Methodology! How operators can take advantage of hot topics to plan events!

The operations department plans activities based on the interesting functions/content/users of the product and combines them with hot topics, while the marketing and public relations department digs out product content based on online hot topics. Sometimes, colleagues in the marketing department will temporarily create content on the product that can be combined with communication for the purpose of communication.

For operators doing hot spot marketing , any hot spot planning that is not aimed at improving product data is rogue. But for the market, as long as users feel that the creativity of this product following the hot spot is fun and has exposure , that is enough (three views and political correctness are the bottom line of leveraging hot spots).

Maybe you still find these two differences a bit abstract after reading them. Let me give you a familiar case. To express the core idea of ​​the case, I will name it "4-hour escape is better than Shanghai, a self-entertainment of the operation"

In early July this year, the literary and artistic public account "New World" and the travel application "Flight Butler" planned a flash marketing event "Escape from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou in four hours", which ignited the circle of friends of Internet practitioners, and the data proved that the event did achieve good results: the topic was read tens of millions times on Weibo, over one million times on WeChat, and the number of fans increased by 100,000 in three hours, and successfully aroused topic discussion on Zhihu, where Minpao gathered.

From a brand perspective, the marketing campaign of Flight Butler did have some effect. After all, the exposure that the product received from the campaign on Yijitang’s official account “New World View” was quite large, so it could be rated 90 points, with the other 10 points being for fear that it would be too proud.

Flight Manager's Sina Micro Index

Baidu Index of Flight Manager

From the perspective of website operation, Flight Butler’s “Escape from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou” event planning can only be given a low score range. It is an event planning that does not aim to improve product data.

Why do I say that! First, there are mistakes in crowd focus and competitor selection. Are the users of Flight Manager really literary young people? As far as I know, literary and artistic young people like to travel by small green trains and stay in youth hostels. Are the competitors that Flight Steward needs to eliminate through marketing really people who can’t just leave at will? If I really want to go on a trip, for someone like me who is not very literary, I would probably choose to use Ctrip to book the air tickets and hotels.

Secondly, a very fatal problem is "paying too much attention to simplifying the communication path and completely ignoring the path setting to improve product data." During the entire event, users only need to reply to keywords on the official account "New World" to obtain the exact meeting location. The interactive relationship between users and the Flight Manager APP is not a strong connection, and the effect of providing product data will not be very good. Judging from the download data volume, it seems that this brand exposure did not have a good effect in attracting new users. Flight Butler's highest ranking in the appstore overall list in the first week of July was 60. This best result appeared on July 7, not July 8, which was all over the WeChat Moments yesterday.

Flight Manager ranking trend chart from 6th to 8th

In general, the "Escape from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou in four hours" marketing campaign brought the public account "New World" to a climax. Not only did it increase its fans and earn high brand marketing fees from Flight Steward, it also built a brand for its target audience. For flight stewards, this self-created hotspot is very helpful for brand exposure, but for operations, it is just self-satisfaction based on the data.

If operations want to plan activities based on hot topics and do not want to repeat the mistake of self-entertainment without any data improvement, they can refer to this article for how to follow up and plan activities in a rhythmic and effective manner when facing hot topics . At the same time, at the end of this article, I will also give optimization suggestions on how Flight Butler’s operations can be optimized if there is another hot opportunity to “escape from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou in four hours”.

In the article "Chinese Valentine's Day, Olympics... 8 Hot Marketing Routines that Operators Must Know", we mentioned that hot spots are divided into unpredictable hot spots and predictable hot spots. Among them, unpredictable hot spots such as celebrity gossip and social events are more suitable for brands to follow up with a poster or write a soft article. Predictable hot spots such as traditional festivals and social hot spots are more suitable for operations to leverage the power of hot spots and plan events to effectively improve data. Specifically in the planning of activities, operations can conduct hot spot research on the three elements of the activity : marketing tools , interactive scenarios, and product packaging.

