Essential information for APP promotion and operation: the most comprehensive and complete online event planning guidance program!

Event operation is an explosive operation method carried out to achieve goals in a short period of time. It is an important operation method in Internet product operations and a professional skill that all operators must master in their careers. Event operation is divided into three steps: planning, execution and summary. Today I will talk to you about event planning .

Three steps to event planning:

Identify a clear purpose for the event

There is a fundamental difference between a clear activity purpose and a vague activity direction. A clear activity purpose must be a quantifiable number, while a vague activity direction can be summarized by words such as attracting new customers , retention , and promoting conversions .

There are many benefits to clarifying the purpose of the activity

A clear goal is the first step in event operation, and the goal is the guideline for all subsequent operational decisions.

Operators always think that they are quarreling with each other every day, but in fact, everyone is a colleague, so there is nothing that cannot be discussed nicely. When we have made clear the purpose of the activity, when we start to argue, the purpose of the activity becomes an important basis for everyone to argue. In short, clear goals also help us resolve differences and make relatively reasonable decisions during operations.

How clear should we be?

Goals need to be expressed in numbers and can be quantified. For example, "increasing the number of new registered users" is not a clear goal; a clear goal should be "introducing 1,000 new registered users within three weeks, and the average cost of introducing each user is less than 50 yuan."

How to set clear goals

Identify target users and product features

The participants of the event must match the user portrait of the product. It is difficult to satisfy everyone. Clearly defined and segmented user groups will help us set the right goals.

Identify the current life cycle of the product

The operational objectives of different product life cycles are different. During the product introduction period, we mainly introduce seed users and take care of their user experience; during the growth period, we need to focus on introducing new users who meet the positioning; during the product maturity period, we must pay attention to product monetization. One example that I have a particularly profound experience with is the changes in Didi Chuxing's activities over the past two years, from large coupons in the beginning to discount coupons, to later coupons restricted to carpooling use only, and to today when coupons can only be exchanged for points. In different product life cycles, the way the same profit-sharing activity works will change accordingly.

Research competitors and industry conditions

Every activity launched by an Internet product is the result of careful consideration by Internet people, and other people’s activities often provide guidance for our planning of activities. Look at the effectiveness of other people's activities. If the results are good, you can use it as a reference. If the results are not good, you can directly avoid the cost of trial and error. You can also see what pitfalls can be avoided. The shared bike war broke out in the second half of 2016. OFO and Mobike referred to each other's activities and set off round after round of free craze.

OFO and Mobike have very similar operating methods

If so, you can look at the past reviews.

We are always growing through trial and error, and referring to past events can help us set goals for new events.

Determine the resources you have

Resource Type

In event operations, we usually need the following three types of resources, namely money (budget), promotional resources, and human resources. Generally speaking, money can be used to purchase prizes, purchase external traffic , and conduct external marketing . Some offline activities also require money for venue layout. Promotional resources usually refer to internal promotional resources, such as the APP’s startup screen, pop-up windows, banners, major advertising spaces , etc. Human resources usually refer to designers, front-end and back-end engineers, test engineers, and operations personnel themselves.

Arrange in advance and avoid peak hours

A year's plan begins with spring. At the beginning of each year, we will roughly know which fixed festivals there are and which confirmed hot spots we can use for activities. We must make advance reservations for resources (especially human resources). At the same time, we must also achieve staggered use of resources. Some activities that have been scheduled in advance or some long-term activities can be arranged for development when resources are relatively abundant.

How to deal with insufficient resources

When resources are insufficient, we have two solutions. The first is to increase available resources . Generally speaking, conducting joint promotion activities with other platforms is a good way to borrow external resources. For example, the gifts used by globalmarket.com in exhibition promotions come from their partner manufacturers.

Globalmarket will give these handbags as gifts to the participants, and some scavengers will resell the collected handbags.

The second idea is to achieve a more reasonable allocation of resources, that is, to use efforts where they are most effective, such as raising the threshold for winning prizes and changing general awards into lotteries. The rational allocation of resources is also reflected in human resources. If some sudden hot spots are considered to be highly consistent with product and user positioning, resources can be allocated to them first. But once the hotspot is over, it is better to give up than to waste these resources.

The raw materials of good activities

There are many activities that are popular among the people, but they all have something in common. When planning an event, you might as well move towards these directions, and perhaps your event will become a good event.

Related

There must be a close connection between the activity and the product, and the user profile of the activity should be closely related to the user profile of the product. Not only will those irrelevant activities have little effect, but more seriously, they will also cause the loss of the core users of the product.

