When operating an event, how can we ensure that attracting new users is valuable?

Mastering how to organize activities is one of the essential skills for user operations and attracting new users, but the more essential the skill is, the less people care about it and the easier it is to ignore it.

In recent years, I have seen many people who do user operations only consider how to conduct activities, what form the activities will take, how much the activity budget will be, whether the KPI can be achieved , etc., but rarely pay attention to whether the activities are popular with users, whether the frequency of activities is too high, the standard conversion of activity links, how to reduce the activity budget, and other more detailed and focused thinking.

Although the purpose of the activity is to increase the value of a single product in the short term, wouldn’t it be better to increase the value in a better and more efficient way to acquire more active users who meet the product positioning? If you only want to attract new users, then what’s the point of buying a bunch of dead users?

01 Activity Positioning

Now is not the time to compare who has better or prettier user data, but to assess the specific net benefits of users.

I participated in an event held by an online translation company in 2014 or 2015. At that time, the event was in the form of a big turntable. The main prizes were pure red envelopes, with prizes ranging from 1 yuan, 3 yuan, 5 yuan, 10 yuan, and 20 yuan. The way to distribute the prizes was to follow the official account , send the serial number to redeem the prize, and then add the customer service red envelope assistant to receive the red envelope.

Under this logic (because I was also involved in the planning and participation of the event at that time), are the acquired users of any use to a translation company? Will a group of users who just want to get red envelopes pay attention to your manual translation? Therefore, this activity itself has committed the first problem.

Positioning is not only about positioning the theme and direction of the activity, but also about positioning the target group and purpose of the activity.

When an online translation company organizes an event, the theme of the event must be related to the translation or product itself (XX Translation Festival), and the direction of the event must be to determine the user education and impact of the event on future development (a dissemination activity for the xx translation product in the translation field).

Positioning the target audience for an event is actually very important for the event, as it will affect the selection of prizes. Translation products should target users who need translation. Where do the users who need translation exist? Schools or foreign companies? If it is for a school, the prizes should be for resume translation, thesis translation, etc. If it is for a company, the prizes should be for contract translation, accompanying translation, legal document translation, etc.

The purpose of positioning is actually relatively simple. It is mainly to position the main purpose of this event, whether it is to attract new customers, promote activation, or promote the brand .

However, the positioning of this translation roulette wheel activity was biased from the beginning. It is unlikely that the customized group of red envelopes is the group that needs translation, so the positioning of this activity was biased to a certain extent.

Positioning in an event is the first step in planning and the direction of execution. Therefore, for an event, the first point of activity positioning must be planned in detail and accurately positioned.

The main method of positioning is to use products, superior instructions, and the market as the basis for positioning. For example, if the product is a translation product, the personnel are the people who need translation. Then the market and user needs can be analyzed to be distributed among students, foreign companies, companies with overseas business, and other users. According to the instructions from superiors, whether it is attracting new customers or promoting activation, plans and activities will be arranged and planned based on the previous products and markets as the positioning basis.

02 Analyze activity data

For many friends who are engaged in user operations, they will basically analyze data when conducting product activities . They will also analyze previous activity data and channel data, and they will also position products and users. However, is this really how user operations are done during activity operations?

During the activity operation process, the analyzed activity data plays a key operational role in guiding the operation direction, channel data, activity market data, etc. for the operation personnel, and the operation data of these activities are often easily overlooked.

Generally, during the operation of an activity, when analyzing activity data, most people simply look at the data of previous activities and the data of the channels and then start doing it. Some operators don’t even look at the data before starting to plan and execute the activity.

But in fact, many people don’t know that activity data is divided into four major categories of data. Before conducting an activity , the activity’s past activity data, past channel data, past conversion data, and current conversion data will be analyzed and compared.

The main data extracted and applied from past event data are traffic during the event, user downloads during the event, landing page types during the event, and user types during the event; the main data extracted from past channel data are exposures, clicks, and page reach rates of each channel; the main data extracted from past conversion data is the conversion of each link, from advertising to page, from browsing to registration, from registration to participation in the event, etc., to make an overall conversion data.