Marketing tools can be understood as those that can be configured in the background and directly play a role in improving product data. Due to the suddenness and short-term effectiveness of hot spots, few companies will develop a new marketing tool specifically for a hot spot. What's more, the development of marketing work is a product-oriented job, and there are many details that need to be considered in-depth in the product. Most companies plan events that take advantage of hot topics and use ready-made tools for marketing. The better ones carry out micro-innovations, and the tools can help operators achieve the purpose of the event.

In addition to marketing tools, interactive scenarios (the way of distributing marketing tools) and product packaging are the two elements that can be most integrated with hot spots when operating and planning activities. The essence of operating by leveraging hot spots is to build interactive scenes by combining products with hot spots, and then determine the copy and tone of the product packaging based on the interactive scenes.

When leveraging hot spots, the interactive scenarios include raffles, e -commerce , free gifts, quizzes, flash sales, group buying... or creating new scenarios. All of this needs to start with analyzing the hot spots. Here we focus on the recent hot event, the European Cup, as an example to study the process of operating and planning activities by leveraging hot spots.

The process of operating a hotspot

1/Analysis of hot spots

If you want to better leverage hot spots for operations and make interactive scenes unique and different from the crowd, you have to dig deep into all the information related to the hot spots. The more niche and scarce the hot spot-related information you find, the more interesting the activities you can operate in combination with the hot spot planning will be. For example, what is the difference between the Rio Olympics and the London Olympics? What is the difference between it and the European Cup?

1) Hot Information

This refers to objective scientific information related to the hotspot itself, as well as information related to the external environment of the hotspot, including other foreseeable important festivals or company dynamics. Among them, the external environment during the Olympic Games is that all companies need to face Valentine's Day, 818 Suning mid-year promotion, Japan's unconditional surrender day...

2) Information sources

Collect all content related to this hot topic through search engines, Weibo, Tieba, Tianya, news portals, and vertical forums. Below is some of the content related to the "Rio Olympics" that I found.

The 31st Summer Olympic Games, also known as the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics, were held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil from August 5 to 21, 2016. Rio de Janeiro became the first South American city to host the Olympic Games in Olympic history, and also the first Portuguese-speaking city to host the Olympic Games. In addition, this Summer Olympics is another major sports event in Brazil after the 2014 World Cup.

This is the third time that Rio has bid to host the Olympic Games in the new century. This coastal city has previously bid for the 2004 and 2012 Olympic Games, but was unsuccessful both times. Rio de Janeiro is also the second city in South America to apply for the hosting of the Games. Prior to this, Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina, had failed in its three bids.

The 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics will feature 28 major events and 306 minor events. Golf returns to the Olympics and rugby sevens joins the Olympics.

On December 23, 2014, the Rio Olympic Organizing Committee announced the mascots for the 2016 Rio Olympic Games and Paralympic Games. Inspired by the flora and fauna of Brazil, the two mascots represent the animals and plants of Brazil respectively, reflecting the passion and unrestrained nature of the samba country. The official website of the Rio Olympics posted photos of the two mascots. They are between cartoons and reality, integrating various Brazilian pop cultures, while also having elements of animation and video games .

On June 14, 2016, the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympic Organizing Committee announced the slogan of the 2016 Rio Olympic and Paralympic Games at the Future Stadium of Rio Olympic Park - "A New World". The slogan means that the Rio Olympics will create a better world to influence and change the next generation.

On July 27, 2011, Phelps won the 200m butterfly championship at the World Championships in Shanghai. He won four gold medals at the 2012 London Olympics. To date, he has won 22 Olympic medals, including 18 gold medals, becoming the athlete with the most medals and gold medals in Olympic history.[3] On August 4, 2012, Phelps announced his retirement after the swimming competition at the London Olympics. On April 15, 2014, Phelps announced his official comeback.

……..

2/Explore hot keywords

After collecting information related to the hot spots, you can mine keywords related to the hot spots based on this information. These words can be divided into directly related words and associative words, which are mainly nouns, verbs, and adjectives. In order to help you open your mind better, we recommend using the nine/twenty-five grid method to mine keywords. You may have other better ways, as long as you can force yourself to think of more interesting and fun keywords.

