4 steps to execute and implement event operations

How to execute and implement a complex and large-scale event.

Because the execution and implementation part involves a lot of content, whether it is data analysis, marketing promotion, etc., I will explain them to you separately later, so the overall content of this part may be a little simpler. Let's take a look at it step by step.

4 Steps to Implementation of Activities

The first step is to communicate with our R&D and related resource parties to see what plans we have. Because in the above 4 steps, we have only produced a plan that we think is reliable, and have not communicated with others yet, so we need to do a round of communication to see if this plan needs to be adjusted. If it does not need to be adjusted, the resource schedule needs to be confirmed, and the launch of the activity needs to be followed up. So this is the first step to solve the problem in the execution of the activity.

3-step workflow after the initial concept of the activity is confirmed

So after we have an initial plan for an activity and we have a preliminary idea, in order to confirm it and push it online, what should we do? Basically, there are three small steps to focus on in this link. Let's look at them one by one:

1. Arrange the preliminary concept plan

With a preliminary plan in hand, it is important to convert the plan into requirements, including what functions we want to develop and how many pages we need to support it. We need to communicate with product, R&D and other departments with these basic plans and requirements.

2. Evaluate and confirm adjusted needs

At this time, it is necessary to ask product, R&D and other departments to evaluate the feasibility, workload and the extent to which existing resources can support. Here we must adhere to the principle of cutting off as much as possible the requirements that are difficult to develop or have a low cost-effectiveness, as well as some requirements that may already have some mature alternative solutions on the market. We may also consider cutting off such requirements as much as possible to reduce some of the burden on the R&D department.

3. Confirm all matters & estimate time, and enter the project management process

Confirm the final plan and requirements, estimate the development time, manage the project progress, and continue to follow up on the progress until it goes online.

Basically, with just these three steps, we can complete the confirmation of the activity plan.

Let's go back to the previous example. For an event like the xx festival of the two-dimensional e-commerce website mentioned earlier, the first step is to organize the preliminary concept plan. All the requirements in this plan that may require development support should be listed in detail. If you can do it to the extreme, maybe you can convert the requirements directly into development language.

For example, they are required to make several types of coupons. How should these coupons be made? If it is possible, they can directly make it into this granularity. If it is not possible, it will probably be the granularity shown below. There are probably 8 requirements that require R&D personnel to evaluate and support.

1. Organize the initial idea

• New users will receive an additional 30 yuan discount on their first order
• During the special sales of categories A and B, 10% off for all items, other coupons can be used in combination
• You can invite your friends to bargain for selected products, and you can get a discount of up to 15%
• For users who have registered for more than one month and have not made any payment, a 40% discount coupon for some products will be issued
• During the event, we invite well-known KOLs to share their stories online every week to attract more attention and traffic.
• A "Looking for 2D Super Fans" crowdfunding campaign will be conducted in advance, with each person paying 33 yuan first. Once 1,000 people have participated in the crowdfunding, all crowdfunding members will enjoy a 40% discount on all courses purchased during the event. (Cannot be combined with other discounts)
• The first 10 orderers of the day and all users whose order sequence contains "33" (such as the 33rd, 133rd, 233rd, 333rd orderer, etc.) will receive a beautiful gift

They can roughly understand what each requirement is for and what it should look like, so this is basically our first step, to organize the preliminary ideas, turn them into requirements, and communicate them to the R&D staff.

Next, if we take this requirement to R&D, they will give us feedback, such as all the above requirements.

2. Evaluate and confirm adjusted needs

• New users will receive an additional 30 yuan discount on their first order
• Can do
• During the special sales of categories A and B, 10% off for all items, other coupons can be used in combination
• Can do
• You can invite your friends to bargain for selected products, and you can get a discount of up to 15%
• Bargaining is allowed, but the amount you reduce each time should be fixed.
• For users who have registered for more than one month and have not made any payment, a 40% discount coupon for some products will be issued
• 40% off coupons can't do that, but credit vouchers can
• During the event, we invite well-known KOLs to share their stories online every week to attract more attention and traffic.
• Can be implemented on third-party platforms, no development required
• A "Looking for 2D Super Fans" crowdfunding campaign will be conducted in advance, with each person paying 33 yuan first. Once 1,000 people have participated in the crowdfunding, all crowdfunding members will enjoy a 40% discount on all courses purchased during the event. (Cannot be combined with other discounts)
• The development is too complicated. I suggest that you pay 5 yuan and get a 100 yuan voucher.
• The first 10 orderers of the day and all users whose order sequence contains "33" (such as the 33rd, 133rd, 233rd, 333rd orderer, etc.) will receive a beautiful gift
• Can do

Basically, after the R&D personnel have completed the evaluation and given us such feedback, we will have to do another evaluation based on this feedback and make adjustments to our activity plan. Therefore, the importance of communication with R&D and confirmation of needs actually lies in this part.

