Event planning tips and guidelines

If you are an operational product manager who needs to deal with users and traffic, then you need to promote your product.

Whether you want to increase product awareness, attract new customers or make a profit, the easiest way is to hold an event.

Next, I want to tell you: what pitfalls I encountered when implementing an event and how I solved them.

1. Does your activity solve a certain “need” of your user group?

First of all, you organize an activity to achieve a goal, but before that, you need to constantly ask yourself: Why do people participate in your activity?

As a product that does not have its own large traffic and has not yet become a unicorn, there is no need for people to focus only on your product.

So when your product needs to hold an event, please try your best to ensure that your event solves the needs of users to some extent.

Taking me as an example, the product is a paid 2B marketing tool, and its target group is small and medium-sized enterprises. Once, because the free membership time did not cost us anything, I naively thought that our ROI for the “buy a few, get a few free” campaign was good.

But the facts are slapping in the face. Although there are enough marketing nodes every month, this does not mean that marketing tools will be used frequently.

The reason for this needs to be traced back to the user group.

• First of all, small and medium-sized enterprises generally do not pay much attention to their own brand image, which means that they will not pay too much attention to non-critical festivals.
• Secondly, due to their own size issues, small and medium-sized enterprises are not willing to invest in marketing activities at every key node.
• Finally, the platform is a marketing tool, which is very time-sensitive and has many competing products, so users’ loyalty to this product is relatively low.

Therefore, when we reviewed the situation at the end, we found that users would not be attracted by the “buy a few, get a few free” offer, because they are already users of the tool and their current problems have been solved (doing a marketing campaign at this point). “Buy a few, get a few free” is only to solve his future cost problem, so users are not willing to take risks for the future.

Therefore, in the next event, we will directly use the solutions to users’ needs before or after using this tool as the event content, and the effect will be much better than before.

2. Don’t give users a choice

As an instrumental marketing tool, it is applicable to many industries, including retail, catering, education, hotels, etc.

When you have a large number of users, visiting them will become a very costly thing. If you go straight to the visit without screening at this time, your return will be very low.

Position your own activity advantages and think about whether there are better solutions to your activity advantages. If this type of user can easily come up with a better solution than yours, then I suggest giving up this type of user to improve efficiency and reduce costs.

For example, we once specially organized a highly cost-effective WeChat Moments advertising package for small and medium-sized enterprise customers to carry out an activity (without advertising, since it was lower than the market price anyway).

Then, when customer service visited those customers, two types of customers did not show much interest in it.

When these customers do not have the need for brand promotion, they just want to make conversions and want to be directed to the store.

So when I communicate with those catering and hotel clients, they usually question: Why don’t I use this money to promote on platforms such as Dianping and Ctrip, instead of doing what you do?

Of course, this question can be answered and solved; it’s just that you have to spend more time and energy to analyze and compare the cost and effect of this package, so the cost will be relatively high.

But if I use this time to recommend this to supermarkets and educational companies (because these two types of companies currently do not have a better traffic platform for promotion), will the effect be more effective?

What I want to say here is: when a certain type of your users can easily come up with a "better solution", you need to think about whether it is worth spending a higher cost?

3. The nodes of activity communication should be simplified as much as possible

As a non-famous tool product, how to reach users with activities every time is a difficult problem.

In the past, I have tried to use partner channels to push campaigns to a larger user pool.

The whole path is like this: I launch an event, and my partners push my event to their suitable user pool. If there is intention, they will hand the users over to us for follow-up.

There are four key communication nodes:

• I communicate with my partners
• Partners communicate with customers
• Partners communicate with me
• I communicate with customers

During this process, I also tried to train partners to reduce the communication of problems in the middle, but unfortunately, many problems arise in practice. We cannot force our partners to fully understand the event business, so our partners are stuck in the middle like a megaphone.

Over time, if your incentive policy is not very powerful or the control points are not very precise, your partners will become lazy and the final results will be surprisingly poor.

Therefore, we continued to visit and promote our product among the user pool. After all, since we are one family, it will be easier for us to find the users’ problems and address them accordingly.

4. Try to underestimate your human efficiency (not necessarily)

I can use this point as a supplementary point because not every company’s situation is the same. I am just speaking from the perspective of human inferiority (I’ll save my life).

This is a very realistic thing. When you regard this as the job of the assistants, you need to underestimate their efficiency and estimate the deliverables.

These are the pitfalls I encountered when implementing an event. I bring this up here, firstly, to serve as a reminder for you, and secondly, in the hope that you can also sort out your own pitfalls.

No matter how long or short it is, it’s good to think about it. Whether it is right or wrong, write it down and someone will judge it.

Author: Shem

Source: 1NEDAY