Overtime on 816#.

The label of "no overtime" accurately hits the hearts of hundreds of millions of office workers who work overtime. Just recall the song "Feeling My Body Is Hollowed Out" which was popular at that time.

Why does Tian Yukong love performance art so much that he wants to perform one for every client? The focus is not on what behaviors and activities are carried out offline, but on the online hype topic. It would be even better if it could be reported by the media . Although these silly girls holding signs are really embarrassing to watch.

Equally embarrassing is the performance art of Durex AiR air condoms. A live broadcast of a condom experience for hundreds of people, with a three-hour extended screening, took the entire Internet by storm as soon as this topic went online. Those who didn't know would have thought it was a group orgy.

But the live broadcast event that the spectators were looking forward to was actually an hour of moving beds, half an hour of interviews, half an hour of gymnastics, half an hour of eating fruits, half an hour of mysterious silence, and finally a puff of smoke before it ended. The result was a barrage of criticism. But the huge controversy has brought Durex more attention and voice. Although the on-site event was not well-organized, the design of the topic can at least score 120 points and was a great success.

Therefore, to plan an event well, the effort goes beyond the event, and the topic should come before the event.

The starting point of event design should be to create topics to communicate with users. Activities without any topics will be thankless and ineffective.

2. From water - user integration

The most taboo thing in branding is for business owners to talk to themselves and say irrelevant things that users don’t care about, which makes the whole situation even more embarrassing.

Similarly, when planning an event, you cannot just have fun by yourself, have fun and feel good about yourself. Instead, you need to have fun together with the consumers.

In short, good event planning must make users become tap water.

Let users participate in you, talk about you, forward you, and comment on you. Without user participation, event planning is just a castle in the air.

In the book "The Tipping Point", Gladwell analyzes the three major factors that trigger popularity:

• The Law of Individuals - Communication Objects in Social Networks
• Adhesion Factors - Factors that Popular Things Should Have
• Powerful environment - the environment needed to initiate popularity

We will discuss the power environment and adhesion factors below. This part will talk about people, especially those with extraordinary interpersonal energy.

Gladwell divides these people into three types:

• Connector - a social expert who knows a lot of people and is keen to introduce more friends to each other.
• Insider - a knowledgeable person who knows everything in a certain field or all fields, is keen to help you solve problems, and never tires of sharing professional knowledge (I probably belong to this category).
• A salesman is a person who is good at selling goods and can persuade others. He is keen to sell information and items that he believes are valuable to everyone and to encourage them to buy them.

Marketing activities can only create trends if they find these people. This is why event planners have to look for Internet celebrities , KOLs , and big Vs to do promotions , because they bring their own topics and traffic .

In 2014, the Ice Bucket Challenge took the world by storm. The most powerful thing about it is that it has a roll call mechanism.

Everyone who pours ice water on his or her head has to name three people; the people named have to either pour ice water on their heads or donate money; after accepting the invitation, they must name other people to pass the game on.

In the process of passing it on from one person to another, the Ice Bucket Challenge slowly became popular. After celebrities such as Justin Bieber, LeBron James, Mark Zuckerberg , and Bill Gates joined in, the Ice Bucket Challenge became popular across the United States.

The then-President Obama who was named only donated money but did not support the cause, which also attracted a lot of criticism online.

Seeing that the bigwigs in Silicon Valley are having a great time, domestic Internet elites can no longer sit still.

Without being invited by anyone, Liu Zuohu, the founder of OnePlus, took the lead in completing the ice bucket challenge, claiming that he was the first person in the Chinese Internet industry to complete this challenge. He then named Zhou Hongyi, Luo Yonghao , and Liu Jiangfeng.

But in fact, the first person invited from China was Lei Jun .

Bill Gates named DST boss Yuri, and Yuri mentioned Lei Jun. Lei Jun then completed the ice bucket challenge at the gate of Xiaomi headquarters and named Andy Lau, Robin Li and Terry Gou.

As a result, the Ice Bucket Challenge has also been launched in full swing in the country. It became a national carnival that went far beyond the scope of charity .

During that period, whether or not one was named to participate in the Ice Bucket Challenge became a criterion for testing the quality and status of a big shot. The big guys who were not named were restless and anxious like ants on a hot pan, staring at Weibo every day to see if any big guy @ed them.

The introduction of this naming mechanism is actually the key to the Ice Bucket Challenge becoming popular around the world, because it involves users in the dissemination and makes users part of the spread of its infection.

