When doing activities, you must make clear these 3 points

Through the collation and analysis over the past few months, I have summarized some key nodes in the event planning process. The design and planning of these nodes have a great impact on the results.

I summarize these key nodes as: the positioning of the activity, the starting point, and the communication chain. The following aspects will be explained and elaborated in detail through cases.

1. Positioning of the activity

Operations personnel should all know the saying "Don't do an event just for the sake of doing an event". This is telling us that when doing an event, we first need to know what its purpose is, rather than just doing it blindly.

In the subsequent event planning and design, we must always maintain the direction of this "purpose". In some of the activities I have experienced, I was attracted by an idea during the planning stage after brainstorming, so I began to think based on this idea. As a result, I thought for a long time and found that I had deviated from the original purpose.

Among the activities I organized, the positioning of the activities is divided into three major categories: brand marketing activities, warm-up activities, and main activities.

Brand marketing activities

The purpose of brand marketing activities is to build user awareness of the brand through various forms of activities. The results are usually not conversions or purchasing behavior, but more focused on dissemination.

For example, during the 618 period, NetEase Yanxuan "renovated" an elevator room in Beijing's China World Trade Center and transformed it into a snail home. All the items used in the elevator room were from NetEase Yanxuan, which attracted many passers-by to take photos and post them on WeChat Moments . At the same time, a short video was released with the keywords "snail home" and "good life is not that expensive" to highlight its brand value, let users know, and form an awareness of the brand.

Warm-up activities

There are two purposes of warm-up activities: to accumulate potential energy for the main activity and increase the scope of dissemination, and to familiarize oneself with the form of the main activity in advance and reduce the cost of understanding.

The former method is usually more crude, appearing in as many scenes in your life as possible, placing subway advertisements, and using H5 to spread publicity. Taking the 618 preheating stage this year as an example, as early as a month before 618, such posters began to appear in various subway stations: Break the busyness and enjoy the good things.

At the same time, a 618 promotional video was released with the same theme of "Break the busyness and enjoy the good things". Through offline subway scenes and online video scenes, we build momentum in all directions, create topics and distribute coupons to accumulate potential energy for the main activities.

Similarly, NetEase Cloud Music carried out a marketing campaign during the graduation season. It first launched an interactive topic on Weibo - "What can two fingers do?" This slightly dirty topic attracted a lot of attention and comments, and also aroused the curiosity of many people to continue paying attention.

The latter approach is to reduce the user's understanding cost through a "small-scale preview" of the main activity, making it easier to join the activity. For example, on Double Eleven every year, Taobao stores inflate their deposits. Before the 618 event, the digital, menswear, and sports events are held, and users are informed of the specific methods by reducing prices in advance and distributing coupons to ensure that the potential energy explodes on the day of the event.

Another example is JD.com ’s 618 pre-heating event this year. The format itself is to compete for red envelopes with speed, but the highlight is the presentation of pre-heating content. The timeline of the main venue clearly shows the discounted categories corresponding to each time period, and there is a "manual" style 618 guide to view, so that users know when to come to JD.com to get the biggest discount.

Main Activities

The main activities vary in form according to the attributes of different products and user groups. To increase the frequency of product use, you can organize activities by giving rewards to multiple behaviors after a single behavior, such as Mobike 's card-carrying car, which has some kind of reward for collecting x cards; to increase the popularity of content, you can improve the quality of the content itself, create a sense of scarcity and a threshold for receiving it, such as sharing the app to Moments to receive limited audio; by allowing users to actively receive limited quantities instead of giving them away for free, you can increase the efficiency of using coupons and the conversion effect, such as Tiantian Fruit Garden using a nine-square grid picture to distribute coupons, different pictures correspond to different copywriting and coupons, attracting users to click multiple times, and different copywriting will increase the desire to buy (as shown below)

2. Starting point of the activity

The starting point of an activity is the initial entry point of an activity. The effects brought about by different entry points may be completely different. For example, a public account for parents may be very popular for showing off their children’s achievements, but if it is transplanted to a public account for students and turned into showing off their report cards, the effect may plummet. Similarly, for a community UGC activity that requires users to comment and write their own stories, if the user group they target is more likely to lurk than post, the effect of the activity may be very poor.

From the above, we can see that the starting point of an activity is strongly related to the style of the product itself and the attributes of the target user group.

