Four ways of thinking to teach you how to plan an event that will go viral on WeChat Moments

Why can some activities spread spontaneously without being triggered? Why do some activities require a lot of marketing costs to promote them? Why do some users see an activity and click on it but nothing happens afterwards?

How can we organize an activity that will quickly go viral on WeChat Moments at a low cost?

Perhaps you are already clear about all the elements of planning an event: background, goals, themes, forms, content, rules (low threshold, short path, wide dissemination, heavy rewards), objects, time, and channels , but you still cannot come up with an activity that stimulates users to share and spread the word.

Through the analysis and summary of more than 100 WeChat Moments screen-sweeping activities in 2016, this article finally found some highly applicable rules and taught you the methodology of planning screen-sweeping activities.

1. User demand thinking

1. Plan activities to suit human nature

The founder of Linkedin once said: A good product and operation must cater to one of the seven deadly sins of human nature . Human nature is a psychological attribute that people generally possess. Generally speaking, human characteristics are the key words to portray a character. Product operation activities are all centered around the needs of a set of characters portrayed by human characteristics. Therefore, only by deeply understanding human characteristics can we carry out activities that cater to user needs in a targeted manner.

There have been summaries of human nature in China and abroad for a long time:

• The seven deadly sins of human nature: pride, envy, wrath, laziness, greed, gluttony, and lust;
• The three poisons in Buddhism: greed, anger, and ignorance, namely greed, hatred, and ignorance.

• Arrogance: conceit, contempt for others, sense of superiority, and pride. This is commonly seen in marketing activities that involve quarrels, such as the price war between JD.com and Suning , and the quarrel between Uber and Shenzhou. In order to satisfy users’ sense of superiority and privilege, activities such as vanity and ranking competitions are used to put users in a high position. Jealousy: others have certain resources or characteristics that you don’t have, comparison, and dissatisfaction with yourself. The operational strategy that arouses user jealousy is manifested in comparison, such as the slogan of the Golden Wine advertisement: My daughter gave it to me, if you want to drink it, ask your son to buy it; and there are also activities on Valentine's Day that mock single people and show affection to single people.
• Rage: refers to violent and uncontrolled anger, often accompanied by cursing. For example, Ma Rong's cheating incident, during the period of tension in Sino-Japanese relations, activities that used public anger to boycott and suppress Japanese products, and vented users' emotions - beating product managers , etc.
• Laziness: Just wanting to do simple things, or even not wanting to do anything. The activities include functions such as lazy listening, one-click ordering, one-click cleaning and acceleration, etc. The process is simple and easy to enter, or VIP payment does not require completing specified operations, such as forwarding to Moments, taking screenshots and specifying the number of friends to invite.
• Greed: Desire without satisfaction. Free taxi rides, one cent for the first takeout order, free food and trial, group buying, flash sales, red envelopes, coupons, buy one get one free, raffles, free shipping, one dollar treasure hunt, zero dollar shopping, free mobile phone for financial management, etc. During the annual Double Eleven shopping spree, online disk products give away online disk space that many users don’t need.
• Taotie: the desire to eat. Doing e-commerce means selling pictures and planning packaged food at the content level; Liangpin Shop’s snack giveaway event and Le Chun’s early tasting registration event. There are also angles related to preventing obesity and eating healthier, such as cooking competitions, food festivals, specialty festivals, live cooking, factory production line visits, and testing whether it is suitable for two people to eat together.
• Lust: The love for colors such as green, yellow, long and short, and the temptation to be aroused by sexual desire between men and women, in short, it refers to good-looking people and things. Beauty community, Caoliu community, live show, WeChat Momo, beauty products, Maopu breast competition, school beauty and model competition, photography, film, singing competition and other activities.
• Vanity: An abnormal social emotion that people display in order to gain honor and attract general attention. QQ level system, medal system, red, yellow, green and purple diamond lighting, QQ show, spending money to buy privileges, skills, skins, WeChat sports rankings, game level rankings, cute baby voting, and various pretentious picture generation activities.
• Peeping: observing secretly, understanding privacy, and having a gossipy mentality. Anonymous complaints on Wumi, Yik Yak, and Maimai, test the degree of understanding between two people H5, let friends anonymously evaluate activities, and find out who has browsed your circle of friends.