Here is an example of a rebate: Plateno Travel APP held an event where guests who booked a hotel were offered free concert tickets. Plateno focuses on mid-to-low-end economy hotels, with the mainstream users being 20-30 years old. However, the free concert tickets it offers are indeed tickets to a band called Skylight, which is composed of 50-year-old men. We should try to avoid such operating methods in our daily operations. Not only does it waste resources, it will also disgust mainstream users.

Simple

If you want as many users as possible to participate in your event, “simplicity” is very important. A few years ago, the activity of "retweet to win an iPhone" was very popular on Weibo. The user operation threshold was very low. You only needed to click to forward to participate in the activity. When this idea was not overused, it was indeed an excellent and simple brand promotion activity.

Epinephrine

A great campaign should evoke emotions in users and give them a sharp adrenaline rush. Breaking the rules and doing unexpected things can make users feel surprised; creating suspense can make users feel nervous; and generating emotional resonance can make users feel moved. Last year, Wu Yifan's participation in the National Commando h5 that went viral on WeChat Moments was a successful activity that quickly boosted users' adrenaline secretion by breaking the rules and using celebrity effect.

User Profitable

When it comes to profitability, users need not only material incentives, but also spiritual incentives. Material incentives are easy to understand. For example, coupons and cash back are direct material incentives. Spiritual incentives can be social currency (commonly known as talking points), showing off capital, etc. I will not describe the material incentives here, but I can talk about social currency. Rankings are an important source of bragging rights for users. By introducing rankings at the end of the Aircraft Wars mini -game on WeChat , users have something to brag about in their social circles. This is a form of social currency.

Trustworthy

Credibility is not only reflected in the credibility of the platform itself, but also takes into account the use of activity copy . Always check whether you are exaggerating, whether you are over-consuming user expectations, and whether the corresponding rewards are sent to users on time.

lively

Xiaomi's book "Sense of Participation" has long occupied a major position on the corporate management bookshelf. If an activity can make users passing by feel immersive, then this is indeed a plus point for the activity. In simple terms, "sense of participation" means "lively". I remember that every time there was a big sale, we would always revise a text message dozens of times to notify users to participate. The director always told us that there was no visual effect. Later, I gradually understood that the so-called visual effect of a big sale is this kind of "liveliness".

The dream sprint list of Kuaiduobao makes the whole product have a lively and winning atmosphere

It should be noted that these materials that constitute a wonderful event are not all necessary, but we can try to rely on them during the planning process. There is no need to randomly implant these elements into the Internet. At the same time, these materials can complement each other. For example, when material incentives are sufficient, people will be willing to participate in activities that are not so simple.

Two core elements of the activity: time node & activity theme

All activities must have a reason. Users will find it difficult to accept benefits without explaining the reason. We must find this reason and then combine it with the product. This “reason” is our first point of contact with users. It is very important and is the core of event planning.

Time Node

festival

There are two types of festivals. One is the festivals that existed before the Internet appeared, such as New Year's Day, Chinese New Year, Qingming Festival, Dragon Boat Festival, Mid-Autumn Festival, Labor Day, Children's Day, Women's Day, April Fool's Day, Christmas , etc.; the other is the festivals created after the Internet appeared, such as 419, 520, 618, 1111, and the anniversary celebrations of major companies.

There are also some that are clearly not festivals, but are forced to be festivals, such as "Color TV Festival", "Beauty Festival", and "Apple Annual Discount Day".

Hot Spots

There are hot topics every day, including social hot topics, sports news hot topics, and entertainment news hot topics. As long as they are strongly related to the products, we can use them to play with them. For example, the promotion effects of major hot topics such as the Oscars , the World Cup, and the Olympics are no less than those of festivals. For example, activities such as the World Cup, guessing and quizzing in exchange for red envelopes can both fit the hot topics and be related to e-commerce products.

Sometimes, we can predict some hot spots . For example, during the Olympics, Sun Yang's competition was a hot spot. The time of the competition has been set. We can prepare two posters about Sun Yang winning the championship or Sun Yang's regretful failure, and send them out on Weibo and WeChat official accounts as soon as Sun Yang's hand touches the edge of the swimming pool. When it comes to chasing hot topics, whoever is the fastest will seize the initiative. If you wait until Sun Yang wins the championship before arranging the design and sending it out, your article will be drowned out by a crowd of promotional posters that take advantage of the trend.

