3 questions and 5 steps to help you create a successful online event

When doing an online event, we often feel uncertain.

Will users be enthusiastic about participating? Will the activity be as effective as we expected? Is the breaking point we imagine really the breaking point?

A common problem faced by planners: I have a good idea, and then nothing happens.

We often suddenly have some ideas and inspirations, and we think they are all good at the time. However, after writing the plan, I found that some links were very risky. What’s worse, when the activity was implemented, it was discovered that users simply did not buy into it.

However, are there any key factors and techniques that can enable us to answer 80% or more of these questions in advance? Today, let’s discuss this aspect. And share with everyone the execution details of successful online activities.

Image: PEXELS

Text: Yaoyao This article has about 4176 words and takes 8 minutes to read.

But throughout the entire event, I encountered many pitfalls and worked overtime until late many times. In short, when organizing a large-scale event, it is far from enough to just have a desire to complete the event. Before planning, you need to understand a few things and answer a few questions. Zhang Weiyang Each of your steps will be controllable and the final result will be foreseeable.

(2) Extrinsic motivation

Extrinsic motivation is behavior that is stimulated by external factors, such as praise, prizes, bonuses, and honors. The most commonly used rewards in event planning are red envelope rewards and prize rewards.

In event planning, if you can leverage the users' intrinsic needs, you will get twice the result with half the effort, while external material rewards can only serve as a supplement to ensure better progress of the event.

2. Obtaining industry rankings through third-party selection will help the company promote its business;

3. The selection model is simple and easy to operate. If you win the award, it will help your performance rating at the end of the year and also allow the company to see your efforts.

In order to fully mobilize the suppliers' interest in participation, we have supplemented the external motivation in terms of activity form and rewards. like:

1. Participation in the selection is completely free, which motivates small and medium-sized enterprises to participate.

2. The selected suppliers will have the opportunity to attend the award ceremony dinner with 300+ developers. For suppliers, being able to communicate face-to-face with so many senior customers is a great opportunity for business layout and network expansion in the coming year.

(1) Participation of benchmark suppliers

Although there is no unified ranking standard in the industry (if there is, our event would be meaningless, haha), each industry will have its own ranking, but they are slightly different. So we first need to mobilize the top 30 suppliers to participate. Only smaller suppliers will have a herd mentality. As for the top two suppliers, although their participation may not be high at the beginning, if the top 5-30 suppliers participate, they will join one after another under pressure.

(2) Developer participation

Through our years of promotion experience, we know that where the developers are, there is the supplier's interest. Therefore, if all the big-name developers can participate in this event and actively recommend suppliers to participate in this event, they will naturally be able to attract most of the suppliers. In short, gaining the approval of the developer means gaining the approval of the supplier.

So, after this analysis, can we connect to these two types of core users? The answer is yes. After more than two years of operation , the supplier side has established connections with most of the industry's upstream and midstream customers through promotion and operation, and they are quite active, so it is not difficult to invite them to participate in the selection.

On the developer side, although the platform itself does not connect a large number of users, the head office has been deeply involved in the developer business for more than 20 years and has rich resources and a deep foundation, so it is not difficult to invite developers.

1. PC-level WeChat portal covers and promotes the entire network. (All channels of the operation team need to be mobilized)

2. Verbal invitation from core suppliers. (Need to mobilize sales staff to promote)

3. Invitation from the developer. (It is necessary to mobilize the customer resources of the headquarters and branches)

4. In addition, because the R&D resources required for landing pages and the design resources needed for event promotion are relatively easy to call upon, they can be considered later.

After careful consideration, we found that although it is impossible to mobilize it on our own, it can be done if we can get the attention and recognition of the company's leadership.

(1) Activity objectives

First determine the main direction of the activity (i.e. the main tone), set an overall goal for the activity, and then break down the goals into smaller pieces. Taking this selection activity as an example, the main direction is brand promotion activities, and the overall goal is to enhance the brand influence of the platform in the industry. The decomposition goals are:

a Number of companies participating in the selection

b Number of votes for the event

c. Increase in the number of followers on the company’s WeChat account

(2) Activity theme

The message we want to convey through this event can be a point of view or an image we want to create. Since this is basically the first time we are doing this event, what we want to convey is an evaluation of the competitiveness of industry suppliers, so we just name it that. (The second event had a more sophisticated theme, which I will not reveal here.)

(3) Target audience

When you first come up with the idea for this activity, you may only have a vague idea of ​​the activity target. But once you answer the first three questions of planning, it will become clear who the target of the event is. According to the previous analysis, the target of the selection activity is the suppliers from the entire industry, led by the top 30 suppliers in the industry.