Positive human qualities commonly used in operational activities: justice, compassion, love, gratitude, love, persistence, spirit of contract, sharing, righteousness, etc.

Examples of activities: " Luo Yixiao , stop right there", "Luo Yufeng: Asking for blessings and encouragement", moral kidnapping such as "If you don't forward this, you are not a Chinese", "Shopping List for Parents", the app's certificate of righteousness, one-week CP activities, 21-day check-in activities, ice bucket challenge inviting three people to pass on the message, various name-calling and passing on activities in the circle of friends, and inviting friends activities.

2. Plan activities to meet user needs

Get to know your users at the beginning of event planning, and plan activities that bring value to users based on their needs, so that users will be satisfied, praise you, and feel good!

There are two theories commonly used to analyze the needs of operational activities: Maslow's hierarchy of needs theory for analyzing user needs: physiological needs, safety needs, social needs, respect needs, and self-actualization needs; and the KANO model that reflects user satisfaction: attractive attributes, desired attributes, essential attributes, indifference factors, and reverse attributes. The purpose is to improve user satisfaction by analyzing the needs of users of your products.

When the Wei Zexi incident made everyone question the qualifications of hospitals, users had the need to know which hospitals are in Putian, so the Putian Hospital Query H5 was created; Alipay 's PM recreated the childhood demand for collecting instant noodle cards in the form of Alipay's lucky red envelopes, and the gameplay is still popular; Starbucks launched the "Use Stars to Say" function , which allows users to treat friends to coffee and gift cards, to meet users' needs for thanking and treating; during the spring recruitment period, various internal referral groups, interview experiences, and job information are also most needed by fresh graduates, and various job search platforms plan activities to forward screenshots to join groups in response to demand.

2. Self-contained traffic thinking

Internet traffic is becoming more and more expensive, the cost of reaching users with products and services is getting higher and higher, and marketing expenses have become a bottomless pit. More and more products and services are turning to businesses that bring their own traffic, processing, packaging, and monetizing existing traffic. In fact, in order to reduce the communication costs of promotional activities, we also need to use the elements of existing traffic to carry out communication. That is, what everyone will pay attention to and like, you just do the elements that everyone pays attention to and likes. The first is to increase the ROI of a single campaign, and the second is to create a campaign that can be successfully spread. The following article will trace the sources of traffic elements in communication activities from 7 perspectives.

1. Personal traffic: KOLs and big Vs with existing fans and influence

Self-generated traffic at the human level is manifested in having a large number of fans, influence or appeal. If users have a certain amount of free time, they are willing to spend time on you that could have been spent on other things, which shows that the traffic figure has importance and influence.

Using the objects that people are already paying attention to to carry out marketing activities will undoubtedly meet the needs of existing users while increasing the chances of existing users spreading the message to users they are not following to get them to participate. Therefore, activities carried out using such KOLs and big Vs have actually affected at least two circles of users. This is also the reason why many advertisements like to find celebrity endorsements that match the product's temperament. Planning activities related to people who bring their own traffic, not only with real people or celebrity endorsements, but also planning activities around Doraemon, Spider-Man, Ultraman, Sun Wukong, etc., can also form an effective communication scope.

Yin Yue Tai once launched a fan support campaign - "Introducing My Idol to the World" . This MV website spent more than one million to buy 300 billboards in subway stations in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. Fans wrote advertising copy for their idols and then voted to grab the billboards. Whoever got the most votes got the advertising space . Online: 3.41 million people voted for 737 idols, the official website was visited more than 100 million times, and the number of readings of Weibo topics reached 18 billion; offline: In Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, promotional copy of 79 artists appeared on billboards in 145 subway stations.