However, when chasing hot topics, you must know what to do and what not to do. I will share with you in detail in the "Public Opinion Risks" section later in this article.

The author once experienced something that affected his entire career because he became obsessed with chasing hot topics.

Grab traffic

The idea of ​​grabbing traffic is often used in e-commerce website activities. The logic of grabbing traffic is roughly like this: when some super-large platforms hold super-large events, the traffic of the entire network will increase. Set the climax of your own activities during the warm-up period of other people's activities, and divert users from other platforms who are impatient to wait to your own platform.

For example, from my personal experience, JD.com’s 618 event is a well-known event, and I also followed the crowd to go to the JD.com website to take a look, but I found that some products cannot be purchased immediately. So I moved to Vipshop and found that although the product was not as cheap as on JD.com, it was still a low price I could accept, so I placed an order without hesitation. In this case, Vipshop cleverly placed the climax of its mid-year promotion on June 16.

Activity Theme

The purpose of the activity is the father, and the time point is the mother. Once the two of them are determined, having a child becomes the theme of the activity. The theme of an event is a copy determined based on the purpose and time node of the event. We need to write copy that is attractive, and it must be simple, unique and in line with the positioning. There is nothing special about writing copy. Just write more, think more, and produce more drafts.

Many friends will spend a lot of effort on the theme of the event when they just start to operate the event. The reason is that they regard this as the first step in event operation. In fact, the theme of the event should not be determined at the beginning of the operation. As you can see, my article is so long just to discuss the theme of the event with you. There are really a lot of things to prepare before formulating the theme, but once you are ready, the theme will come together as smoothly as parents giving birth to a child.

Activity form and implementation platform

A photo game for elementary school students that generates photos of themselves

Tencent Animation H5 tailor-made for Xue Zhiqian

Activity Schedule

Each activity will have its own rules and processes. In order to avoid legal risks, the rules of each activity will be written in great detail. However, users do not have the patience to read long paragraphs of activity rules in detail, so our activity process needs to have two output forms.

Activity process - up to three steps

As mentioned above, "simplicity" is one of the raw materials that make up an excellent activity. If the steps for user participation in an activity cannot be described in three steps, then the activity cannot be called "simple." Different from the detailed "activity rules", the activity process is the main content of educating users on how to participate in the activity. It should be concise, combining pictures and text, so that users can understand how to play your activity in the shortest time.

NetEase Kaola used three pictures and three lines of text to explain how to play this friend invitation activity.

Detailed activity rules - as detailed and concise as legal terms

The most incisive thing about the legal provisions is that there is not a single word of nonsense in them, but there is also not a single redundant word. For the detailed "activity rules", we need to refer to the writing method of legal clauses and fully inform all the details (including the lottery algorithm) so that the legal department can review them and avoid legal risks.

Lowering the barrier to participation

"Simplicity" is mentioned here again. Simplicity is not only reflected in the simplicity of activity design, but also in the simplicity of user participation. The above article has mentioned the phenomenon of Weibo being flooded with reposts of the lottery. In order to make it easier for users to participate, we can postpone some complicated processes . Extremely annoying operations such as registration or login can be postponed to after the user has participated in the activity game, and needs to claim prizes, coupons, or even complete the order before registering or logging in.

Here I would like to mention the "Law of Conservation of Energy". Many times we want users to save as much effort as possible when operating, so we have to put in more effort during development. To strike a balance between the two is the operational experience that we operators need to slowly accumulate in our daily work.

Gamify and task your processes

The gamification of events is another article in detail. Here we will just talk about some basic elements of gamification to help you get inspiration in the event planning process.

Construct an addictive system based on the GAME principle:

• Goal is a qualitative task based on consumer behavior, such as logging in, sharing, and purchasing. Each time you complete a task, you will earn some points.
• Allow (rule), the rule is how to get points, how to add points
• Medal (award), members are matched with discounts and privileges after reaching a certain level or completing an event
• Echo (resonance) encourages sharing, comparison and showing off

Like the membership clubs that many e-commerce platforms have, the points system and task system therein are all a series of games.

Beware of Operational Black Swan

Black swan refers to an extremely unpredictable and unusual event that usually causes a chain reaction of negative reactions or even subversion in the market. ——Definition from Baidu Encyclopedia

Public opinion risk

As mentioned above, when chasing hot topics, we must do what we should do and what we shouldn’t do. You can follow entertainment hot spots, but it’s best not to touch the negative aspects of celebrities, otherwise the die-hard fans will attack you and the result will be counterproductive. Never touch political hot spots. There used to be a product called Fanfou, which touched things it shouldn’t have touched and missed the best opportunity to rise.

