Want to run a viral marketing campaign? Avoid these 3 misunderstandings first!

When a company plans a marketing campaign, the first question it must ask is: Who is the campaign for? Is it for the people who participate? Or is it for the onlookers?

This problem is the first pitfall that many companies are most likely to fall into when planning events.

People all over the world know that in our daily lives, we often encounter three soul-stirring problems every day. They represent our basic thoughts and ultimate answers to life.

These three questions are:

What to eat for breakfast?

What's for lunch?

What's for dinner?

Oh, no, these three——

Who are you?

Where are you from?

Where are you going?

These three questions are the three soul-searching questions of corporate event planning.

The first question is, who is the event for? Who is the target audience of the activity? If the target audience is wrong, no matter how successful the activity is, it will be meaningless. Who are you showing off to?

The second question is, where do the users come from? Why should they participate in your event? If this issue is not figured out, the activity will never go viral, no matter how sophisticated the plan is or how generous the prizes are.

The third question is, what does an enterprise do when making activity diagrams? What is the purpose of event planning? We all know that organizing events is very expensive. Not only is it costly, but it is also a waste of time and energy. Organizing an event is very labor-intensive and energy-consuming. It not only makes people bald-headed, but also makes their legs weak. If you don't understand the meaning of doing an event, and just do it for the sake of doing it, you will end up losing both your money and your life.

If you don’t answer these three questions clearly, and then rush into launching an event, these three questions will become the three biggest pitfalls that companies are most likely to fall into. Next, I will present a small guide for planning a screen-sweeping event and explain it in detail.

When many companies launch new products, they hold events and press conferences. The main audience they invite to the events are the media, and very few users are invited. Why?

The main purpose of inviting the media to attend the press conference is to encourage them to write and publish articles, thereby influencing more readers and helping them learn about corporate information and new products.

After all, the venue is limited, and the number of people participating in the event is generally no more than a few hundred people, at most a few thousand people, and over ten thousand is already very exaggerated. Even if the activity is moved from offline to online, the number of people who participate in the secondary spread will be far greater than the number of direct participants.

Therefore, the significance of organizing an event lies in watching rather than participating.

It goes without saying that there are activities of a branding or public relations nature. Even for promotional activities, we cannot just focus on customers who place orders. We also have to consider how to continue the promotion after it ends so that more people are willing to place orders.

If you can realize that the activity is for the onlookers, not the participants. Then, you will naturally think about a question: why do people want to watch you?

That’s right. Thinking about this means that you are finally on the right track in event planning. In order to attract people to watch and create a screen-sweeping effect, the event must create topics and output content, thereby causing secondary diffusion. This requires the design of the activity flow.

You should know that event execution is only 1/3 of a perfect event planning, and the other 2/3 is topic generation and content diffusion.

Topic ignition - activity execution - content diffusion, this is the complete path of an activity.

Of course, the order of priority can be adjusted according to the specific situation. For example, you can carry out the activities first, generate topics and content through the activities, and thus form social diffusion to influence more people.

Alternatively, you can create a topic first to spark everyone's attention and interest, and then spread the designed content to influence more people. When many people turn their attention to you, you can then execute activities, which will naturally attract traffic and you won't have to worry about no one participating in the event.

In the book "The Tipping Point", author Malcolm Gladwell talks about the three key elements of how to trigger a trend:

Adhesion Factors - What elements should a popular item have to enhance its adhesion?

The law of individual figures : opinion leaders in social networks, the power of role models is infinite

Power environment - launching a trend requires considering the social environment, what the social culture is like, what the social psychology of the general public is like, and what topics are most likely to create waves in society and spark heated discussions.

I call the adhesion factor the communication element. It is the detonating point that makes an activity popular. It represents some basic value elements that are commonly recognized by the group. It is a symbol of popular culture.

Another point is the character rule. The same sentence will have different effects when said by different people. Therefore, companies must design the initiators of the event in advance, such as celebrities, KOLs, and opinion leaders in the user group. Only when the event is initiated by these people will it have greater potential to become popular.

For example, in April 2016, SK-II held a blind date corner event. After the event video “She Finally Went to the Blind Date Corner” was posted on WeChat Moments, it instantly went viral. This event helped SK-II’s sales in China surge by 50% that year.

Because "leftover women" and "blind dates" are themselves very topical communication elements, and in today's environment where women are pursuing independence and the equal rights movement is on the rise, SK-II's activities can easily be ignited as long as it is promoted by opinion leaders among the female group.

When planning an event, one of the things that bothers us the most is why consumers should participate in your event? How to make activities more attractive is a big problem.