The voice of a brand is insignificant in the market. Only by introducing this social mechanism in event planning, allowing users to participate in the design of communication routes, letting users speak for you, and achieving resonance with users, can you achieve the best communication effect.

The Flying War, Surround the Nervous Cat, Jump Jump in WeChat, and even the earlier Stealing Vegetables and Parking Spaces on Kaixin.com have become national games, which are inseparable from the social mechanisms they designed for competing with others and interacting with friends.

As a result, Honor of Kings has even become a social tool for the post-00s generation, and game-based social interaction has become a new trend. Which APP or game today dares not have this kind of social mechanism?

It is said that Internet traffic is king, so what is traffic? It is the users. Users are the essence of traffic.

Why is the water so clear? Because it comes from a source. Users are the source of vitality and vitality of a brand. Only by capturing users and turning them into tap water for marketing activities can we truly capture traffic.

In the Johnnie Walker ad, Bruce Lee said:

“Dragons are immortal because they never leave water. Water, like intuition, has no shape and cannot be grasped, but it has the power to change the world.”

Good event planning requires this kind of intuition to understand users and be able to constantly change the direction of communication based on user needs and psychology, so that it will eventually flow eastward and into the sea.

To borrow a phrase from Emperor Taizong of Tang, Li Shimin:

Brand is like a boat; people are like water. Water can carry a boat, but it can also capsize it.

3. From the cloud - social effects

The duration of a marketing campaign can be as short as one week or as long as two months. But consumers' attention is fleeting. Even major social events that go viral, such as a certain doctor being arrested or a certain celebrity cheating, will be completely forgotten by netizens after two days of popularity.

Consumers are forgetful, and few will pay attention to what you are doing from the beginning of the event. No matter how awesome an event is, if it’s not finished within two months, it will become a lazy woman’s foot binding, long and smelly. Because no user will pay attention to you for that long.

Therefore, marketing activities pay great attention to the control of rhythm. From building suspense to debut and then to continuous deepening, different communication stages must be designed, and different topics must be brought out in each stage to continuously stimulate user attention, grab user's sight and keep users paying attention to you.

In order to capture consumers, at the beginning of event planning, we must know what kind of social environment and culture we are in today, understand social psychology, pay attention to what consumers are paying attention to, listen to what consumers are talking about and participate in consumers' conversations, and become a leader of public opinion.

In a word, take advantage of the situation.

Event planning must be integrated into the social cloud network to leverage traffic and voice through social effects.

At the end of 2008, the Queensland Tourism Bureau of Australia wanted to do marketing promotion , and they planned such an event:

“The best job in the world”.

A Great Barrier Reef ranger is being recruited worldwide. The job content is just to patrol the island every day in a golf cart, feed fish, dive, eat seafood, take photos and write blogs to promote the Great Barrier Reef. The salary is 150,000 Australian dollars (about 720,000 yuan) for 6 months. Also included are free flights and a beachfront villa.

On January 10, 2009, the day the campaign was launched, the Queensland Tourism Bureau's website received over 1,000,000 hits , with 25,000 hits per hour, causing the website to crash.

When registration closed on February 22, a total of 34,684 people applied for the job worldwide, and Tourism Queensland claimed that they had received applications from most countries in the world, except Western Sahara in Africa and North Korea in Asia.

In the end, with a full-year budget of just A$1.7 million (about RMB 8.21 million, including A$150,000 in salaries for island rangers), the entire event received a large amount of free coverage and continued follow-up from media in many countries around the world, bringing a total of A$480 million in public relations benefits to Tourism Queensland.

Why is this activity so popular? Why does a tourism bureau talk about work instead of travel?

This is because the 2008 economic crisis swept the world, many companies around the world went bankrupt and laid off employees, and the economic crisis made everyone uneasy. At this time, people were most concerned about work rather than vacation.

At this time, even if you tell me how beautiful the coral reefs in Queensland are, how exciting surfing is, and how dreamy the ocean park is, I am not in the mood to listen, because I am about to lose my job, so why would I go out and have fun?

oh? Work?

Yes, let’s talk about work, and it’s such an attractive job. As a result, Queensland has captured the imagination of consumers around the world.

When I heard about this case for the first time, I was greatly shocked and a new world opened up for me. I listed this case as one of the three cases that influenced my advertising career.

