How to write a better planning proposal?

When writing a planning proposal , how can we write content that will distract the other party? How to enhance the persuasiveness and rationality of content? And how to avoid homogeneity and content that fails to highlight the characteristics of the brand? In response to these questions, the author will give specific analysis and answers.

Let’s talk about planning and writing plans today. There are a total of 3 experiences to share.

01 Planning is divided into creative planning and strategic planning

1. Creative planning

Creative planning has a relatively low threshold. As long as you can think of creative ways to play various activities and are familiar with the routine of writing plans, you can basically do it.

Because of this, planning often becomes just a matter of "packaging" the creative ideas: trying every possible way and finding all kinds of reasons to pave the way for deductions.

But even so, good creative planning should produce insights that are "spiritual" and not just empty words like "They are a group of young and unique post-90s people who like entertainment..."

Therefore, in the creative proposals written by some 4A advertising companies, these previous deductions will be written by senior copywriters. For example, you often see a short sentence on a large picture, but after reading it, you will feel: Wow! Very well written!

It’s not all about how beautiful the writing is, but the “insights” that are written are really “small”, but they feel very touching.

This also verifies what a senior said before: good BIG IDEA all come from small insights, such as small emotions, small tempers, and small behaviors. Therefore, if you want to do creative planning well, you may need to be relatively emotional. Anyway, I feel that I am not that type of person.

2. Strategic Planning

The other is strategic planning. We usually hear about various things such as business strategy, brand strategy, communication strategy, media strategy, social strategy, e-commerce strategy...

As I understand it, no matter which strategy is adopted, it is essentially a choice. This kind of choice is made through analysis and insight into the industry structure, market trends, competitors, consumers, etc., and then several methods are provided. Finally, the best one is selected based on the brand's own resource advantages. This is the strategy.

So, to some extent, strategic planning needs to be more rational and look at the "big picture". This is why many companies recruit strategic planners and require them to work for at least 2-3 years. In addition, many companies whose main business is advertising strategy/consulting will have their own focused industries. For example, some are good at the catering industry, while others are good at the fast-moving consumer goods industry.

There is no difference between the two types of planning, because the direction of development will be different:

As creative planning progresses, it will develop more and more in the creative direction. Strategic planning will develop in the direction of consulting. You can choose according to your own attributes.

Of course, there are many times when writing a larger brand annual plan requires both strategy and creativity. Therefore, if you can take all of them into consideration, you will definitely become a rare "generalist".

02 The essence of writing a proposal is to carefully arrange a "persuasion" process

By the time you open PPT and write a plan, it means you already have a solution idea (or creativity, or strategy). You just need to present your ideas through PPT, and the ultimate goal is to convince the other party to accept your ideas. So many people, including myself, sometimes become a mess when they open a PPT or are writing. The fundamental reason is that their thoughts are not clear, which leads to the inability to convince themselves.

Only when you have mature ideas, it is time to write a plan. Usually there are two types of writing logic. One is the storytelling type of writing, and the other is the rational professional theoretical model writing method, which also corresponds to the two methods of "persuasion": "appealing to emotions" and "appealing to reason".

There is no inherent superiority or inferiority between the two writing methods, but there are two prerequisites:

• You need to first understand who will be listening to or reading this proposal. For example, for some fast-moving consumer goods brands that are already very good at it, you can use some lively story-telling logic that is easy to understand and interesting. However, for some relatively conservative clients who do not have so many "tricks", they will trust content that looks professional more.
• If you use a more rational professional theoretical model writing method, then the content you write must be confident enough to ensure that it is correct. Because at this time, you are actually letting the other person enter into a rational logic, which can easily make the other person "break the game" and think about whether what you said is right or not.

By the way, I would like to share a few theoretical models that I often use to string together the logic of the plan: 5W, 4P, AIPL, GROW, FAST, SWOT, PEST, people, goods and places, Boston Matrix, etc.

These are certainly not meant for you to apply them mechanically, but they can at least provide some ideas for newcomers. And it is very likely that as you use it, you will learn to integrate it and form your own unique solution logic.

In addition to arranging the logic throughout the entire plan, the other thing is how to make the written content look more convincing when writing it. For example, how can we make the other party feel that the opinions expressed in the strategy plan make sense? When writing a creative proposal, how can you make the other party believe that this idea can be spread?

I have summarized the following methods to better support our content:

1. Arrange data

This is the simplest and most convincing way. For example, before we propose in our plan that brands collaborate with celebrities or co-brand with IPs, it would be best to have some data to show whether the celebrity’s fan base is highly similar to the brand’s potential audience? Is it that a large proportion of the brand’s potential audience likes cultural and artistic IPs? People who look at it this way won’t think that this is just something you came up with on the spur of the moment.