The existing conversion data mainly comes from the analysis of the effects obtained after the activity warm-up. The overall analysis data is the same as the data extracted from previous conversion data.

The main analysis methods for these four categories of data are almost the same. If you use an activity case table to demonstrate data analysis , you will find that analyzing simple activity data is not difficult and is relatively simple, as shown in the table.

The above is the data analysis process in the form of a table based on the cases I learned about. It simply demonstrates the process of data analysis for a single activity. The data analyzed here is mainly based on the premise of completing the goal, so the main goal of the analysis is to complete the task and form the main analysis ideas.

Past channel data, past conversion data, and current conversion data are all analyzed in the same way as in the table above. The goal of analysis is to improve the original data while achieving existing goals. The difference between the analysis of these four types of data and the activity review data analysis after the activity is that one focuses on direct improvement, while the other focuses on the reasons after the failure of the activity, the recording and improvement of the data.

03 How to plan an event

After determining the operational positioning and data analysis of event planning, it is necessary to implement the actual planning process of the event accordingly. The planning process is extremely important for an event. In event planning, data and positioning can be used to conduct a unified analysis and selection of planned activities. At the same time, the specific event form, activity content, activity rules, activity personnel, activity arrangements, activity budget and risks should be reflected in the planning case.

The relevant contents in the planning case will ultimately affect the final effect and direction of the event during the implementation process. Therefore, event planning is important for the event, just like a beacon to guide operators to carry out the implementation.

In event planning, the main planning objects and contents are event form, event prizes, and event process. Among them, the event form is mostly the final activity method obtained after positioning and data analysis.

Just like the earliest activities carried out when we were doing the special price project, the activities were carried out through a roulette wheel or voting. This was based on the fact that Special Price was a special price platform, and the target audience was consumers who loved to take advantage. Based on the analysis of the population situation, it was determined that the activities that users would definitely play included roulette, voting, opening treasure chests, etc. Through this idea, the specific activity methods at that time were determined.

Also during the planning process, in order to increase the number of users and meet the product and user positioning, the selection criteria for prizes should be to attract the target group + increase the number of users. According to the data analysis of the project at the time, 60% of the users on the website basically buy cheap and electronic products. In this way, it was concluded that 3 iPhones were the first prize, followed by direct-sale brands and other coupons as prizes. On this basis, a corresponding cash reward was set up for the first prize. This setting method allows users to actively participate in the first participation and continue to stimulate users to participate through the first prize.

The entire activity must be simple and fast, so the entire activity process is shown in the figure as an example:

The overall process is very simple, and it allows users to participate in the event first, and then induces users to register and receive rewards. One of the main reasons for doing this is that no one wants their things to be lost, and we use this psychology of users to plan activities.

After the entire event format and process are determined, the most important thing is to coordinate with the technology and product departments on page design and development. At the same time, the operations staff is required to provide the product staff with the required function configuration sheet, draw a specific event process or provide a specific Word document, and describe in detail the probability of prizes when users participate in the event, and the functions that need to be developed (for example, if users are required to participate in the event first, then it is necessary to limit the participation of a single IP address in the event, and it also needs to be cached until the user registers to claim the prize).

Therefore, in the entire event planning, we not only need to consider the planned event form, but also need to observe how the current event theme is determined, how the event process is designed, and the event development functional documents, etc., which are extremely necessary in the event planning process.

Similarly, the event planning process is not as simple as I described. It is also necessary to analyze and estimate the specific effect display and event budget. Similarly, the channel data and channel situation configuration that need to be configured after future event planning will eventually be reflected in the event planning case. Therefore, the overall event planning content, I will write a separate article in detail after 8 o'clock in the event, because the overall event planning concept and thinking are not suitable for description from the perspective of user operation, because it involves all aspects of operation.