A considerable proportion of the users are parents themselves. American-style education is also very unfamiliar to Chinese people, so the quality of the content itself is very high. Compared with such high-quality content, the behavior of saving screenshots and forwarding them to Moments is simply not worth mentioning. Parents are very willing to forward them. At the same time, there are a large number of parent users with the same attributes in their Moments, which extends the dissemination chain. Therefore, the starting point of this activity has a great positive effect on both dissemination and conversion.

Here’s a personal counterexample: DingTalk’s subway marketing ads targeting entrepreneurs

This wave of marketing advertisements launched by DingTalk in subways mainly focuses on the hardships of entrepreneurship , and promotes an emotional attitude of "entrepreneurship is hard, but persistence is cool" through selling misery and chicken soup. First of all, as a 2B product, companies must think rationally when making decisions and will not choose you just because they are moved or emotional. Secondly, there will be entrepreneurs or bosses in the subway scene, but they must be a minority. The majority of users must be office workers. The activity cannot reach the target users, and in the end it can only move yourself and make you happy.

When considering the starting point of an activity, the first thing to determine is: who are the target users of the activity, what are their prominent group attributes, and then design the activity process and form based on these attributes. Most of NetEase Yanxuan's users are office workers in first- and second-tier cities who desire a quality life but whose purchasing power is not that strong. Therefore, the "snail house" and "value for money" elements in the previous World Trade Center elevator marketing campaign hit the nail on the head.

Another example, with the hot trend of overseas travel, the consumption capacity of Chinese people has increased. However, when traveling abroad, due to cultural, language, insufficient preparation time and other reasons, there are great pain points in booking hotels, looking up travel guides, chartering cars, etc. This group of advertisements placed by Royal Charter at airports and subways focuses on solving these pain points: "Chinese", "Take you to play by car", "No travel guide required".

3. Transmission Chain

Whether an activity is successful, in addition to having a good starting point, it also needs a strong communication chain that can reach more outer-circle users - the first-level users are the target users you can reach first, the second-level users can be understood as potential users of the product, who can become target users through conversion, and the third-level and above users can basically be understood as spectators.

When we talk about an activity or marketing that goes viral, we cannot just look at how many people forwarded it in the circle of friends, but how many third-level users forwarded it. A viral activity will fail if it does not reach the third-level users. This point is more meaningful for Internet practitioners to think about: because your network of relationships consists of Internet practitioners, an activity is usually spread by these people, that is, first- and second-level users. This kind of screen-sweeping can only be said to have an impact within the circle. When you see that your elementary school classmates and high school teachers have started to forward it, it can be considered a qualified screen-sweeping activity.

Let’s take an example of a viral event that just happened today - Tencent Charity’s “Children’s Gallery”. For one yuan, you can buy a painting by a disabled child or a mentally ill person and save it as a wallpaper. First of all, the word “charity” is a positive point for everyone and someone wants to forward it. Secondly, the cost of one yuan is very low, so why not use one yuan to express your kindness to others? Compassion, public spirit, extremely low participation cost and project transparency made this event a huge hit, with a conservative estimate of tens of millions of views.

Another event that has swept the screen - New World View’s 4-hour escape from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou . In the communication chain, the first leverage point was created by stimulating the dissatisfaction of office workers in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou with their current lives, excessive pressure and desire to escape, coupled with the purchase of air tickets and their longing and yearning for unknown places. Then, through live broadcasts and discussions on major media platforms, the topic fermented and reached users at a higher level.

Although it is rare to experience a dissemination volume of tens of millions or even hundreds of millions, the concept of "communication chain" should be taken into consideration in the planning and design of activities - how to find some leverage points to leverage more people, and at which key nodes of communication to set some behaviors to strengthen the dissemination of the activity, this is a very important thinking.

Strictly speaking, this is not an event planning article with a rigorous logical structure. This article only selects three relatively important key nodes - the positioning, starting point, and communication chain of the event, and uses some cases to illustrate the things and thoughts that need to be considered in these areas.

Remember that copying these routines will not make your next event go viral, nor will it allow you to “spread to hundreds of thousands of users at zero cost.” Instead, take these key nodes into consideration during future event planning stages. Perhaps the next time or the tenth time, you will create a viral event.