In September 2015, the movie " Minions " was released, and Baidu Nuomi launched an event where customers could get a banana for free when buying movie tickets. How could we attract more people's attention to this marketing event and get more people to buy tickets from Baidu Nuomi?

They designed a topic in advance:

#Little yellow man sells bananas on the street and is brutally punished by the city management#

Although Baidu Nuomi didn't take this matter seriously - it didn't actually go out to sell it on the streets, but just asked people to cosplay as Minions and pose for a few photos with the urban management.

However, this fake news still made it to the Weibo hot search list and was reported as real social news by the media that were unaware of the truth.

Why did this event become popular? Why do the Minions have to do with the Urban Management Bureau? What did I, the Urban Management Bureau, do to offend anyone?

This is because of the strong contrast effect created by the cute Minions and the "first military branch of the Celestial Empire", "strategic deterrence", "strongest heavy infantry", and "national heavy weapon" urban management. This contrast has attracted the attention and reposting of a large number of users.

In the social context of the financial crisis, the best jobs have become a topic of global attention.

In the online context where urban management officials are demonized and ridiculed, the enforcement of the law against Minions has become the most eye-catching hot topic.

Good event planning requires knowing people’s wishes in the social environment, what consumers are interested in, what they pay attention to, and what they talk about. Only by following this trend can we create influential marketing campaigns.

Advertising and marketing are part of social culture, and no brand's activities are isolated from society. Only when a brand event is supported by social culture can it become a topic and hot spot of national concern. Cloud integration is the only way to amplify the impact of your event.

Based on insights into social culture, it is very important to find those "communication elements" that can create social effects, such as the best jobs and urban management mentioned above, which are communication elements with topic stickiness.

Many years ago, I saw a piece of social news on Weibo: a naughty child poured Coke on an expensive piano, and the piano store sued the parents. After reading this news, my first reaction was that it was fake news and a promotional activity planned by a piano store or piano dealer. Later it turned out to be true.

Why do I think it is fake news? Because "naughty kids" and "high-priced piano claims" are both communication elements that can obviously generate social attention, and they are piled up very deliberately.

And there's that fake news about "a college student arranged 999 grapefruits into a heart shape to confess his love to a girl but was rejected" which is really marketing. "College student" and "confession was rejected" are all communication elements. People who are familiar with it will find it fake at first glance.

This "communication element" is the adhesion factor mentioned earlier. When this adhesion factor is placed in a specific power environment, it is likely to trigger a trend and become a major social event that attracts the attention of the entire nation.

For example, not long ago, there was a social news about a naughty kid who was beaten up for molesting a violent person on a bus. The accusations and protests against the naughty kid created a powerful environment. At this time, if there is an event planning combined with this communication element, it will easily explode.

The ice bucket challenge mentioned above actually had nothing to do with ALS at the beginning. It was just a charity event where you either pour ice water on others or donate to any charity.

But in 2014, when the Ice Bucket Challenge started to explode, Hollywood released two ALS-related movies in one year:

You're Not You and The Theory of Everything.

"The Theory of Everything" is a young biographical film about the famous physicist Stephen Hawking , who is a patient with ALS.

So after Pete Frates, captain of the Boston University baseball team and an ALS patient, participated in the Ice Bucket Challenge and called on people to raise funds for ALS research organizations through this event, the Ice Bucket Challenge completely became a public welfare event to support ALS patients.

In fact, this is a powerful environment.

4. From force - game mechanism

Honor of Kings has a user base of over 200 million and 54.128 million daily active users. The average daily number of new users is 1.748 million, equivalent to a county. More than 52% of users are under the age of 24, and 54% of players are female (data from May 2017).

After Honor of Kings, "Chicken Patch" quickly became a popular term among the people.

(Oops, wrong picture)

This is the WeChat index of PUBG in November 2017.

Currently, 67.9% of underage Internet users in China play online games , and 70.9% of primary school students play online games. Since the game is so fun, as a naive advertising person, I am thinking:

How can we make our event planning like a game, interesting and addictive?

First of all, we need to answer why games are fun and where the fun of games comes from.

This is because the game has a complete set of mechanism designs that allow players to enjoy the sense of accomplishment of overcoming difficulties and challenges.