Examples of H5 ads using celebrities include "Kris Wu is about to join the army" and " Jordan Xue hasn't written a joke on Weibo for 2 months, so he came up with a big idea." With the same creativity and execution, if other celebrities who are not popular enough or are unknown are used, it will be difficult for the H5 to spread no matter how well it is done. Trump often makes headlines for his remarks on Twitter that conflict with his identity as president. Jike APP took advantage of Trump's remarks and made an H5 generated from Trump's Twitter account . With the help of some high-frequency New Year's words, netizens had a lot of fun making fun of it. There is a joke about Mimi Meng : If you (the editor) don’t know what to write to get 100,000+ views, go and attack Mimi Meng. It is also about leveraging the traffic of influential figures at the content planning level.

2. Traffic at a certain time point: holidays and certain times that users pay attention to, etc.

Holidays are a periodic time window, which has long been an inherent concept in the minds of users. The biggest event in the Internet circle every year is the Double Eleven event promoted by Alibaba. Initially a discount event for some merchants on Tmall , it has now evolved into a festival that is not limited to trading platforms such as e-commerce, Internet finance, O2O , etc., where major apps compete for traffic and attention. There was an O2O e-commerce platform that did not hold any activities on Double Eleven Day, but the platform traffic surprisingly increased. In fact, this was because users believed that there would be activities on Double Eleven Day, which would bring in traffic. If the platform caters to this perception of users, the traffic generated would be huge.

Qingming Festival, May Day and National Day are festivals that bring their own travel and entertainment traffic. An OTA company also took advantage of the opportunity to hold an activity to generate air tickets . Taking advantage of the college entrance examination, the college entrance examination admission ticket generation, **** (industry) national unified examination papers , and the Valentine's Day marriage certificate photo generation.

There is a "Sunday effect" in love psychology, which means that the success rate is higher if you confess your love on the last day of the holiday. Because the holiday is coming to an end, people are inevitably depressed and lost, their psychological defenses are lower, and they are more easily moved. Sunday is a day with its own traffic for confession.

The traffic of entertainment and travel APP products increases on weekends and decreases on weekdays. The weekend is also a time when traffic comes naturally for this kind of entertainment and travel needs. During the Spring Festival, many APPs and public accounts send out red envelopes to take advantage of the Spring Festival and attract attention.

Golden 10 o'clock : Whether it is tweets or general H5 activities, they will grow rapidly around 10 o'clock in the evening. This is the time when users are browsing their Moments.

3. Real-time hot traffic: Events that are getting more popular

Taking advantage of hot spots is the most common behavior to attract traffic. Wherever users focus, generate content related to that focus to cater to their needs. Weibo is the platform that can take advantage of hot topics the fastest. Durex’s official Weibo account is the best at taking advantage of hot topics. It can prepare copywriting within minutes of a hot topic. Classic cases include:

• "Durex Condoms as Shoes During Beijing's Heavy Rain"
• "DUDU taxi, the choice of veteran drivers" when Didi and Uber merged
• "You All!" when Fan Bingbing and Li Chen made their relationship public. ! ! ! ! ! ! ! Bingbing has Li! ! 》

There was also the Rio Adventure H5 planned by NetEase Dada during the Olympic Games, the "Chinajoy Model Showgirl Contact Information" that deceived clicks during Chinajoy, and Phoenix Finance's "How many Putian-affiliated hospitals are there in the city where you live?" during the Wei Zexi incident. 》 Query H5. When the Lanshou Xianggu video became popular, a public account took advantage of the situation to make a Lanshou Xianggu H5 game, replacing the black and white blocks in the "Don't Step on the White Blocks" with Lanshou and Xianggu. Clicking on different colors will also make different voices. The game itself is fun, and coupled with users' attention to hot topics and the brainwashing of voices, it has promoted a lot of dissemination. The same filter as "Your Name" also swept the screen with the help of everyone's attention to the movie. Before the Spring Festival, many groups were sharing the relative relationship calculator app , and later Xiaomi also launched its own calculator H5. The mini program community activities that I organized during the launch of the mini program gained nearly 10,000 community users without any promotion. This was due to the long-accumulated and highly anticipated potential of the mini program.