04 How to configure channels for successful activities

The success of an event is not only related to positioning, data, and planning, but also to the channels used during the event. I wonder if you have ever had this feeling: the most difficult thing when planning an event is not knowing which channels to choose. If you don’t have money, you don’t know which channels to promote . If you have money, you don’t know which channels to use.

The process of thinking about which channels to use is actually studying how to configure channels for the event, and the way and method of configuring channels will ultimately affect the success of the entire event.

Research activity channels

So after studying Tmall Double 11 and other APP small activities (anniversary celebrations, big turntables, etc.), you will find that most of the activities are based on advertising + business in the process of channel configuration, and are exposed or promoted in the media. Just like during Tmall Double 11 event:

1. All advertisements were placed on the entire network ( network alliances , DSPs , browsers , hijacked pop-ups, etc.)

2. Yingke and Tmall reached a business cooperation.

3. Use news + self-media to warm up, expose and highlight topics.

By studying some small APPs, we found that the channels for their activity configurations are mostly single or multiple advertising + small business cooperation.

Therefore, we can conclude that the channels configured for a successful campaign are inseparable: commerce and advertising. So how do you choose the channel of your choice from among the vast number of channels?

Analyze channel suitability

Currently, in the entire Internet industry, excluding business channels (strategic cooperation, traffic cooperation, upstream cooperation, and downstream cooperation), the remaining channels in the entire Internet industry are mainly divided into free channels and paid channels.

The main channels of free channels include social channels, such as Momo , QQ, WeChat , communities , Zhihu and other vertical communities and operation methods (EDM, SMO, SEO , etc.). The current mainstream and well-known paid channels include Baidu bidding and Guangdiantong advertising.

How should we analyze whether these ads are suitable for a campaign?

1. Conduct channel adaptation analysis based on the target audience.

Channels are divided into vertical and non-vertical and user screening and non-screening. If your target audience is people in the financial or Internet industry, aged between 25 and 35, then the best advertising platform to place advertisements on is the DSP platform and the vertical industry. The reason is: DSP can conduct precise delivery through user big data screening, and the vertical financial industry portal or platform users themselves are more accurate.

2. Determine channels based on budget and conversion

After analyzing the channels, it is necessary to decide on the importance of abandoning or investing in them based on the channel’s conversion user data and corporate budget, rather than investing all of them.

After determining whether these activities are suitable for certain channels, it is necessary to carry out final optimization and preparation for all channels, because the pictures or texts required for different channels are different. At the same time, it is also necessary to optimize the channel conversion before the event advertising is launched or during the preheating launch to reduce consumption and increase conversion rate . For example, before placing an order on Baidu, you need to deploy keywords based on the product, divide the keywords into long-tail keywords , event keywords, competitor keywords, industry keywords, etc. At the same time, prepare different creative ideas and titles for different unit keywords.

So if you want your campaign to be successful and cost-effective, refined channel operation and analysis, channels and other operational means are also indispensable. But operations ultimately depend on people. If there is only one person managing the channel, he or she may only be able to manage two channels at most. Not having the time to accurately manage other channels will also cause problems in the channels.

As the fourth point of event operation, channel plays a role in the process of publicity, promotion and attracting new members for the event. It is also the starting point of an event and has a great impact on whether an event will be successful. At the same time, even after deciding on the promotion channel , the subsequent activity will be warmed up, and the warm-up will be a good way to test the channel and increase the success rate of the activity.

05 Activity warm-up

Many people have asked me before how to take control of an activity and control its success rate independently. The key to improving the success rate of an activity is "warm-up". I have previously written about the 8 points of an event, namely positioning, data, planning, and channels. These 4 points are mainly about how to select and operate the direction, form, and promotion of the event . Although they can improve the success rate of operating activities, they still fail to completely and accurately improve the success rate of the event.

If you want to increase the success rate of your event, you need to start with event warm-up. Why do you say that? Many people think that preheating is simply notifying users of upcoming events, but this is not the case. There are two types of preheating: the first is internal testing preheating, and the second is open preheating. These two types of preheating have completely different functions.

