What should operators do before, during and after an online event?

Today, taking online activities as an example, let’s talk about what operations should do before and after a complete online activity.

A complete event can be divided into before the event, during the event, and after the event according to time or progress. Event operations to carry out an event, whether online or offline, simply focus on these three aspects.

1. Before the activity

The ancients said, "Planning is the key to success, while lack of planning leads to failure." Whether the preparations before the event are done properly or not will affect the effect of the entire event. Therefore, an excellent event operator never fights unprepared and always does everything that should be done before the event.

What should operators do before the event?

1. Get to the activity target

For event operations, any event is done with a certain purpose. The essence of the activity is to motivate users to perform certain specific behaviors through a certain reward mechanism. Therefore, the activities we can see are all targeted, such as giving gifts for following WeChat public accounts , giving video website membership cards for app downloads, and giving gifts for entering offline stores.

This also reminds event operators that before you do an event, you should first ask yourself why you must do this event and what your purpose is.

Usually, there are two types of goals for activities: long-term goals and short-term goals.

Short-term KPI goals for the event:

Attract new users : Attract new users to download, register or follow, such as driving downloads for an app or planning an H5 event or a prize-winning event to attract fans for a product public account ;

For example: In order to increase downloads, Tmall app gives shopping coupons to users who download and log in to the app for the first time.

Promotion : Promote user activity, such as organizing a flash sale or group purchase event for active old users;

Retention : Increase the number of new users who stay after a period of time, such as the daily sign-in activities that some apps do to improve user retention , the most typical example being the Taobao sign-in and Taobao gold coin activity;

Convert to paid users : turn the original free users into paid users, such as the activities often done by some video apps: "Get XXX for the first time membership";

The long-term goal of the event : to increase brand awareness and recognition, which will involve brand and product strategies, which I will not elaborate on here.

2. Market research

We know that promotion involves competitive product analysis . Similarly, activities also require market research and analysis. For example, find out what kind of activities your competitors have done, which ones are more successful and where their success lies, which activities have failed and why they failed.

Event operations also require a certain degree of sensitivity to the market, be familiar with the popular event formats on the market, and learn to analyze the logic behind the popularity of these events.

3. Gain in-depth understanding of activity audience attributes

One thing that needs to be made clear when operating an event is that no matter what the event is, it is for users to enjoy. If even users are not interested, the value of the activity cannot be reflected, let alone achieving KPI indicators. Before organizing an event, you should have a deep understanding of what types of activities your target user group likes and what activity prizes they are sensitive to. That is, think about what prizes are most attractive to them from the perspective of users' concerns and needs.

Take the prize of phone bills for example. For an office worker like me, a few dollars of phone bills are not something I really care about. But what if your target is a college student? They will be different, they will like it very much.

For example, one of our clients (a financial banking company) held a simple activity at a university in Hunan during the start of the school year in September this year, "Follow the WeChat account to get free phone bills." The prizes purchased were phone bills provided by this platform. Hundreds of thousands of phone bill prizes were purchased within a month. What does this show? It shows that college students are still very interested in phone bills.

At that time, we wondered why CITIC did not choose prizes such as data packages or membership cards? Because college students do not have much demand for data packages. First, the school mobile phone company generally has packages that provide free data, and there is campus network. But phone bills are different. Even if you don’t make many calls on a daily basis, you still need some living expenses to call home. Therefore, for this type of activity users, phone bills are the most suitable.

So even if it is a relatively old-fashioned prize, as long as the participants of your event have this demand, you can still have a great time.

4. Develop activity plan

The process of event planning is also called event planning . An event plan that is creative, feasible and actionable can help operations better achieve KPI goals. What does an activity plan include?

1) Purpose and theme of the event

The purpose of the event is what kind of effect you hope to achieve through this event, whether it is to help a public account attract fans or to attract new users for an app, etc. Since the purpose of the activity has been mentioned above, it will not be repeated here.

The theme of the event is the main content of your event. Every event should have a theme that is consistent with the purpose of the event, obvious, and concise. The theme will generally tell users the basic information of the event through the event copy .