4. Content brings its own traffic: catering to user preferences

Content that has been verified by other platforms to have the potential to become popular, or content that everyone is paying attention to, can be used as event materials and integrated into an event output. At the end of every year, the annual review is very popular: "Alipay Annual Bill" and NetEase News ' "Entertainment News in 2016" . The "Generate Your Own Entertainment Headlines" launched by NetEase Entertainment and the "Generate Your Own Jokes" activity launched by Black Pineapple APP , "Your Story is Toxic" , are both activities centered around interesting content. Content-based activities are produced by both organizers and users. For example, Faceu's "Everyone Spits Rainbows" activity, which cost RMB 500,000 and took three days, pushed Faceu to the top of the App store .

5. The form of expression brings its own traffic: the gameplay that users enjoy

The ghost animal videos that have emerged in recent years have shown fun, interesting and viral characteristics, and have also been widely used in marketing activities. The "Generate a Sentence of Guichu Video" created by Guichu Input Method allows users to experience Guichu in 5 seconds and gained 1 million users within 12 days. Uxin Used Car spent 30 million in 60 seconds to launch a ghost-animal advertisement "Best, best, best, best, Uxin Used Car" . The Baidu Index rose from 16,000 to 250,000 in two days. Changba 's "Automatic Rap" activity can convert what users say into RAP format and play it back.

Invitation cards are widely used in WeChat public account marketing and are also a powerful tool for attracting fans. In the early stage of Double Eleven, Bestore launched the "Get Snacks First" event, which gained 1.2 million fans in just 4 hours. Now the rap form of "One Person Drinking Drunk" is being widely spread, and there will surely be cases of the spread of the rap form. Previously, there were emojis in WeChat that played a series of pictures quickly, and people could take screenshots to choose boyfriends or girlfriends . Later, they were also brought to public accounts for use.

6. Games bring their own traffic, so users can play them if they like.

Communication activities in the form of games can enable brands and users to interact continuously, immerse themselves in the activities and deepen brand awareness. They can also promote sharing and dissemination through game numerical achievements, thereby promoting participation in the overall activity and the scale of dissemination. Sanjieke once held an activity called "Surround the Product Dog" based on the prototype of "Surround the Nervous Cat"; Durex created "Durex Go" based on the prototype of Pokemon Go; Tmall also held a red envelope and coupon grabbing activity based on the prototype of Pokemon Go during the Double Eleven period; 51 Fanbei created "Aircraft War" based on the prototype of "Shooting Planes"; the author previously planned a money counting activity on a loan APP, where whoever counted got as much as they got. Generally, when choosing game prototypes for such activities, you should pick ones that have low barriers to entry, short paths, and have been popular in the past, such as Snake, Tetris, Who Steps on the White Block, 2048, Find the Differences, Whack-a-Mole, Gold Miner, Fishing Master, etc. These fun and easy-to-play games can be combined with brand activities to form a publicity campaign.

You can go to some websites that specialize in H5 games to see which games’ gameplay can be combined with your own products to create activities and find inspiration.

7. Marketing activities bring their own traffic: if you can’t get enough of it, keep doing it

(1) Test class

Most of them test zodiac signs and personality, as well as psychological age, name meaning, where the partner is, past life, IQ, EQ, ability to seduce girls, etc. You can guess the city by listening to the voice, guess the picture and the song crazily. There are various ways to play and users really enjoy it. The most popular one is the Plato Personality Test , which gained millions of followers in just one morning. There are also matching tests, which test the degree of tacit understanding between two people, how well they know each other, the degree of consistency in values, the degree of matching in eating preferences, etc., such as MissFresh's "Come on, let's test whether we are suitable for eating together."