Use the nine-square grid to mine keywords, write the hot keywords in the middle, and then the first step (the most important step) is to fill in 4 words with different meanings in the grids before, after, left and right of the hot keywords. If you can't think of a word to fill in the blanks, we can look for words according to the five elements that make up an event, namely when (when), where (where), what (what), why (why), and who (who). They are the basic elements of an event statement.

9-grid

25 grids

Then make cross-lexical associations, same-column vocabulary associations, and same-row vocabulary associations on the table in order to fill up all 25 boxes. It is not enough to just think of these words. In order to better find keywords that can be used to leverage the momentum, you can classify these words.

Verbs: jump, complain, stay up late, guess, study, cheer, avoid, take risks

Adjective: faster, exciting

Nouns: gold medal, schedule, itinerary, travel, strategy, samba, Chinese team, Sun Yang, athlete, competition, Rio

Among them, verbs are the key reference directions for interactive scenes, while adjectives and nouns are the reference directions for product packaging. Finally, you can also use Baidu Index to see the overlap between the user portraits of users who follow hot topics and the product's own target users, and use them as the target users to focus on influencing the event planning.

(People in Beijing and Shanghai are most enthusiastic about the Olympics)

(The main audience of the Olympics are male friends born in the 1980s and 1990s)

3/Analyze operational objectives and marketing tools

When planning activities by leveraging hot topics, the operational objectives are no more than five categories: attracting new customers, promoting activation, retention, conversion, and sales. Choose one of these as your core purpose and set goals. Then look at what data is associated with the core purpose and what existing marketing tools can effectively improve this data.

Confirmation of operational objectives before event planning

Choosing campaign marketing tools around data

At this stage of operational analysis, the core elements of event planning (interactive scenarios, marketing tools, and product packaging) have basically been determined. Based on the above analysis, write down a few ideas for Olympic activities that you have thought of.

Idea 1

Theme: Rio

Purpose: To increase the number of platform registrations

Hot topic: Combined with the common verb "risk" in the European Cup

Marketing tools: traffic packages/cash….

Interactive scenario: Registered users receive traffic based on their scores

Product packaging: Rio architectural style and Olympic color packaging

Idea 2

Topic: Olympic Games Daily Comments

Hot: Humorous comments on Olympic events, players, coaches, etc.

Marketing tools: red envelopes/discount coupons/experience bonuses

Interactive scene: Danmu (complain and get red envelopes)

Product packaging: organize and output daily high-quality complaints

Idea 3

Topic: Sun Yang wins the championship, I will send traffic

Hot topic: As a Chinese sports star, Sun Yang's achievements have attracted much attention

Marketing tools: traffic packages, discount coupons

Interactive scene: Guessing

Product packaging: Olympic swimming pool packaging

Idea 4

Theme: National Olympic Carnival

Hot topic: There are 28 sports in this Olympics

Marketing tools: red envelopes/discount coupons/experience bonuses/physical prizes

Interactive scene: Bubble Dragon (lottery)

Product packaging: Ordinary Olympic packaging

Okay, at the end of the article, let me talk about the flight steward activity optimization suggestions that I can think of.

If conditions permit, you can develop the page together with Xin Shixiang. Users can enter the keyword "just go" in the product's search box to search for this customized activity page, and be informed to grab tickets at 10 o'clock. Those who grab tickets can depart within 4 hours. Those who fail to grab tickets can get coupons and depart on their own.

There are two advantages to doing this. The 30 spots will not be taken up immediately, and the three hours from 7 a.m. to 10 a.m. are expected to bring in a very large number of downloads. Active users, including Flight Steward's own users, can also participate in the ticket grab. Even if they only receive coupons in the end, the coupons can be used to stimulate them to use the product, and the possibility of them becoming paying/repeat purchasing users is quite high.