• Clear goals: Knowing what you want to do in the game, people with a sense of purpose will be full of motivation.
• Actionable steps (rules): Knowing what to do in the game, you can control your own behavior and performance in the game, so you have the illusion that you can control your own life.
• Immediate and vivid emotional rewards (feedback): Every action you take will receive real-time feedback. For example, if you work hard to kill a monster, your endurance will be +1, intelligence will be +1, agility will be +1, strength will be +1... As you kill more and more monsters, you will gradually wear more luxurious armor, get more powerful weapons, and wear more gorgeous jewelry...

The best thing about games is that they have feedback and predictable results. As long as you work hard, you will get rewards. As long as you keep working hard, you will win.

Although games are not always easy and enjoyable, and some games require tremendous effort to complete, the fun that comes from overcoming these difficulties and challenges is also enormous, and you gain a sense of accomplishment and self-control.

That’s the power of games, the fun mechanics of game design.

Why do many people find life quite boring?

That's because life is not like a game. For many people, they have not found a clear goal in life and don't know what to do. Life doesn’t give you a set of rules and guidelines for how to spend your life and how to live your days. You don’t know what to do, and in the end, you don’t see clear feedback immediately after you have put in your efforts…

For example, you endured not eating for a day, but when you weighed yourself you found that your weight had not changed at all (no feedback was given), so your motivation to lose weight was dampened.

So, how do we design marketing campaigns?

That is to use the power of games in activities, introduce game mechanisms, and make activities full of fun.

First of all, many marketing activities deliberately lower the threshold for participation in order to attract more users. In fact, this may not be a good thing. Without difficulty and challenge, consumers will not be interested in participating.

Secondly, many marketing activities are actually quite boring and dull. Providing prizes to attract user participation is actually not a good thing.

Because participating for reward and participating for interest are two completely different motivations, events that are not inherently interesting require rewards to stimulate others to participate (for example, work requires salary).

Giving users prizes will further make them find your event boring.

This is just like giving a child money to study. In the end, it will develop to the point where he won't study if you don't pay him. Because this will make children feel that reading is very boring and they will like reading even less (the correct approach, of course, is to let them enjoy reading).

Finally, the design of marketing activities must provide instant feedback on user behavior , such as designing a leaderboard that allows users to compete with their friends, or providing users with points and honor badges. These are typical game feedback elements.

Nike+'s running system and keep's points plan are both typical feedback designs.

Target is the third largest retail chain in the United States. Every Christmas season, long queues form in front of the checkout counters, attracting countless customer complaints. This not only directly affects revenue and user experience , but also exhausts cashier staff and managers. Adding cash registers and firing poorly performing cashiers didn’t help.

So Target added a gaming mechanic to the checkout process. As each item was scanned, the screen would display a G (green) or R (red), with G standing for fast and R for slow. After each checkout transaction, the screen will give the cashier a score for his/her performance.

Cashiers must complete more than 88% of transactions efficiently to receive rewards, as this score is directly related to salary and promotion.

The tedious and tedious cashier work has thus become a fun-filled game.

Cashiers therefore have clear goals, and a day's cashier work is broken down into specific tasks, with rules for evaluating cashier performance and real-time feedback.

Target turned its cashiers into gamers, using gaming mechanics to make employees more engaged and productive at work.

Microsoft also does the same thing. The development of the Windows system often takes several years, involves tens of thousands of R&D personnel, and has to launch dozens of language versions in different countries and regions. This will inevitably lead to various bugs and language errors.

Quality checks on system languages ​​often require a large team to check every function, every line of text, and every dialog box in the system. Not only is it a huge workload, it's also boring.

So Microsoft developed a game to let Microsoft employees around the world "find faults" in the system and set up a bug ranking list for global employees. Simply discover, identify and submit bugs to earn points and compete with colleagues around the world.

Ultimately, 4,500 Microsoft employees participated in the game, using their lunch breaks and after-get off work time to review more than 500,000 Windows dialog boxes and report 6,700 system errors. I haven’t hired anyone and haven’t spent a penny.

Look at this evil capitalist world. Let employees work overtime like crazy without realizing it, and the key point is that they still find it fun and fulfilling.

This is an example of how to use the power of games to make a boring activity interesting.

Topic priority, user integration, social effect, and game mechanics are the four attributes of a good event. Achieving these 4 points is the key to the success of event planning.

• The theme design of the activity should emphasize the topic first
• The content design of the activity should create social effects
• The activity flow design should integrate user participation
• The process design of the activity should introduce game mechanisms

The author of this article @空手 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