Strategic design and implementation of large-scale event promotion!

Please think about the following scenario:

A certain two-dimensional e-commerce website has been online for two years, with over one million registered users, three main product categories and over 100 SKUs. Its monthly sales last month were 2 million yuan. The boss hopes that you can increase monthly sales to more than 5 million yuan through activities within two months, and the total budget for the activities will not exceed 200,000 yuan.

Where should you start?

Similar to the above scenario, in actual work scenarios, you will often confirm with your boss to be very clear about the purpose (increasing monthly sales) and the target (more than 5 million).

What would you do at this time? Is it to directly design the gameplay and format of the activity? For example, flash sales, recharge rebates, etc.

In fact, after clarifying the purpose and goals of the event, the first step you need to do, and what you must spend a lot of time and energy on, is to design the back-end strategy of the event in line with the goals.

For example, in the case of the two-dimensional e-commerce website, what you need to think about is: there are so many ways and means to increase sales, where should I focus my focus and resources? This will make it more reliable for the activity plan to achieve its goals during final implementation.

All of these are actually not perceived by the users participating in the event, but require deep thinking and design by the operators.

Next, let’s learn how event operations should be combined with goals and design event backend strategies.

Now that our activity constraints are clearly defined, we can move on to the second step of the entire design plan. At this step, the core issue we need to solve is actually to evaluate and deduce our existing business data based on the activity goals defined in the previous step, find some clues, discover the better focus points of the activity, and finally formulate strategies around these focus points.

We need to make it clear that in the second step, the output we want to obtain is actually the back-end strategy of the activity. That is, if we want to carry out this activity, assuming that we have more than 1 million users on our site, then what kind of users are we targeting? Or if we target different users, do we have different strategies and different incentives to help us achieve the goal of the entire activity? What we want to produce is probably a strategic plan like this.

So how do we come up with a plan? In fact, we have to do some work. The output of this plan, as we just said, is completed by reversely evaluating our activity goals. To put it simply, we are going to organize an event with the goal of attracting 200,000 new users. This is our goal, but there are definitely many ways to achieve it. We may have different approaches on different channels, including letting old users bring in new ones, cooperating with a certain channel, or simply making more placements. These are all ways to achieve the goal.

So first we need to break down our goals and see how many methods can help us achieve them. At the same time, we also need to make some inferences from the current data to help us find which parts of the data may have a higher cost-effectiveness for our current investment, or which areas have a greater chance of making significant data increases. So in a sense, the strategy is obtained after a certain amount of decomposition, analysis and evaluation based on our goals. It is such a basic relationship.

If this sounds a bit abstract, let's go back to this specific case. Now you can combine this background and feel it. If you were given such a basic activity requirement, how would you start? So in such a context, you can feel the value and significance of backend strategy designation.

Simply put, in such a context, if you just go back to the context of the simple activities we mentioned before, we say that if we want to do such an activity, we might as well give discounts, or we give cash back to old users. Then the basic question now is if you give discounts, how exactly do you do it? Will it be different for different product categories? Will the extent of your discounts be slightly different in different time periods? I think these issues cannot be decided simply by thinking in advance, so you must make a good strategic design for the event.

Therefore, the activity strategy design should return to our current sales volume, which we want to increase by about 2.5 times. So where should our sales volume be driven to increase?

Will an increase in traffic lead to an increase in sales? Or will an increase in conversion rate lead to an increase in sales? Or do we want to increase sales by relying on repeat purchases from old users? Or should we focus on solving problems for new users? Or are we going to raise prices? Or should we focus on a certain category?

We can get so many ideas at once, but these ideas still sound a bit messy, so we must find a more orderly and scientific way to help us do such analysis and thinking, which leads to the very important method that I will talk about below - combining the goals to design the back-end strategy of the activity.

How to design activity backend strategies in line with goals?