Security Risks

For operators, the most common security risk is the swiping of event red envelopes. Restricting IP and verifying mobile phone numbers are common methods used by operators. Before the event goes online, we can communicate with the security team in detail to avoid security risks during the event.

Legal risks

We should understand the Advertising Law in detail and know some words that we may often use but cannot use, such as "best", "first", "national level", etc. When we encounter some words that we feel may be risky, we must take the initiative to ask our legal colleagues and not to cause serious consequences for the sake of momentary pleasure.

Systemic Risk

Considering the high concurrency caused by the lottery leading to system paralysis, as well as the negative impact of sudden system failures during the event, emergency plans need to be made before the event begins, and the person responsible for the accident needs to be understood so that once an accident occurs, the person responsible can be quickly located and resolved.

Other possible pitfalls

When I was in charge of event operations for the first time, I fell into four or five traps at once. I defined these traps as: asymmetric information flow .

The first is about definition. The purpose of our activity is to attract new users, so what are new users? Is this a newly registered user or a user who has newly registered and placed an order? The second is about information transmission. The product selection changes on the activity page were not notified to the front-end and back-end development. The product selectors sent the updated product ID via email, but the developers basically did not pay attention to the mailbox.

So, when executing the activity for the second time. After all activity planning is completed, the requirements need to be defined in detail in the document. All documents, interactive drafts, and design drafts related to this activity must be placed in the same shared folder. (Later, I also learned to use wiki or Tower to notify relevant personnel when information is modified)

Data monitoring and statistics

At the beginning of this article, I told you about goal setting. Event operation is a very goal-oriented operation method. The most intuitive way to judge whether we have achieved a certain goal is to observe the data. Data is like a report card from a test when you were a kid. If you get good grades, it can boost your confidence; if you get bad grades, you need to understand where you did not do well and keep working on it.

After an event is run, we need to understand the drainage effect of each channel , user participation and financial situation. There are many items of each type of data indicators. Some data need us to continuously monitor during the event operation, while some data only need to be counted and reviewed after the event.

So, what data do we need to monitor continuously? Generally speaking, there are two types of data that need to be actually monitored: one is data that is highly relevant to the purpose of the activity, and the other is data that is highly relevant to the cost of investment.

Core data: If you want to increase sales, then the average order value and the number of orders placed by users are the core data; if you want to increase the content consumption of content consumers, then the average daily reading volume and the number of content consumer devices are the core data.

Data that is highly relevant to the cost of investment: For example, the user conversion rate of the drainage channel needs to be continuously monitored. Once it is found that the input-output ratio of a certain channel is very low, it must be shut down in time to avoid huge losses in the future. And prize inventory also needs to be monitored in real time, and the winning probability and inventory can be adjusted at any time.

Of course, regarding data monitoring and statistics, we’d better continue to communicate with colleagues in the data analysis department and refer to their opinions. After all, in the workplace, it is very disgusting to take over other people’s business.

Planning Documents

Like thinking about the theme of the event, planning documents are also a huge obstacle that many event operators encounter when they get started. They generally mistakenly believe that the event planning document is all there is to event operations and invest too early in writing the planning document. In fact, after careful consideration of the dimensions mentioned above, the event planning document is just a summary of the above scattered ideas.

What should event planning documents include?

Here I use a picture to summarize what the event planning document needs

It is best to present the event planning document in the form of PPT, because we must hold various meetings in the early stages of event planning, and using PPT can better display it. At the same time, when we make PPT, we will frame the content we want to express and express it more concisely, which can reduce the reading cost of colleagues from various departments.

As a special reminder, event operations involve cross-team communication. Certain sections of event planning need to be developed together with other teams. For example, the interaction model needs to be discussed with the design team, the monitoring indicators and statistical indicators need to be discussed with the data team, and the detailed rules and customer service notifications need to be communicated with the customer service team.

Final Thoughts

Event planning is basically over here, and the next step will be a bigger challenge - event execution, which I will continue to discuss with you in subsequent articles.

Event operation is really fun. After experiencing events big and small, you will find that you are becoming more and more interesting, and your relationship with colleagues from various departments is getting better and better. Moreover, the explosive growth nature of event operations will also make you full of confidence in your future operations career.

Mobile application product promotion service: APP promotion service Qinggua Media advertising

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