When planning a hit event, you need to pay attention to 3 issues

Activities are an important means of operation and have many functions. They can awaken silent users, attract new users , and increase the depth of product content . Therefore, many companies have dedicated teams responsible for activities. Even if there is no team of dozens of people to be responsible for it, there is a group of 2-3 people to plan and operate it.

Do you think there are routines in event operation ? Yes, there are, for example, a regular planning plan , and each company has its own traditional planned activities or similar activities held every month and every year . Are you saying there are no tricks in event operation? Sometimes it is really difficult to find a routine . The reason why there is no routine is that an innovative activity is very routine and requires a lot of trial and error. The form and content of the activity are new, so it depends on the coordination of the team to complete it. In this article, I will not go into details about the routines and plans for operating an event, because there are a lot of such articles on the Internet, and most of them are about the planning and operating routines of events. I will mainly talk about the control of details such as the key points of innovation activities and the problems that may arise in the implementation of the activities.

1. How to judge the feasibility of an activity

Generally, there is an idea before an activity takes shape. This idea may be the product of a team brainstorming session or it may be the product of an individual's fantasy. But no matter what, thoughts are the basis of all actions, and we allow many thoughts to exist. However, while allowing ideas to exist, we must also test whether the idea is feasible, because wild imagination is too exaggerated. If you don’t have the resources and technology to realize it , it will be useless. To test whether an idea is feasible, we need to analyze it from four aspects.

1. Competitive product analysis

The purpose of competitor analysis is not to copy competitors’ operational actions, but to analyze competitors’ strategies to see if there are any areas worth learning from and whether there are areas that need to be improved. If competitors have already planned similar activities before us, it doesn’t mean your idea is out of date. At least it lets you know that your idea is feasible. The second is to carefully study whether there are any areas that need to be improved in the previous activities. If there are any, don’t be afraid to delve deeper, because often the bugs they can’t think of are often the success of your ideas.

2. Think differently

You can indulge in erotic thoughts, but don’t overdo it, because once you get caught up in your own thoughts, it’s hard to extricate yourself. When we are planning an event, we often think about it ourselves first and then discuss it with the team. At this time, we have to think from the user's perspective about why this idea is attractive to users. Users are a group, and we often cannot represent typical users, so we don't know their real thoughts. At this time, you need to think from the other person's perspective, or do a simple survey. Alternatively, you can analyze some key information from user feedback, comments, complaints, and other information within the product. In short, what you need to remember is not to over-think yourself as a user, but to put yourself in their shoes and listen more to their opinions.

3. Resource scalability

Resources and activities can be likened to the relationship between fish and water. Resources are water, and activities are fish. Without water, the fish may just be like this. On the contrary, the richer the water is, the more movements the fish can make in the water. So when you fantasize about this idea, you should first think about how much resources the company can give you. This resource includes but is not limited to human resources, funds, third-party resources, etc.

Generally speaking, when planning an event, a company usually has resources such as manpower and budget, but the amount depends on the size of the event and the return you promise. Because once you invest more resources, you have to achieve better results, and often many people dare not guarantee that the activity will be good, so they have to do it even if the company gives them 100 or 1,000. Of course, the company can provide you with some of the resources for the event, but there are also many things you need to strive for in various departments and use your connections to attract third-party resources to join, so as to increase the scale and efficiency of the entire event.

4. Team recognition

The activity idea must be approved by the majority of people, otherwise you cannot carry it out. This is very crucial because an event is a team effort, not something you can do alone. Even if you can take care of everything, the results probably won't be good, because each person has a specific task. The most important thing is that a bystander sees more clearly than you. You still have to improve some of the bad aspects of this activity. Therefore, the higher the team's recognition, the more feasible the idea is.

2. 3 key points for a successful event

What are the criteria for defining a good campaign? I think it’s inseparable from these three key words : demand, creativity, and communication.

1. Demand

Let’s talk about needs first. According to Maslow’s needs analysis in humanistic theory, all humans have needs, which can be divided into levels from low to high: physiological needs, safety needs, social needs, respect needs and self-actualization needs.

For example, physiological needs are mainly the desire for food, warmth and sex; safety needs are mainly the need for protection and stability; social needs are mainly the need for a sense of belonging; respect needs are mainly the need for respect for personality; self-actualization is our highest level of human needs, mainly a need to realize self-ideals and realize potential.

For event operators, exploring the needs of target users becomes the first key task. Because as long as you grasp the needs correctly, your subsequent activities can proceed in line with what users want most.

For example, if our product is an e-commerce product, this group of target users themselves have physiological needs, namely needs in terms of food, clothing, housing and transportation. Then what we need to analyze next is how to make their demands in this regard stronger and grasp their "dark" side. The "darkness" here refers to the seven most primitive sins of mankind. In fact, we also talked about this in Chapter 4. The seven deadly sins mainly include pride, envy, wrath, sloth, greed, lust and gluttony.

And we see that actually every sin includes human beings. What is the main manifestation of this sin? For example, voyeurism is mainly due to users’ desire to spy on celebrities or their curiosity about their private lives. For example, we know that Fenda , which became popular in 2016, takes advantage of human curiosity. You only need to spend a few dollars to ask some big names questions, and others can also pay to eavesdrop on what the celebrity said to you.

For example, there is lust. Not to mention lust. In the current environment, Internet products like to play by the rules in their functional design or marketing activities . For example, Alipay ’s Campus Diary; and other micro-businesses use beautiful girl avatars when adding you on WeChat , in order to get you to chat with her for a while, and then you will buy her things.

