A Guide to the Evolution of Cognitive Event Operations

Today I will mainly talk about the topic of event operation or event planning. I will mainly talk about it in four parts. Part One: My understanding of event operations has changed since I started working. I will briefly summarize the perspectives of each stage.

Part 2: When I disassemble an event case, what areas do I focus on, why I value it so much, and some of my current disassembly tips.

Part Three: I will talk about my current workflow and some methods when I plan an event.

Part 4: I will share some of my current thoughts, such as how to improve my event operation capabilities and what thinking directions I can rely on.

01. My change in understanding of event operations

Extensive stage

Many of us first started planning an event when we were in college or joined the student union or clubs. At that time, our understanding of events was very superficial, and when planning, we basically opened Baidu and entered the keyword "event planning template". Then I simply copied the template and wrote some bland introduction. Since no one had any experience at the time, as long as your writing was not too bad, you could basically pass.

What was our main consideration as college students at that time? An activity plan is enough. Then, we use the power of the student union, or some basic publicity methods, such as posting posters, setting up stalls, distributing DMs, and door-to-door promotion to recruit participants for the event. These are basically all the things we can consider. These are the embryonic stages of our understanding of event planning and are very superficial. This is the first stage for most of us.

Here you can see the activities I did in college:

Looking back at the entire plan now, there are basically few useful sentences. This is also the initial state for most of us. At that time, everyone actually had no knowledge of the activities, and basically relied on Baidu templates and copied them.

After we have done some activities, we will gradually have a more three-dimensional understanding, that is, there are several forms of activities, such as competitions, exhibitions, summits, cultural and entertainment performances, lectures, small salons, small training camps, etc. For slightly larger events, we will consider the event process, personnel division of labor, event budget, risk management, etc. It is no longer a small event that a few people simply organized as in the past. Each type of activity is different, and the complexity of things has also increased.

The second plan we can see was a small off-campus training that I did together with two other schools. At this point you can see an upgrade in cognition. Here you will see a new dimension, that is, you will see that this activity is starting to have a little "rhythm". At the same time, you can also see that I care more about publicity, budget control, personnel division of labor, and event dissemination.

With the accumulation of experience, it is basically no problem to organize some small events, but it is still very rough.

Offline + Online Stage

When I first started working, I was the head of a charity organization for college students. So we held hundreds of events, big and small. The most common activities are lectures, summits and some closed training. At that time, I accumulated a lot of experience in activities, including capturing and focusing on various details, and also produced a large number of SOPs, and then I had a more three-dimensional understanding of activities. So far, my event experience has been biased towards offline + online communication. But at that time, I gained the following important insights:

1. A good activity is one that can tell a good story to users

A good campaign is essentially about portraying a story that users believe in and are touched by. The form of the campaign is not novel, so there is no need to excessively pursue innovation in the form of the campaign. Instead, the focus should be on presenting your persuasive logic in every detail.

Let me ask you a question here. We held an event today, right? People on site had a great experience. Do you think this was a successful event? Or what other qualities do you think a good event should have?

Some people would answer that the scene was lively, the event experience was good, and it was crowded; some would say that there was a lot of useful information, etc.

What everyone said is right. Let me add that a good event needs to have the following conditions in addition to the on-site experience:

Theme of the event

Let others know what you solve or what service you provide. What you need to solve is whether others will be interested when they see it and whether you can attract the attention of the target group, so the main visual of an event is very important.

Content Production

The output of marketing materials, including photos of activities, user reviews and Moments, teachers’ golden sentences and speech content, and various hooks that can be spread again.

Activity Orientation

It depends on what direction your activity is directed. If it is marketing-oriented, you should seek conversion; if it is brand-oriented, you should seek communication.

2. Pay attention to the size of the activity and its superposition effect

Activities can be superimposed based on the marketing focus throughout the year. Behind a large project, there are multiple sub-activities, and each sub-activity has its own significance and corresponding mission. Only by achieving the goals of multiple sub-activities can we help achieve the annual goals.

At present, many of our classmates who are engaged in event operations, especially those who are not working in large companies, usually face the situation that the boss says there is a lack of traffic, so you organize an event, and the boss says the conversion is not good, so you organize another event. This is the situation for the vast majority of people.

It is true that time is money for startups, and they need to be careful to constantly maintain the revenue formula, that is, revenue = traffic * average order value * conversion rate.

If you only stay in the situation I mentioned earlier, and don’t think about how to grow in a large scale and stably, then you may have to operate a small event for a long time. We cannot stop here if we want to break through and reach a new level while maintaining the current level.

Online stage

Although I have done a lot of online activities before, and achieved good results. However, strategy is rarely used and luck plays a larger role. But later on, I gradually developed my own methodology and calibrated it through different types of activities.

I myself prefer to use the WeChat ecosystem, so I will use the fission within the WeChat ecosystem to explain what the activity is like. The essence of the fission within the WeChat ecosystem is to find ways to get users to post "Friends Circles" for you.

Whether you are doing mission fission, community fission, or using various activity tools, such as group buying, support, bargaining, buy-one-get-one-free, voting, competition, exchange, customization, transfer, and distribution, in essence it will all come back to allowing users to post on the "Circle of Friends".

Therefore, to achieve this goal, you need to trigger user actions with the lowest cost and the most powerful persuasive logic. The simplest and most brutal ones are common distribution, Pinduoduo's assistance, etc. These are just a small part of the methods.

So when an event operator is going to organize an event, what problem is he solving?