In order to attract people to participate, event organizers often make two mistakes:

First, lower the threshold for activities. They are worried that it is too difficult to participate in the activities and consumers are unwilling to participate. As a result, the activity mechanism is too simple and looks quite stupid, which makes consumers even less interested in participating.

Second, set up a large number of prizes to attract consumers to participate in the event. As a result, the activity failed to influence the users it was intended to influence, but instead attracted a group of freeloaders.

You should know that there is a term in psychology called "expulsion effect", which means that rewards will squeeze out fun.

For example, if you are a parent, you hope to cultivate your children's good habit of reading more. Then you tell your child that you will give him 10 yuan for every book he finishes reading. Then you are in trouble. The more money you give, the less interested your child will be in reading. Once the reward was gone, he refused to study anymore.

Monetary rewards are inherently suitable for less attractive activities. When you offer prizes, you're suggesting to consumers that the activity is boring. The reason is simple. Why does the company pay you a salary when you work, but no one pays you when you play games?

Good event planning does not rely on prize incentives, but on the design of event participation mechanisms.

I personally have summarized two very classic activity participation mechanisms: one is called the challenge mechanism, and the other is called the team standing mechanism.

The challenge mechanism is easy to understand, such as the roll call challenge, ice bucket challenge, smile challenge, bottle cap kicking challenge, broom standing challenge, paper ball kicking challenge... It has been spanning China's Internet for 20 years, across generations of social products such as blogs, Weibo, WeChat, and Douyin. Its goal is to trigger imitation by a large number of users.

Why do people like to imitate? Because we are always eager to challenge ourselves and prove ourselves. Because we always hope to find authority and obey, because we always want to integrate into the group, do what others are doing, and gain a sense of belonging to the group.

To describe it in three words, it is "people, follow, crowd", which means to prove oneself, obey authority, and belong to a group.

The second mechanism is easier to understand. It means who do you stand with?

Sweet soy milk or salty soy milk, which one do you support? Are you a sweet or salty rice dumpling fan? If your mother and your girlfriend fall into the river at the same time, who would you save?

Each question was so fatal and could easily lead to quarrels and arguments, so the topic quickly became a hot topic and the event was a great success.

For example, in sports communities like Hupu, the posts with the most traffic are usually about rankings, such as who are the top ten shooting guards in basketball? Who are the five best forwards of all time? Who is greater, Kobe or James? Because these topics are very likely to cause people to take sides.

In the 2018 girl group talent show "Produce 101", the program team introduced two very controversial characters: Wang Ju and Yang Chaoyue. Each of them was given a life attitude and values, so who do you support?

If you understand the participation mechanisms of these two activities, you will no longer worry about no one participating in or paying attention to your activities.

The last big misunderstanding involves the fundamental purpose of the company's activities. Why do we hold activities? Many companies do not have any strategic plans for their activities throughout the year and just do activities for the sake of doing them.

Valentine's Day is coming, let's do an event. Summer vacation is coming, let's do an activity. "Mulan" is about to be released, let's hold an event. World Environment Day is coming, let’s do an event. 618 is coming, let’s do some activities. The Mid-Autumn Festival is coming, let’s do some activities. Double 11 is coming, let’s do some activities. Christmas is coming, let's do an event. The Spring Festival is coming, let's do an activity...

As long as you want to organize an event, there are so many marketing nodes throughout the year that you can’t finish them all. The question is, the more activities the better?

When I saw this question, I thought of two lines of poetry:

Your rushing steps to execute the event is a beautiful mistake/What we want is not passers-by/but returnees.

In fact, the goal of corporate event planning is not to saturate the screen, but to become a user pool that retains and sticks with users. Corporate marketing activities, together with corporate products and corporate self-media, should become the company's private domain marketing front.

In today’s Internet world, no matter how awesome an event or how big a news story is, it will only remain popular on social media for two days before everyone moves on to other things. Consumers are forgetful, and scrolling through the screen for half a day will not bring sustainable growth to the company.

Therefore, when organizing an event, it is important to do branding design and build the event into a marketing platform for the company.

For example, Amway Nutrilite's Vitality Health Run event was held for the first time in Shanghai on June 8, 2002. This event has been held until today, and Amway Nutrilite has maintained this event for 18 years. Today, "Healthy Running" has become a powerful brand of Amway Nutrilite. When people mention healthy running, they think of Amway Nutrilite. Isn’t this the best way for a company to offer its users?

In order to plan an event well, the most important thing to do is to design the traffic flow that triggers the event, the mechanism design for event participation, and the branding design for the event. Only by doing these three designs well can you achieve screen-sweeping and avoid pitfalls.

Author: Empty-handed

Source: Empty-handed

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