I think the method can be composed of two parts:

1. If possible, break down and evaluate the paths to achieve the core objectives of the activity, identify areas with greater growth potential, and define these as optimal activity focus points.

Just like we said just now, there may be N ways and paths to achieve any activity goal. We need to know what the optional paths are, and it is best to do a basic analysis of them to find out which path has greater growth potential. The greater the growth potential, the more we should focus our resources on investing in this area. This is the first step, and it is recommended that everyone do it.

Why is it possible? Because not every company's internal data systems and data analysis capabilities are perfect and powerful. So for some companies, even if they need to conduct an evaluation, they cannot do a complete evaluation and can only do a partial evaluation. This is understandable, but no matter what, I think we should have this awareness.

2. You can combine or directly use the "3 core questions of activity backend strategy" as an auxiliary tool to complete the framework design of the activity backend strategy

What if we don’t have such perfect data analysis capabilities and systems, and we may not be able to completely scan all paths to achieve our goals? Don’t worry, there is another very important tool. Next, we can use this tool in combination. It is called “3 Core Questions for Activity Backend Strategy”. I will tell you what these 3 questions are later.

In other words, if we answer these three questions clearly, perhaps these three questions can serve as an auxiliary tool to help us complete the framework design of the activity backend strategy.

So I think the core steps in designing the backend strategy of an activity are these two parts. I would also like to clarify a concept here. We have been talking about the word "focus point", so what exactly is the focus point?

The so-called "focus points" are some strategic directions where investing your activity resources is more cost-effective. There are generally 1-3 better focus points in an activity.

Just like an activity has a budget of 100,000, which can be invested in old users or new users. However, after evaluation, we found that investing 100,000 in old users can bring in 1 million in sales, while investing 100,000 in new users can only bring in 300,000 in sales.

If this is the case, assuming we can carry out data comparison and analysis to this extent, our decision will actually be very simple. We should obviously invest it in old users, so this is the so-called focus. There will be 1-3 optimal points of focus in an activity, and everyone should be clear about this concept.

Common core business data disassembly ideas

We will briefly expand on the two core methods of designing activity backend strategies above. First, let’s talk about the first method, which is to break down and evaluate the paths to achieve the activity’s core goals. I believe some of you have already thought of this. In fact, this involves the core method of indicator decomposition (which will be explained in detail later).

Almost all core business indicators can be broken down into a basic mathematical formula. This mathematical formula may be an addition formula or a multiplication formula. When we turn it into a formula, we know how it is constructed. If we want to improve the formula indicators, then we can identify which links we can focus on and do such a basic breakdown.

How to find the best activity focus through data analysis and deduction

With this disassembly method and idea, how do we find the focus of the activity step by step? It’s actually very simple, there are 3 small steps in total:

1. Assuming that you want to raise the core indicators, break down the path to achieve them

Basically, it is a method of decomposing indicators. If we want to increase sales, the path to achieve this may be to add up different categories, and then the number of users * conversion rate * ARPU value, which is also the second idea. There is also the sales volume of new and old users, which can constitute the third decomposition.

2. Combine the disassembly ideas, extract the data prelude, and analyze and compare the existing data performance

For example, our revenue can be divided into revenue from new users and revenue from old users. By analyzing and comparing the changes in these two parts of revenue over the past six months or a year, we can see some changes and trends in the data, and we can judge whether the revenue from repurchases by old users still has a lot of room to increase or it has basically reached the peak and there may not be much room for increase.

This includes how much room we can tap into in terms of growth in new user revenue. We need to analyze and compare existing data, including across different categories and channels, to get some basic conclusions.

3. Determine the best starting point with the greatest potential for growth through data analysis and comparison

Is it the type of channel, the type of user, or the type of product?

Basically, after completing these three steps, we have completed the breakdown of the activity goals and found the paths to achieve them, and then see which path has the most potential. After we have completed these steps of analysis, the first half of the strategy design is basically completed.