1. Internal test warm-up

As the name suggests, internal test warm-up is to conduct internal user testing for the activity. Internal test warm-up may be conducted through seed user groups, employee user groups, or core user groups. Generally, the internal test is first conducted by the operation to test issues such as test procedures and rules. If there are no problems, it will be provided to seeds or core users and employees for testing. During the test, the process problems of participating in the activity, the conversion rate of participating in the activity, receiving rewards, and placing orders are analyzed.

If the purpose of the activity is to increase user registrations, then each activity channel needs to be preheated for internal testing. Each channel should be run for 1-3 days for data testing, and the registration conversion rate brought by the single data should be analyzed. At the same time, it should be analyzed how to improve the conversion rate to complete the data indicators. As shown in the figure, when I was running GuangDianTong ads, I invested about 300 yuan per day for 3 days, and made an optimized data table every day (the specific project is not convenient to disclose).

2. Open preheating

The difference between open preheating and internal test preheating is that the first step is to start large-scale publicity for the event, and to conduct batch operations and material delivery in the open preheating using the methods and approaches previously used in the internal test preheating to quickly and batch acquire users.

At the same time, during the open warm-up, it is necessary to change the materials according to the usage time of the channel. For example, for Guangdiantong, it is best to change the materials every day to conduct continuous channel testing. Generally, after the material results come out during the internal test warm-up stage, batch related materials will be produced.

Generally speaking, during the open preheating process, what operations need to pay most attention to is whether users will behave according to your previous internal test preheating. Because sometimes the effect is extremely good in the internal test, but it will decline or be worse during the open preheating. At this time, you need to conduct targeted operational cooperation or increase channels to improve the success rate of the event.

Generally, activities will have a warm-up process, which is not very simple. Especially during the internal test warm-up, it is necessary to test the conversion and loss in each activity process, and also to optimize it in a targeted manner. Because if the activity wants to have the highest cost-effectiveness in the channel, the internal test warm-up is a necessary process to improve the cost-effectiveness, because it can optimize in a targeted manner to increase the conversion rate and reduce the cost of delivery.

Activity preheating is the fifth element of successful operation in user operations. For those who don’t know how to improve the success rate of their activities, they can improve it through preheating.

06 Activity Optimization

After an activity has gone through positioning, planning, channels, data, and preheating, the entire activity is basically in a state of completion. What should we do if we want to increase the success rate of the activity more? There is only one way, and that is to "optimize" the activity. It is mainly through further optimization of channels, planning, and preheating data, with the ultimate goal of reaching the optimization peak.

However, optimization is what many operators tend to overlook when running activities. For example, most operators will have the following two situations:

First, sometimes you do a lot of optimization work but don’t know whether it is optimization.

Second, they did not do any optimization work, but still believed that they had done the activity to the extreme, which was not the case.

What is optimization?

Optimization refers to operational work carried out on the original basis. For example, when I am making a sharing courseware, I have completed the courseware production, picture and color configuration. In fact, at this point everyone thinks that it has been completed, but I will further simplify the text that can be simplified, delete the unnecessary pages, and so on. This process is further optimization.

For activities, optimization is everywhere, and it is difficult to explain it in one article. When talking about channels and preheating before, I have used cases to explain. Just like the selection of audiences for channels, the placement of keywords is also optimization. For example, for the internal test of preheating, preheating itself is also a kind of optimization data.

So how to optimize it? But what I want to say more is nothing more than the extreme thinking, refined thinking, and data-based thinking of operations. Needless to say, these thoughts are very important for operations, but in fact, these thoughts are what operations should have.

Take Pinduoduo as an example:

As you can see from the picture, Pinduoduo has one less process than other group-buying products. Perhaps you don’t think this process has any impact, but the optimization of this process has greatly improved the user experience and allowed Pinduoduo to acquire a large number of users and orders.