For example, if the product we want to analyze is an e-commerce product, which mainly sells goods related to food, clothing, housing and transportation, then we should grasp the user's needs in this regard, that is, the mentality of being greedy for small profits. So we will set "traps" everywhere on the platform. For example, get 200 off for purchases over 500, 500 off for purchases over 1000, make a reservation for 99 yuan, grab a deal with 1 point, etc., all in order to get users to spend more money. The discount and flash sales events such as Tmall Double Eleven and JD 618 that we see every year actually take advantage of consumers’ greed.

Therefore, after grasping the psychological needs of users, this activity is not far from success. After all, activities need people to participate, right?

2. Creativity

The second keyword is creativity. Why should users participate in your activities instead of other activities and continue to participate in your activities? Maybe it’s because your activities are novel, fun and exciting, the service is good and high-end, which gives me something to talk about with my friends. These are the reasons why an activity is recognized by users and they are willing to participate in it.

I mainly summarized two reasons: the first is that the threshold is low enough. The threshold is an important way to screen users, but now many users prefer to participate in activities with simple rules and not too much verbosity, because such activities do not take too much time to participate. In this era of redundant information, whoever helps users save time will seize the business opportunity, so we try to lower the threshold of the activity as much as possible to allow more people to participate. For example, Jianshu held a cute pet picture and text competition in March. You can participate by just taking one or a group of cute pet photos, or hand-drawing one or a group of cute pet comics. This participation threshold is extremely low for users of Jianshu, which can mobilize users to participate to the greatest extent.

The second reason is that this event can become a topic of conversation between me and my friends, which is the concept mentioned by Jonah Berger, a marketing professor at the Wharton School of Business, in his book "Contagious": social currency. This means that after I participate in your event, I can discuss this topic with my friends and family, and this will be something to talk about.

For example, we participate in the Double Eleven and JD.com 618 activities, which have almost become a major festival for Chinese people, so you also go shopping at this time, and you can discuss the pros and cons of this event with others.

3. Dissemination

The third keyword is communication. Why would users be willing to help promote your event after participating in it or seeing it? Here we have a propagation factor involved.

Communication factors refer to what factors in this activity touch the hearts of users and make them actively forward and spread the activity. Communication factors mainly include showing off, identification, personality, interest, reciprocity, etc. Once these factors are recognized by users, they will actively help you spread them for free. We all say that the most important thing in marketing is user word of mouth. So you can see that marketers are trying to understand users’ psychology, to see what users like to spread and what they don’t like to spread? For example, why are so many people forwarding Mi Meng’s articles, such as “To the Bitch”? Because the people who forwarded the article all have several bitches in their hearts, and Mi Meng's article just happened to touch their nerves, so it resonated with them. Many people said that after reading the book, they felt very refreshed and felt that the author spoke from his true nature. This is the identification factor.

We have seen that Didi , Uber, Mobike and ofo invite friends to register, and the two of them can get a free ride or a certain amount of discount, which is to capture the reciprocal psychology of users. Since you have invited your friends, both of you can enjoy the discount at the same time, so why not? It can also enhance the friendship among friends.

3. Issues that need to be paid attention to during the implementation of the activity

1. Keep an eye on these data during the activity execution process

Judging from the results of the event, the core data is nothing more than how many fans the event attracted or how many fans were converted . However, during the event, some data need to be dynamically monitored, such as participation in the event page, channel sources, and channel conversion rates . Although these data may not be the focus of our attention after the event, the longer the event cycle, the more critical these data are. Because the quality of this data is directly related to the results of your entire activity. For example, I held a promotional event and placed ads on many channels, but which channel was more effective? If I didn’t pay attention to this data, I might not know which channels I should increase my investment in, and which channels I should abandon or optimize my landing pages . If you analyze this data, you can use it to drive your decisions.

2. Continuously optimize activities through data

Let’s take promotional activities as an example. The ultimate goal of a promotion is to sell goods and achieve sales volume, so the selection of products for promotions is very important. This needs to be understood through product analysis . Through product analysis, you can understand the overall sales situation of the website's products, select products with high user browsing, clicks, and conversions, and distinguish which are hot-selling products and which are bundled products.

For example, through product analysis, it is found that product A has the highest number of views and secondary page jumps, which means that users are interested in this product. Furthermore, the conversion rate will be high, so this product can be considered a hot-selling product and participate in promotional activities. Product C has a low number of views, but its second-bounce rate is higher than that of Product B. At this time, you should consider whether there is a problem with the product, such as the product content is not detailed enough. At this time, you can consider optimizing the product introduction and see the effect. If the second jump is improved after optimization, then product C is also one of the hot-selling products. Product B can be considered as a bundled product.

3. Collect user feedback and user information

Sometimes the landing page or the overall participation in the event cannot be seen officially, but there may be some questions in the user experience , including that not all users can participate smoothly when participating in the event, and there may be problems of one kind or another. At this time, a channel for user feedback should be provided. For example, if you are doing a new WeChat follower campaign, the feedback channel may be the WeChat background input. You should always pay attention to the message page and pay attention to the problems and suggestions reported by users. Once users collectively report the same problem, you as an operator should start to pay attention to it, because this may not be a problem with a certain phone or network, but may be a loophole in our settings. At this time, we must urgently check and improve it.

Planning an event is not difficult, but planning a hit event is rare. Event operation also requires feeling, but this feeling can be derived from practice. Think more, observe more, and practice more, so that the planned activities will have "depth", which is also the basis for becoming a hit event.