6 tips for planning a big advertising campaign

More and more brands are willing to spend a large budget to run campaigns during major e-commerce promotion events such as 618 and Double 11. It's not just the e-commerce department investing in "direct/product/diamond" or influencers who bring goods, but also large-scale marketing activities planned by jointly investing with the brand marketing department.

How to plan this kind of big promotion campaign? It will not be like the "castle in the air" ideas planned by some advertising companies, nor will it be like the overly "down-to-earth" gameplay developed by some TP/MCN companies.

In today’s article, we will discuss more from the perspective of major strategic directions, and this is purely my personal experience.

Below, enjoy.

01. Use numbers as a guide to achieve your goals

If we look at it from the perspective of “quality” and “effectiveness”, this kind of big promotion campaign is obviously more inclined towards the “effectiveness” side. How to maximize the effect? ​​A very important point is to use data first to be targeted, which is also the biggest difference from planning general brand campaigns.

How can we use data to achieve targeted results? Usually we can start from two dimensions:

One is to infer the population gap through GMV, which is called "GTA disassembly" in the industry.

(For the specific operation of "GTA disassembly", you can go to the end of the article and join my knowledge planet get)

These population gaps are then allocated to different promotion channels, such as: "Direct Product Diamond", "Interactive City" within the site, RTB outside the site, off-site campaigns, etc. This way, you will know the target audience you need to focus on for this campaign, as well as the more quantitative target audience gap. This will help you avoid making random decisions when planning the media communication matrix for the campaign.

Second, use the data to see who this campaign focuses on.

For example, through the data bank, we can see that the user group aged 18-25 has the highest proportion in the A/I link, but the proportion in the later link P drops a lot. We can roughly infer that this group of people may like to browse our products on a daily basis, but due to price factors, the transaction conversion rate is relatively low. At this time, we can target them as the target audience for this campaign. Then, we can look at the insights of this group of people through labels with lower granularity, and the ideas they come up with will be much more effective.

02. It is crucial to create information increment for the campaign

The biggest reason why many big promotional campaigns are ineffective is that they fail to create incremental information.

It’s just a matter of taking the regular product selling points, or even the brand proposition, and finding an agency to use creativity to do it again. For consumers, there is absolutely no reason to place an order with you.

For example: If Coca-Cola tells you “Refresh yourself with me” on June 18th, will you have any special urge to buy it? Probably not.

During major promotional events like 618 and Double 11, the most important thing in marketing is actually to convey the "buying point", that is, to give consumers a reason to buy from you, and the strategy is to create incremental information for your campaign.

For example: Why do many brands release new products, co-branded products, and creative gift boxes during these major promotional events? This is the information increment.

For example: Why do more and more brands choose to announce new brand spokespersons with great fanfare during major promotional events? This is also creating incremental information.

Of course, the means of creating incremental information can also be through purely creative means, such as creating some gimmicky promotional mechanisms. For example, a few years ago, a brand came up with a big promotion idea of ​​“Free of charge if it rains”. The core purpose of information increment is to create a reason for consumers to buy from you now.

03. Maximize the matching of “people, goods and venues”

The so-called matching of "people, goods, and places" can be summed up in one sentence: allow different groups of people to buy what they want through corresponding touch points.

For example, a certain clothing brand has resources such as a popular star on the communication side and several top fashion KOLs who can be used for PR seeding. On the product side, its top products are the co-branded T-shirts in cooperation with League of Legends, as well as some new spring styles and regular products.

In this case, "people", that is, our target consumers this time, should be divided into three groups: celebrity fans, gaming crowd and regular brand consumers.

Next, we need to match them with the corresponding goods and venues in advance: For gamers, the product of choice is definitely the League of Legends co-branded T-shirt. In addition, we can also make some commemorative game peripherals or gift boxes related to the League of Legends to inspire their feelings. If the star happens to be a veteran player of the League of Legends, we can further deepen the story of the product. When it comes to the choice of "venue", it is also relatively clear, including gaming platforms, e-sports circle forums, gaming bloggers, etc.

For the regular crowd of the brand, we can further subdivide those who are promotion-oriented, that is, those who will come as long as the brand has a promotion, and those who really like the brand. For the former, you can choose some long-tail products or basic styles for discount promotion, and tell them that there are current promotions through Diamond Ads, Weitao and other touchpoints; for the latter, new spring models will be their main choice. You can ask top fashion KOLs to take some PR photos wearing the new spring styles, and then distribute them through Xiaohongshu and fashion KOLs to reach this group of people.

This is what we now call "fine-grained operation of the crowd". In fact, the example above is a relatively simple population segmentation. A more refined approach is to segment the population based on several major labels of the industry to which they belong, combined with consumer labels in the brand's own data bank or CRM database. This will get rid of the dilemma of inefficiency caused by the large granularity of the target consumer population used in traditional practices. For example, Tmall divides the clothing category into six major groups: luxury people, quality and practical people, mainstream fashion people, trendy people, shopaholics, and affordable people. For different groups of people, the choice of corresponding products is different, and the choice of field contacts is also different.

Therefore, before officially making an e-commerce campaign plan, we should first have a "fine-grained operation" table like the one below, and then match the goods and the venue based on the specific population.

04. Pay less attention to creative content production and more attention to media resources

I once wrote an article titled "Industry Dilemma: The Disconnect between Creative Content and Media Environment", which began by exposing a phenomenon that many brands encounter when doing campaigns, that is, they spend a lot of money to produce a variety of rich creative materials, but in terms of communication media, they only rely on their own Weibo and Weibo accounts to post them.

The result is only a pitiful single-digit interaction. I really don’t know what these brands are thinking.

Perhaps they naively overlooked a cruel truth, which is: behind all the creative screen-sweeping, the media resources have reached a certain threshold.

This is especially true for campaigns during major promotional events.

Don't spend a lot of budget on having advertising companies produce too many fancy creative materials, such as videos, posters, H5, offline, etc., but end up spending little money on communication media resources.

The smart approach is to focus on producing 1-2 lightweight creative assets, and then spend more budget on how to spread these 1-2 creative assets.

05. Focus on one traffic pool

In the above point, we talked about the need to minimize the production of various creative content materials. In fact, the same applies to the choice of communication positions: try to focus on one position and penetrate the traffic pool.

Think about it, during 618 and Double 11, the marketing and communication environment is already very noisy, and almost every brand is speaking out. At this time, if you distribute the limited budget to many positions, the effect will be even smaller.

So, instead of doing this, it is better to choose one traffic pool and try to invest in it.

Don’t worry about whether the group of people reached is too narrow. Basically, all the popular platforms now cover a sufficiently rich population. At most, you can just select a few more groups.

This is also more intuitive for later effect monitoring.

06. Combine the platform rhythm and strive for a climax in each stage

During e-commerce promotions, the platforms will launch their own marketing rhythms, such as: crowd accumulation, pre-sale, preheating, explosion, counter-marketing...

Most brands know to follow the rhythm of the platform, but this is not enough. It is better to plan a small climax for each stage. This ensures that your marketing campaigns have continuous exposure.

Take this year's Tmall 618 as an example. The period from May 25 to May 31 is the time to warm up the campaign. At this time, you can create a small climax through social buzz. The period from June 1 to June 3 is the start. At this time, you can create a small climax through concentrated media resources. From June 4 to June 15, you can maintain the popularity through some continuous check-in interactions. From June 16 to June 17, you can create a climax through celebrity variety show live broadcasts, etc.

Author: Pulang

Source: Planner2333