However, as mentioned before, this analysis may not be comprehensive, or after the analysis, you may want to see if there are other ways to think about it. So we also have another tool, which is the three core questions of the activity backend strategy design just mentioned.

3 core questions for event backend strategy

Before making an activity strategy, we can ask ourselves the following questions:

1. Which type of users does the event hope to attract? Is it the existing users on the site, users from external channels, or relying on the spontaneous dissemination and diffusion of existing users to attract more people to participate?

2. Which commodity categories/product classifications/topics will the entire event focus on?

Whether you are doing a community-based activity to boost activity or an e-commerce promotion, you can get some answers to this question.

3. Will the entire activity have different strategic designs for participants of different types/characteristics/channels?

For example, whether there will be different strategic tendencies for male and female users is also a question you can ask yourself.

I think a tool like Core 3 Questions actually has two values ​​at the same time.

The first level of value is that if your company's data system is not so perfect, and it does not have so many resources and time to complete a very detailed decomposition of activity goals, decomposition of achievement paths, etc., maybe you ask yourself these three questions, and answer these three questions clearly, maybe you can also get a basic framework of a basically reliable and usable activity strategy.

I think the second level of value may be able to help you fill in some blind spots in your thinking on the basis of your original foundation, just like the example of the two-dimensional e-commerce website just mentioned. Suppose before the beginning, we want to increase its sales by 2.5 times. We also did a lot of data analysis and indicator decomposition. After the analysis, we made a lot of comparisons between new and old users and found that there is indeed more room to increase the sales of repeat users. We also got such a basic prediction. At this time, we have reached a basic conclusion.

After reaching the conclusion, we go through the three core questions again, and we still find that, in the third question, whether the entire activity is aimed at different types of users, we can make some different strategic designs, and we can still find some potential clues.

For example, should I design different strategies for college students and adult users, such as focusing on guiding them to buy different products, or should I design different strategies for male or female users? So in a sense, it can give us some inspiring ideas and help us fill in some blind spots that we may have missed when we were doing rational decomposition and analysis of indicators.

Let us reiterate that when the goal of our event is clear and we need to design the backend strategy for the event around this goal, there are two aspects. On the one hand, we need to break down the goal of the event, do some data analysis and comparison, and find more potential growth points. On the other hand, we need to answer the three core questions of the event's backend strategy and find some answers. We can use them to understand our event strategy design. These are some tools and methods that can be relied on in the second step.

Activity strategies and optimal focus points of two-dimensional e-commerce websites-conclusion

Let’s go back to the case of the two-dimensional e-commerce website. If we follow the entire method we just talked about, whether it is the three core strategy questions or the decomposition of indicators, in fact, if we have enough data support, we will definitely be able to find the ideal activity focus in this two-dimensional e-commerce website.

I think the most important thing is that everyone must understand the core idea. Due to space limitations, I think it would be too much work to fully expand on what data to use and the entire data analysis and comparison process. Time does not allow, so we will simply skip the entire deduction process. Here we assume that we have done a detailed analysis and comparison and reached such a conclusion. That is, we have done a detailed data analysis and comparison, and finally found a better starting point that is roughly like this:

Since the budget is limited, we will not actually spend a lot of money and resources on event promotion and dissemination. Therefore, we hope that the dissemination of the event will focus on old users to help us spread the word externally, with this approach as the core focus.

Next, if we make some simple summary and refinement of the above text description, it can be summarized into the following core parts.

The first is to stimulate old users to buy; the second is to stimulate new users to buy; the third is to focus on registered non-paying users; the fourth is to focus on categories A and B; the fifth is to use existing users to bring in new users. After these five points are sorted out, they are basically what we call keywords, and they are also the five best focus points in the entire activity. Therefore, when we design the activity gameplay later, our gameplay should also revolve around these five points.

Author: Xiongxiong Operation Notes

Source: Xiongxiong Operation Notes