We may whimsically say that our activity has five requirements, and if all of them are achieved, then this activity will be very powerful. But in fact, when communicating with R&D, we must consider the realization cost and feasibility of many requirements. Only a demand that has been fully evaluated for its feasibility can be considered a reliable demand.

When all the requirements have been confirmed, the next step is to fill all the items into the project management table, turning it into a table that can monitor the progress of all matters, making the entire activity more controllable. After that, we can continue to follow up on the progress of various matters. (If you want to receive the "Activity Execution SOP Form" , just reply "Activity Execution Template" in the official account)

When it comes to communicating activity plans with R&D personnel, this is roughly the problem we need to solve.

4 Steps to Implementation of Activities

Then, we proceed to the second step of event execution. Our event plan has been confirmed and we are also following up to prepare for the launch. Next, we should do a good job in warming up and promoting the event. In the stage of warm-up and promotion, I would also like to share with you some simple and common ideas.

About the warm-up of the event

There are two common types of preheating:

1. Creating some suspense during the interaction is often the best option. Commonly used methods include guessing, suspense creation, gradually revealing the content of the event and the relevant participants, and timely reporting on the progress of the event.

Regarding suspense creation, let me give you an example. Didi Chuxing once upgraded from Didi Taxi to Didi Travel. At that time, Didi used a suspenseful approach.

First, they released a poster to tell everyone that its original name was Didi Dache, which attracted a lot of people to spread and pay attention. Such a big brand is suddenly saying goodbye, and everyone is very curious. Then it keeps releasing posters in the app, saying that there are only 3 days left for the new brand upgrade.

Then its old logo was unveiled little by little, and the new logo was revealed underneath. In this way, the entire brand upgrade was warmed up very well, and many people were following and paying attention to it. Therefore, creating some suspense during the interaction is often the best choice for an activity.

2. Inviting users to co-create some activity content, or crowdfunding and other methods are often good ways to warm up.

In other words, we let users participate in the occurrence and establishment of this activity, and let users help us decide. In this way, many users will have a stronger perception of this activity, have a stronger impression of you and be willing to participate.

Therefore, in the warm-up part of an activity, these two ideas are basically the most common. If you want to warm up, I think you should find one or more of these two ideas and implement them well.

About the promotion of activities

After talking about the warm-up, let’s take a brief look at the promotion of a complex large-scale event. In this section, I will also give you some simple ideas. I think that if you want to do a good job in event promotion, it can be divided into four small steps. Let's think about some issues clearly:

1. Confirm internal promotion channels and resources

Looking ahead, you can see what common internal promotion resources are.

2. Evaluate budget and external channel placement

How much money do we have? Because if you want to use external channels, you either have to earn it in exchange or spend money, so we have to evaluate how much money we have and which external channels are available. If I want which channels, we have to negotiate with the channels about their placement.

3. Evaluate the promotion and communication rhythm to see how different resources are arranged

Just like what we talked about before about how to learn from Jianshu's activities, it will also have a basic rhythm, when to do the first round of warm-up, when to do the first round of large-scale promotion, when to do the second round of large-scale promotion, and when to do the climax. We need to roughly evaluate the expected rhythm of the dissemination and promotion of this activity.

Including the activities of the Two-Dimensional XX Festival to be discussed later, we have two special sessions divided into Category A and Category B respectively. In theory, the two categories' special sessions should be independently equipped with some resources to carry out some promotion through more precise channels, so that the effect of the event may be better.

4. Communicate channels, confirm schedule, and prepare materials

Prepare posters, copywriting, corresponding promotional pages, etc., execute them well, and finally follow up with the online launch.

Common channels

So here we will give you some small popularization and statistics on some common channels.

Internal channels: EDM, Push, various product recommendation positions, content-related recommendations, etc.;

External channels: media, Weibo, WeChat, forum communities, relevant vertical channels, advertising, KOL, etc.

I will simply give you a general introduction to the types of channels. I will discuss more details about promotion operations separately later, so I will not explain them here.

4 Steps to Implementation of Activities

We continue to move forward with the activity execution and have completed the promotion warm-up. The next activity will be officially launched, and then we will enter the activity execution, data monitoring and optimization adjustment part. This part involves two related tasks, one is the specific execution of the activity, and the other is data monitoring and optimization. I will talk about these two parts separately later, so I will not expand on this part.