Conversely, the same is true for activity optimization, but it does not mean that the simpler the activity, the better. If it is too simplified, users may be more confused, but if it is too complicated, too many users will be lost. Therefore, the essence of operation is to simplify and optimize reasonably according to the actual situation and in line with user psychology.

07 Activity Execution

For Internet companies, the most troublesome issue for each activity is execution, and execution is also a necessary skill for operations personnel. However, companies now have higher and higher requirements for employees' execution capabilities and execution operations, and it is also becoming more and more important, because companies and operations personnel need to operate through execution. The same thing only takes 60 minutes for an efficient person, but 480 minutes for an ordinary staff member.

Therefore, when the operations staff are carrying out activities and implementing them after planning, whether it is establishing an execution table for the activities or detailed operations of the activities, it is actually to better help and guide the activities to be better executed.

The execution of the activity mainly consists of three aspects:

1. Execution efficiency

2. Implementation details

3. Execution attitude

The high or low execution efficiency will directly affect the preparation speed, number of resources, and coordination speed of the activity. The execution details and execution attitude mainly affect the recording of data, data analysis, resource regulation and the core attitude of the execution activity during the execution process.

Execution efficiency

Generally, an execution plan is prepared during the event planning process. The purpose of establishing an event execution plan is to greatly improve the efficiency of all event coordination and executors, as shown in the following figure:

Execution plans like these are mainly to guide the corresponding personnel of each activity to carry out the execution efficiently. What is funny is that some operators don’t even know what the execution plan is or how to do it specifically. Some even make an execution plan and don’t follow it. So what kind of execution efficiency can we talk about in this way?

The execution details and attitude in execution efficiency are also one aspect of improving efficiency. As an operation executor, all details in the execution need to be paid attention to and analyzed. It is not when the activity data fluctuates the night before and problems are discovered three days later, then analysis is done. Instead, fluctuations should be analyzed when they occur to provide suggestions.

There are many contingencies in activities themselves. Although the success of an activity is not necessarily a matter of execution efficiency or attitude, execution efficiency and attitude are indispensable to the success of an activity.

When it comes to execution attitude, some people treat it as a task, some treat it as just work, and some just do it to cope with it. During execution, the role and attitude you take will directly affect your development.

If you think it is a coping process, then all your work must be coping and you are confused about your career. If you think it is a task, then you will complete all the tasks in your work well and have a full understanding of your career.

08 Activity Summary

Previously, all points from the first to the seventh have been updated on this official account. If an activity has all these 7 points, the success rate of the activity will be maximized. But what if the activity fails? What should I do as an operator?

At this time, a summary of the activity data and content is needed to display the strengths, problems and data of the entire activity, and this display is called an activity summary (review). The significance of an activity summary for an activity is to summarize the data, planning, form, process, success and failure of the activity. At the same time, the problems encountered in the entire activity will be analyzed one by one and corresponding solutions will be proposed.

In fact, everyone knows how to review an event, and also knows the specific practices in the review (if you don’t know, you can search on Baidu, basically Baidu talks about all the current reviews), so today I will mainly talk about why (really need to) review an event. In fact, it has been mentioned above why we need to review an event, because it is mainly to prepare for and improve subsequent activities, but how to improve it specifically?

Hypothetical Case

For example: In Activity A, due to activity problems, the registration rate of a single registration link in a certain period of the activity is reduced by 10%? (Not considering the actual significance)

How to solve this situation? Is the problem a process issue? Or is it because of coordination issues? Or is it because of the prize? How should we analyze it?

In fact, when facing this problem, the first problem that should be analyzed should be the activity process. If the activity process is well connected, then the second thing to do is to analyze the experience of the registration page during the activity. At the same time, it is also necessary to analyze the specific changes that occur within a specific time. If there is no problem, then it is necessary to analyze the changes in promotion channels and operations.

There are many issues that need to be analyzed, and there are also many points. As for whether to review the event, my suggestion is to review it. At least you can analyze many experiences and problems in this event, which will be very helpful for the next event and your own development.

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

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