(4) Activity time

Generally, you can choose holidays (such as Christmas and National Day), hot spots (such as Double 11), special company dates (such as anniversaries), etc., which can more or less play a role in leveraging the trend. Of course, if you cannot borrow any, you can choose a time that is convenient for users to participate. The selection activity is slightly different: there will be an offline award ceremony after the selection, and it must be before each company’s year-end assessment. Working backwards in this way, we determined the online selection activities.

(5) Activity form

In order to achieve the goals of the activity, we need to choose one or two most appropriate forms of activity. There are many forms of activities available for reference now, such as raffles, pre-sales, group purchases, interactive games , H5, prized surveys, etc. You can observe more good activities in your daily life to prepare for them, so that you can refer to them and apply them flexibly when planning your own activities.

(6) Promotional methods

Knowing who the participating users are, you can determine where they are and then find them through the appropriate channels. Generally, they are divided into self-owned channels (channels that the company has opened up after a long period of operation) and external channels (channels that require external forces to reach).

(1) Organize requirements documents

As an operations staff, you may not need to outline every step of the process as carefully as in the requirements document submitted by the product manager . But we also need to clearly communicate to the product manager what our goals and needs are. It mainly includes the demand background, the effect to be achieved, basic copywriting , reference pages, launch time,

(2) Confirm requirements with product managers

The requirements document is only a preliminary plan. The specific implementation process requires the product manager to intervene and provide professional advice. At this time, we need to have many discussions and communications with the product manager, optimize and adjust the copy, and finally determine the prototype, which is the low-fidelity solution.

(3) Determine the copy and design draft

After the low-fidelity is confirmed, the copywriter of the large event must discuss and decide with key people before entering the design stage. Otherwise, if the designer starts with the copywriting, the workload will be very large. We also need to keep in touch with the designer to ensure that the design can achieve the effect we want.

(4) Follow up on the launch and fix bugs

When the page enters the development stage, all we need to do is keep following up and keep abreast of the progress of research and development to ensure that it goes online on time. When the page is pre-launched, let everyone test bugs in the test environment from the user's perspective and fix them immediately.

(5) Page launch

After the page goes online, pay attention to the situation at all times, respond immediately to any problems, and do a good job of comforting users.

What we applied most in this activity was the herd mentality and the comparison mentality. For example, by using publicity that head customers have already registered, you can attract long-tail users to sign up. Use voting rankings to encourage users to continuously increase their votes, etc.

(2) Control the rhythm of publicity

Long-term activities need to create a sense of promotional rhythm. There are two ways to do this: marketing rhythm according to the promotional process, such as warm-up - official start - event climax - end of event; or small promotional activities under the main event to promote further user participation. For example, during the registration stage, users can be rewarded with red envelopes and shared on WeChat Moments to expand the publicity of the event and encourage more users to participate.

(3) Optimize promotional content in real time based on data analysis

When you do a certain type of activity for the first time, you may not know which words or copy can really impress users. At this time, you need to make multiple versions, monitor data, and iterate quickly. Gradually, you will find the users' high points, thereby increasing the participation and popularity of the event.

For example, after the selection activity is over, we need to create a selection result page, a user-specific ranking page, or a poster or (electronic) medal for users to spread the word. You can even write press releases to allow users to form a new media matrix on corporate Weibo and WeChat, etc.

(2) Activity effect display

It mainly includes data display, photo display, promotional screenshot display and so on. The dissemination of information by a single user may not be able to demonstrate how influential the event itself is, so the official needs to compile some good-looking data and beautiful materials to let the industry know the influence of our event.

(3) Undertake follow-up activities

Some companies’ activities may be continuous, such as Double 11 and Double 12. If we can use the "residual heat" of the previous event to "warm up" the next event, we can save a lot of effort in promotion. For activities like ours, there will be an offline award ceremony to follow up, which will promote offline activities while demonstrating online influence, and users will naturally be more enthusiastic about participating.

(2) Starting from the data

It is inaccurate to judge whether an activity is successful or not based solely on each person's subjective feelings. When formulating an activity plan, there are data goals and data decomposition goals. The activity results are compared with the goals set at the beginning to determine the target completion rate of the activity. Further analyze the reasons, whether it can be improved and how to improve it.

(3) Write a review summary and optimization plan

Reviewing is not just about having a meeting. It must be recorded. On the one hand, it can help to sort out our thinking, and on the other hand, it can be used as a reference the next time we do an activity.