(2) Pretending

This type is closely integrated with hot topics. During the Alipay lucky draw period, you can pretend to have a lot of dedicated blessings. When the lucky draw is announced, you can pretend to get a lot of money. When Alipay releases the bill, you can pretend to spend a lot of money. You can pretend to sign the contract for buying a house or a car, generate Tmall selling prices, generate a book with yourself as the author, and generate Facebook employee ID cards and salary slips in three classes. There are also public accounts and websites that specialize in producing such pretentious pictures, where you can look for inspiration or reuse them.

(3) Pictures

This type of activity is mainly based on picture tools . Tiantian Ptu's activity on generating elementary school ID photos during the Children's Day, the "Which team am I most suitable for in the Rio Olympics" during the Olympics, the "One-click cosplay of Onmyoji" of Beauty Camera, and the generation of "Photos of Your Future Children" , photos with celebrities, wedding photos with celebrities, facewin's "Change Husband", "Change Hairstyle", "Change Stills" , etc., giving users a legitimate reason to post selfies is a good operation routine. There are also the new screaming fonts and large fonts that were released in 2016, which were so popular that they were banned by WeChat.

3. User cost thinking in activities

1. Reduce user entry costs and increase user exit costs

An activity should not only have a good idea, but also give users the best experience. With the motivation to participate, they must also smoothly participate in the entire process. Therefore, starting from the moment the user sees the activity page, the operation process and jump path of each step must be optimized, the interaction must be smooth and in line with user operating habits.

For example, for gaming activities, let users play first and then log into their personal accounts to avoid a high bounce rate on the first page. For activities that require registration, let users fill in as little information as possible, jump to fewer pages, and perform as few operations as possible. If the activity is complicated and people don’t want to play it at first glance, you can hide the activity rules without writing them in detail, or make users feel that they are very simple and guide them to participate step by step. Users come in when they see that an activity is fun or profitable, but when it comes to asking them to pay a greater behavioral cost or money, they will hesitate or even jump out and close the activity. At this time, users are making a choice: whether to pay the cost to continue participating in the activity to gain benefits or to give up the costs they paid before. If the costs paid before are already very high or the benefits paid later are attractive enough, it is easy to guide users to complete the entire process.

Le Chun’s viral marketing case: “Pre-order for 5 yuan! Finally, we have waited for the legendary Lechun Zero Fat Yogurt, which is a classic in guiding users to participate in activities. The 5 yuan booking offer in the title looks real and affordable, which encourages clicks. The long text and pictures at the beginning brainwash the users, and the theme appears at the end. Users can choose between "5 yuan to buy 25 yuan milk tickets" and "give up the discount and go to Le Chun to have a look". The focus is to let users buy milk tickets for 5 yuan. Users have been watching for so long, and have paid the cost and recognized Le Chun. In addition, they can make 25 yuan by only 5 yuan, so most users will still pay. After the payment is successful, the user will be prompted to share the account with friends so that the payment can be considered successful. The user has already gone through a lot of trouble and paid the money. The cost of sharing is very low compared to the previous cost. The user will definitely not give up the previous operation and may get a bigger reward if he shares the account obediently. During the user guidance process of Le Chun, every step until the sharing page is to increase the user's sunk cost. The final sharing is a negative incentive for the cost already paid and a positive incentive for more invitations and more benefits. In the end, users not only participate in the activity themselves, but also invite friends to spread it.

2. Reduce unnecessary activity costs and improve activity ROI

It is not difficult to spend money on activities. What is difficult is how to spend less money to achieve better results, reduce unnecessary costs in activities, refine operations, spend money where it counts, and improve the ROI of activities.