2) Activity Creativity

Some people say that creativity is the soul of an event. A good event idea can not only increase the interest of participants, but also help achieve the purpose of the event and spread the brand. Good creativity lies in the unique and novel way of thinking, and creative activities often carry the spirit of the times.

For example, the "4-hour escape from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou" campaign planned by Xin Shixiang used the clichéd topic "escape from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou" and offered free air tickets, hotels and unknown journeys to attract users' attention. In the end, the official account attracted more than 100,000 followers. Although many people later revealed that those who got the tickets were all pre-selected, it has to be said that this was a very creative marketing campaign, and Xin Shixiang achieved its purpose perfectly in doing this event: attracting fans to the official account and increasing brand awareness.

3) Activity type selection

There are various types of activities on the market. There are at least a dozen online activities, such as Weibo topics, forwarding and sharing lotteries, questionnaires, H5 small activities, Tieba building, WeChat likes, voting activities, scratch cards, password activities, sign-in activities, etc. The various forms of activities have caused many operators to suffer from choice difficulties, but what Waiting for Bajie to say is that it is not the number of activities that matters, but the choice of them.

It is recommended that operators select activity types according to specific demand scenarios:

a. Choose the activity type reasonably according to the purpose of the activity

For example, you now want to collect user information for a new app, including the user's gender, age, mobile phone number, mobile phone system used, etc. You can choose to conduct this activity in the form of a prize-winning questionnaire survey and set some questions that can directly collect user information. In order to stimulate users to participate, set up some more attractive prizes.

b. Choose the activity type according to audience needs

For example, if the main user group of an app is people born in the 1990s, if you want to organize an event, you can first understand what types of activities people born in the 1990s like. They love socializing , fashion, and chasing stars, and Weibo topics and Tieba posts are all closer to their daily lives. Suppose you want to organize an activity to attract new users or promote app activation, you can choose Weibo topics, Tieba posts, H5 activities, etc.

4) Event time is determined

The activity time includes the start and end time of the activity, which can also be said to be the activity period or activity cycle. Setting a deadline for an event is done for two reasons: firstly, to maintain its attractiveness and to give participants a hint that “if you miss this opportunity, you will miss it forever, so hurry up and take action”; secondly, to control the cost of the event. An event without a deadline is subject to uncontrollable costs.

The activity time is divided into absolute time and relative time. Absolute time is such as XX day XX time to XX day XX time; relative time is such as within XX days. As shown in the figure below, the time of Tmall's flash sales at the top of the hour is an absolute time.

5) Activity process formulation

The purpose of formulating an event process is to visualize the entire process of the event, to let the operations know exactly how the event will proceed, and to let the event participants know how to carry out the event step by step. The activity process is best listed clearly using a 1, 2, 3 path diagram, as shown in the figure below, a shopping app's "order lucky draw" process:

Online registration - sign in for entry - product samples - product introduction - place an order - draw with order.

The entire activity process is clear at a glance, and is accompanied by specific instructions for each step, which can not only save participants' time in reading the rules, but also reduce the workload of operations.

6) Event staff arrangement

Although the event is the responsibility of the operator, the process from event planning to execution may involve design and development. For example, who is responsible for the event UI design, who is responsible for the event page development, and who is responsible for each section during the event. Operations must follow the completion progress of each arrangement.

7) Activity budget

The activity budget is a rough estimate of the telephone expenses during the entire activity. The budget for an online activity should start from the activity type, activity prizes, activity cycle, activity personnel, activity goals, etc., and clarify how much expenses will be incurred in each link.

8) Event crisis resolution

List the problems that may be encountered during the event and their solutions to plan ahead and ensure that the event goes smoothly. For example, when an e-commerce app does a simple sharing-triggered activity, and encounters special situations such as unsuccessful sharing, failure to trigger after user sharing, and inability to claim activity prizes, what is your emergency plan?