Let's go directly to the last part of the event execution, which is the secondary dissemination + closing + review of the event. The closing of the event is basically the distribution of prizes. I think there is nothing much to say about this. I will just spend a little time to share with you some basic ideas about the secondary dissemination and review of the event.

2 ways to amplify the value of your event through secondary communication

First of all, I think it is very common to amplify the value of activities through secondary dissemination in the execution of many activities. Even if the secondary dissemination is done well, the exposure it brings to your activity, or the value of this popularity, may not only be icing on the cake, but sometimes it can also bring you unexpected surprises.

So how can we amplify the value of an activity through secondary dissemination? I think there are two common approaches:

1. Capture various materials such as highlights, interesting events, current progress of the event, core data or high-quality content generated during the event, and then integrate the above content into a communication content, and conduct secondary external dissemination by contacting relevant channels and media, so as to continuously attract attention to the event.

This is the first and most common way for us to continue to explore the secondary value of communication after an activity is launched.

For example, let’s look at two examples. The first picture is Jianshu’s “Mad Turnaround Contest”. It used an idea when promoting some award-winning works, integrating a collection of excellent articles with interesting twists and turns on the Jianshu website, and then through the forwarding and dissemination of such content, this activity received a lot of attention.

The one on the right is also a common idea. This is an offline Internet partner recruitment festival event. At that time, more than 100 big names were recruited, and then a picture was made to show how awesome these people are. Then that picture was circulated very widely. If you remember, almost every year for large-scale events like Double 11 and 618, they will release some big data reports, which is in a sense a similar approach. If we dig out some highlights or key information during the event and disseminate these things to the outside world, we can still attract some attention.

2. Actively contact various big Vs, celebrities or other relevant brands to participate in activities or interact with activities to create topics.

This is also reflected in Jianshu's Magic Turning Point Contest. After the event went online, I don't know whether it was users who asked the question spontaneously or by themselves, which is "How do you evaluate Jianshu's Magic Turning Point Contest?" Meizu answered this question, and many big Vs and users on the site also answered it. Finally, Jianshu's CEO also came to answer this question, which formed a very good interaction under this question and triggered many people's secondary attention to this event.

Therefore, in terms of how to amplify the value of activities through secondary dissemination, we provide you with these two general ideas for your reference.

About the activity review

Next, I will share with you how to review an event after it ends. I think there are two core values ​​of review. On the one hand, we need to evaluate whether the activity is effective or not, and whether it has met our expectations; on the other hand, we need to look to the future, evaluate and analyze the good and bad aspects of the activity, and summarize some rules for reference in future activities.

So in this context, I think a good activity review, let me share with you a basic framework, I think it is composed of 4 levels:

1. Review the purpose and objectives of the activity

All our reviews must be goal-oriented. Otherwise, I think the review cannot be done and we won’t even have a reference.

2. Evaluate actual achievements, successes and shortcomings

In the second step, we need to combine the previously set goals and objectives, and then evaluate them based on data. This requires facts and data to evaluate what we have actually achieved. And in the process of achieving this, we should identify where we were relatively successful and where we did not do so well, and find out the successes and shortcomings.

3. Dig deep into the data and analyze the core reasons for the shortcomings

For example, for an event like the Two-Dimensional E-Commerce Festival, if we look back afterwards and find that other parts are still in line with expectations, but for users who have registered but have never paid before, their purchase pull is not very successful, then we have to find out the reason.

The reason is that the message did not reach them at all, or even if it did, the discounts and benefits we gave them were not attractive. Or is it that we have already reached them and are attractive to them, but the process and format of our activities are too complicated, so they don’t want to participate, or we simply haven’t explained it clearly. We need to find out the core reason and analyze it. This analysis must come from data, so data is still very valuable to us.

4. Summarize the rules and form future action rules and basis

Whether an event is well run or not, and what are the rules behind it, we need to record these rules and use them as our code of conduct and basis for similar events in the future. In this way, after completing these four steps, I think the review of an event can be basically completed.

Even though it’s the same as learning, learning from the mistakes you made in the past may be more important and valuable than learning more new knowledge. Because we make mistakes almost every day and every week, but we may only learn new knowledge once every few months. If you have the ability to continuously learn, iterate, and improve from the mistakes you have made, then your growth rate will definitely be faster. So I hope everyone can attach importance to reviewing and do a good job of reviewing, gain greater value from it, and achieve faster and higher growth.

Author: Xu Xiongxiong

Source: Xiongxiong Operation Notes

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