Sunk costs: Costs that have already been paid and cannot be recovered, fixed costs incurred in the past, which cannot be changed by any decision made now or in the future. In an activity, once the activity rules are set and the activity starts to be pushed, the sunk cost is fixed, so when setting the rules, the sunk cost of the activity should be reduced as much as possible. Taking the Internet finance industry as an example, it explains how to reduce unnecessary costs in activities: when there are no activities, users have periodic or fixed investment behaviors; when users withdraw funds from their original accounts to participate in interest rate increase and full reduction activities during activities, no net increase in funds is generated, and the activities can be enjoyed only if the net increase in funds or participation is limited to the designated page; when there are activities ranking the investment amount, the minimum threshold for ranking rewards is set to prevent the investment amount within the ranking from being insufficient to cover the reward; in the author’s previous money-counting and new user-attraction activities, old users counted the money, and new users needed to be invited to withdraw and unlock; for large-scale promotional activities, set the number of participants or limit the number of participations, and each real-name user has only one chance, etc.; set a time to lock the funds for the novice mark to prevent the wool party from running away after taking advantage of the opportunity; set a reasonable validity period for the coupon, and invite new users to invest within a certain number of days before it is valid. If it expires, the activity discount will not be enjoyed.

4. Use the perspective of connection to conduct micro-innovation thinking

1. Direct reuse

Many activities can be carried out on other platforms, and they can also be carried out in a different format and combined with one's own products. When analyzing other people's activities, we need to think about whether we can combine them with our own products for reuse, such as Alipay's Ji Fu, and Jumei Youpin has also done activities similar to the Ji Xing Card .

2. Improvement-based innovation

There are many activities with good ideas. If they fail to spread due to deficiencies in execution and promotion, then at least we can verify that such activities are feasible, accepted by users and have demand. We can then take the idea and make secondary innovations. The two most popular activities organized by Xin Shi Xiang in 2016 - "Escape from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou" and "Book Throwing Campaign" - are travel activities that can be carried out at any time. Foreign airlines have already played these activities many times. The first book throwing campaign was Hermione. What Xin Shi Xiang does is to improve the proven ideas, localize them to adapt to the needs of platform users, and push them with strong execution.

3. “1+1” Innovation

Combining two different ways of playing, the above-mentioned ways of playing can be comprehensively utilized and presented in one activity. The game "Friend Impression" was previously played to see who has visited the Moments. NetEase Yanxuan presented it in the form of a spoof of "We Are Getting Married" . The connection value corresponds to the red envelope amount, combining the sending of red envelope coupons with checking Moments visits.

5. Endless Thinking

The above-mentioned ideas are the common points summarized by the author based on the three marketing activities he planned and the observation of more than 100 screen-sweeping cases in 2016. They focus on the planning and ideas level, and tell you from which angles to think about the activities that are more likely to be popular.

• User demand thinking: It requires to make activities that can hit the inner human weaknesses of users and meet their needs, such as the activity of giving away resources that the author planned to increase the number of fans from 0 to 25,000;
• Self-contained traffic thinking: It requires finding elements with traffic and self-contained explosive potential, which is easier to detonate. For example, the money counting activity planned by the author before is a supplement to the money counting behavior in reality. It brings 10,000 community users to the activity at 0 cost, which is a leverage on the hot spots of mini programs.
• User cost thinking: requires setting up clever rules;
• Micro-innovation thinking: is to learn to connect many things and generate new ideas;
• Channel thinking: choose consistent tone in publicity and refine channel management;
• Review thinking: After finishing the work, you should summarize the gains and losses. The author’s previous two activity review articles were published on major platforms, forcing himself to make an output summary;
• Tool-based thinking: Commonly used marketing tools can be applied, such as group buying, bargaining, red envelopes, voting, gift giving, distribution, etc.

This part actually talks about infinite thinking, which actually means that there are too many ways of thinking involved in an activity to talk about them all. Here, I hope this article can give you some inspiration to create more outstanding activities.

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

The author of this article @王威 is compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!