5. Activity feasibility assessment

In order to ensure the effectiveness and purpose of the event, general operators will evaluate the feasibility of the event before launching it, such as whether the event staffing is reasonable, whether the event venue/platform can meet the needs of the event, and whether the event funding preparation is proportional to the event effect.

6. Activity warm-up

After the event plan is developed, spread the event through pre-promotion and list all the available platforms.

Such as internal channels: official website advertising space, official Weibo, WeChat public platform , product communities, social groups , etc.;

External channels: media exposure, self-media platforms , event marketing platforms, external vertical industry communities, social platforms, celebrity endorsements or forwarding, etc.

2. Activities

After the event is launched, the operational work has just begun. During the running of the activity, the main task of the operation is to conduct an overall inspection of the entire activity, understand whether there are any areas of the activity that are worth optimizing, and find ways to collect various activity data.

1. Follow the real-time progress of the event

After the activity is launched, if you want to know whether the purpose of the activity is being approached and completed step by step, the operation can only know by paying real-time attention to the activity.

During the activity, operations should always pay attention to the following data of the activity:

1) Number of views

The number of page views, historical cumulative page views, and the number of people on the event page allow operations to understand the popularity of the event;

Today's new page views and visitor numbers will help operations determine which day of the campaign will be most effective.

2) Number of participants

User participation data records the level of user participation at each stage and at different times during the launch of the activity, making it easier for operations to check for omissions and fill in the gaps during the activity.

3) Number of Winnings

The real-time winning data of the event can help operations monitor the rationality of the winning probability. Once the winning data is abnormal, operations can adjust the winning probability in the shortest time and bring the event back on track.

4) Number of redemptions

Wherever there is a prize, there is a prize redemption process. The number of prizes won is a monitoring of the probability of winning, and the number of prizes redeemed is a control of the rationality of the prize redemption process and the attractiveness of the prizes.

Through the prize redemption data report , the operation can understand the opinions of the event participants on the event process and prizes. If there are any unreasonable aspects, they can be changed immediately, and if they cannot be changed, they will not be changed again.

5) Number of shares

The number of activity shares is also an assessment of the quality of the entire activity, such as activity content, form, prizes, channels, etc. If an activity has been shared too many times or too few times, operations should analyze the reasons immediately upon seeing the data.

2. Timely optimization of activities

Once an activity deviates from the expected development track, we will promptly investigate where the problem occurred, adjust the activity immediately when the problem is discovered, stop the loss in time, and bring the activity back to the expected track.

3. Collect user feedback and user information

Operations are done for users and are activities that connect products to users. In the process of doing activities, it is crucial to collect user information and feedback.

• User feedback: Collect users’ experiences or complaints during the activities;
• User information: user’s basic information (gender, age, mobile phone number, etc.) and dynamic information (browsing time, choice of prizes, usage habits, etc.).

3. After the event

1. Give users an explanation: inform users of the results of the activity

The so-called giving users an explanation means informing users of the results of the activity. Especially for online prize-giving events, many participants come for the prizes. After the event, what they care most about is whether they have won the prize and who won the grand prize. Therefore, after the event is over, the first thing the operator should do is to inform users of the results as quickly as possible through channels that can directly reach users. For example, WeChat public platform activities are pushed through articles, Weibo activities are notified through Weibo, and in-app activities use banner images or information flow diagrams to display activity results.

The picture below shows the lottery announcement of a shopping mall.

2. Make timely analysis and summary based on activity operation data

Whether an app activity or a public account activity has achieved the expected results can only be determined by data. In other words, without accurate data, the activity has no reference, and the operation cannot verify whether the activity is successful or not.

Operations must not only continuously monitor real-time data during activities, but also know how to recover data after the activities are over. Collect the overall data of the recycling event to see how much the final effect of the event differs from the expectations in the event planning stage, find out what links affect the expectations of the event, whether there is a problem with the event content or the event delivery channel, analyze the reasons, and then find solutions to avoid repeating the same mistakes in the next event.

Mobile application product promotion service: APP promotion service Qinggua Media information flow

The author of this article @等待八戒 is compiled and published by (APP Top Promotion). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!