Let me explain with a simple picture. If the picture below is a storyboard, what the operation needs to do is to improve the story, ensure that the characters' routes are smooth, the experience is good enough, and that the activity goals can be achieved, and that stories (information) can be left behind after the characters leave.

At present, I have seen many people who, when doing event operations, only think about the path, or work hard on attracting traffic, but do not consider persuasion logic, event experience, and traffic retention.

This leads to the situation that when many students are doing fission activities, the data is very good during the activity, but later they experience what is called traffic backlash. First, there are a large number of unfollowing and free-for-alls, and secondly, negative word-of-mouth spreads, that is, you overdraw the trust that will affect conversion in the future.

As for why some companies’ fission activities not only have good data but also good reputation, I will briefly talk about my immature thoughts here. I think if a company wants to carry out a good marketing campaign, that is, a campaign that is well received and recognized by users, it should have three characteristics. The company's values ​​are stable, and the marketing materials show that you are solving user needs and the activity data performs well.

02. How to grow through dismantling

Entry Level

If you are just getting started, my suggestion is to choose a template from the various disassembly training camps on the market and break down some basic paths first, so that you can at least develop a habit.

Mature stage

But if you have already skillfully disassembled several cases, or your level has been improved, my suggestion is that you should quickly throw away these disassembly frameworks and break free from the constraints of templates.

Why is this suggestion made?

The operational activity cases on the market can be made into disassembly training camps because the cycle is short enough, the path is clear enough, the theme is not that large, it is standardized, and you can quickly perceive it by going through the process. Such gains are undoubtedly superficial.

The world we live in is a world of multi-dimensional competition, and so is the world of operators. If the knowledge you gain from breaking down an event is the same as that of others, why should you be able to run a better event?

Therefore, this kind of disassembly is fine for beginners, but disassembly in only one dimension will definitely not allow you to make greater progress.

So how to disassemble it?

1. Substitution perspective

Reasoning about the other person’s perspective

Many people say that inferring the purpose of the other party's operator is a bit YY. It is indeed YY when it comes to the interactions between ordinary people, but when it comes to inferring at the job level, there will basically not be too much deviation. The purpose of the operator is nothing more than to get traffic, obtain clues, make conversions, and obtain the other party's labels. Basically, if you eliminate the following, you can get closer to the other party's ideas.

Review the situation for the other party from your perspective

If I were the other person, how would I plan this event? Here is the conclusion drawn based on perspective 1, and then we stand on our side to review and optimize for the other party.

The other person's perspective + my perspective = a new perspective

2. Find your rhythm

When disassembling, the dimensions that are often overlooked are time and rhythm. Many people only break down the visible content, that is, the words, copywriting, etc., but few people care about the time interval. We have introduced before the importance of the rhythm of the activity. Behind this is actually the stage-by-stage investment of resource scale. If you pay attention to it at this time, you will know.

3. Go through the process

There is no need to emphasize this here. The main thing is to check whether the process is smooth, whether users will be lost, etc.

4. Sort out the persuasion logic

After completing the process, you need to see how each page embeds its persuasion logic, whether it is mainly driven by interests, needs, or a combination of both.

5. Finishing Action

When we have completed the entire activity, you need to see whether the other party is assigning new "user tasks" to users. I have previously disassembled the activities of the Money-Making Calendar. I mentioned in the disassembly article that their calendar group has two purposes. One is to allow users to produce content and generate trust in the money-making skills. The other is to seek conversions over a longer period of time. Judging from the planetary marketing on 418 this year, I was not wrong.

In general: you need to develop your ability to read the market, that is, how a thing is managed, not what the thing itself looks like.

03. Thinking framework when planning

When I plan an event, I follow a framework for thinking, which I mentioned in the previous article:

• Purpose
• Target
• Strategy
• action
• measure
• Review

I will divide the goals into qualitative goals and quantitative goals.

Qualitative goals can be understood as

What action do I want to persuade users to take (what kind of cognition do I want to form in the user's mind, and what is the result of this action)

Quantitative goals can be understood as

How many users do I need to participate and what conversion rate do I need to achieve my performance indicators? This requires you to break down the indicators into different strategies and paths.

A strategy is the method you choose to solve a problem.

Action is specific execution, which requires clear rhythm and milestones.

The quality of execution needs to be measured.

Reviewing is not a criticism meeting. In addition to making the best and getting better, we must also iterate on mistakes and form new conclusions or a set of established methods.

Planning Process

It’s never too early to clearly define your goals

Then we need to sort out the strategies. When the indicators are decomposed into different strategies, how can we avoid more uncertainty (find support points for your uncertainty, just like when we write papers, we need to prove that your argument is correct):

• Path Planning
• Copy filling
• test
• Go Live
• Risk Management

04. Advanced thinking from event operation experts

This thinking model is something I added temporarily today. It is the result of my thinking on the way home tonight. Why are others better at the same thing? It must be that they are better than us in some aspects. I summarized it into the following model, which is a bit rough, but still easy to understand. The model is as follows:

There are two points that determine the gap between us and the masters. The first is that we do not consider problems in as many dimensions as the masters do. The other is that we have different levels of understanding of what we can achieve in each dimension. Therefore, don’t think that just because we have mastered the planning of various forms of activities, it means that we are really strong enough. It is very likely that within the scope of your cognition, you cannot access higher dimensions or see deeper levels. So stay humble, keep learning, and keep practicing. These are some suggestions I can give you. That’s all for today, I hope it will be inspiring to you.

Author: Current Operations

Author: Current Operations