2. Storytelling

Using colloquial language to package the entire reasoning process is actually a kind of analogy. For example, to give a very simple example, when explaining a strategy, you can use the three dimensions of "time, place, and people" to package the rationality of this strategy. Similar storytelling contexts include "use the force of one's opponent to defeat the opponent", "kill two birds with one stone", "learn from one's strengths and overcome one's weaknesses", "go with the flow", etc.

3. Induction

Disassemble and analyze similar cases, summarize the commonalities, and use them as support for our views or creativity.

For example, one strategy we proposed is to position the brand as an industry challenger to break consumers’ original misunderstandings about this category, thereby helping the brand gain recognition.

This strategy sounds very risky, because we all know that breaking the user's inherent cognition is actually very difficult, but there are also successful cases.

At this time, you need to find similar cases in your plan to deeply analyze their commonalities, so as to summarize what the brand should do next and provide endorsement.

4. Intersection method

It is suitable for launching big strategies/concepts/ideas, etc., putting multi-dimensional things together and the intersection is the content that can support our views/ideas.

This method can mainly get rid of the phenomenon that the other party feels that things derived from a single perspective are too one-sided, and it looks more convincing.

03 Doing so can help avoid customers asking the question, “Can any brand do this?”

I believe many people have had this experience: after you have presented a detailed plan, when it is time for customers to ask questions, someone will always ask this question: What is the relationship between the creative idea you proposed in the plan and our brand? Can other similar brands do it? Um, that’s not right, it seems like any brand can do it!

To be honest, every time I hear such a question, I want to curse. I kept saying MMP in my mind: MLGB, it’s such an interesting idea, why do you always ask such inappropriate questions? Anyone can do it, but isn’t it true that whoever does it first will become famous?

But we still pretended to be elegant and responded like this: "Well, it's like this. We think the most important thing about this idea is that it can be used as a social topic to attract everyone's attention and play a role in spreading the word..."

The final result is often that the company is unable to win the argument with the customer. In fact, it is not just creative proposals that face this dilemma; strategic plans also face this dilemma. The root cause is that the customer feels that the solution we provide cannot solve his business problems.

What should I do? I share two experiences that can help you avoid this dilemma:

1. Provide solutions from the perspective of solving the brand’s current business problems

You might say, isn’t the client’s business problem mentioned in the brief? For example, this time it is: increase overall sales through the 618 campaign. But in fact, this is just his appeal, not a problem with his existence. Some customers know the real problem themselves, while some customers don’t. At this time, you have to do it like an old Chinese doctor does when treating a patient. You have to take the patient's pulse first, tell him about his pain, and make him feel that he has the disease. In this way, the patient will be willing to pay for the prescription that is provided next.

For example, take the 618 campaign. On the surface, the brief given to the advertising company is a communication-oriented one. But since the goal is to increase sales, then we need to analyze the growth factors of this brand’s business.

Using the GROW model as an analytical tool, and analyzing the brand’s current market data, which of the GROW factors does the current growth factor fall into?

For example, after analysis, the growth factor is mainly Gain (penetration rate), so all subsequent communications should focus on increasing the penetration rate of brand products. How to increase it?

The most important thing on the communication side is to create a series of usage scenarios for the brand's products and let the target audience see them, stimulating their pain points, or itch points, or pleasure points.

2. Dig deep into the mind of the brand/product

In many cases, we feel that the product selling points mentioned by customers are also mentioned by competitors, so how can we create content that "other brands cannot do"? At this time, we need to do some user listening to see what the real image of this brand/product is among the user group? This is about digging deep into the mind of the brand/product.

I usually go to the product details page of Taobao/JD flagship store to read the buyer’s comments, and search for the product on platforms such as Xiaohongshu, Zhihu, Weibo, and Bilibili to see the real comments from users about it. Sometimes, there is a gap between the real user mindset and the brand’s own planning. For example, some brands position themselves as a technological brand. If they develop creative ideas based on this mindset, customers will definitely think that "other brands can do this too" when they see the plans they come up with.

However, after doing detailed social listening on the above-mentioned platforms, we found that this brand is actually more stylish than other brands in the minds of real users. "Stylish technology" is the unique mindset of this brand. After digging deep into this point, the strategies and creative ideas we come up with are what customers are more interested in buying.

Last point: When writing a PPT, be sure to press save from time to time!

Just today, my PPT suddenly crashed, causing more than ten pages of my written work to be lost. What a painful realization. CRTL+S, the Pavlovian reaction that every Pulangni deserves!

Author: Pulang

Source: Powerpluspoint (ID: powerpluspoint)