Activity operation is an important aspect of operation work. Activity operation runs through the entire life cycle of users, and the goals and focus of activity operation will vary at different stages. This article discusses how to build an event and the principles that need to be followed when planning an event, and shares them with everyone.

01 How is an event constructed?

Activity operation refers to the enterprise systematically carrying out one or a series of activities around a certain theme in order to achieve a certain operational goal. In this process, the operational work includes: event planning, event execution, and event review.

The flow chart of the activity operation is as follows

1. Event planning stage

There are three tasks that need to be completed in the planning stage: planning activity plans, gaining support from leaders and other departments for the activity plans, and planning an activity cycle schedule.

In the first step, when planning an activity, you must first do a good job of data collection and carry out your work in a data-oriented manner.

The data that need to be investigated are as follows:

1. Real-time hot spots : How many people are following this hot spot (you can refer to past activity data, data reports issued by consulting agencies, the number of followers on Weibo hot searches, the number of topics posted on public accounts, and Zhihu hot searches, etc.)
2. User portrait : How many existing users are paying attention to this hot topic, what are their ages, genders, regions, incomes, preferences and values?
3. Competitive product analysis : Investigate what theme activities competitors have launched, how many people participate, and what the activity gameplay and reward mechanism are. But please note that competitors should be selected from two dimensions. The first dimension is product ecology. For example, Kuaishou and Douyin are both UGC short video platforms. The second dimension is similar product functions. For example, although Dianping and Ctrip have different product ecosystems, they provide similar services, such as online reservations for hotels and attraction tickets. Therefore, when users have similar needs, Dianping is a competitor of Ctrip.
4. Determine the existing material and human resources : how much experience and material accumulation related to the activity can be used, and list the data. For example, before Bilibili launched the "Let's Catch Pets Online" event, a large number of related videos had already accumulated on the Bilibili platform. Bilibili can use past videos as examples to show users.

Then, based on the information and data obtained from the survey, we design the gameplay and process of the event and finally complete the event planning proposal.

Data research can not only help operators clarify planning ideas, but also serve as arguments/evidence to help operators gain support from superiors and colleagues in other departments, so that the activity plan can be recognized and approved.

The last step is to plan the activity cycle table SOP based on the approved activity plan. By splitting the tasks, setting ROI and deadline for each task, and assigning the tasks to each person in charge, the progress and completion quality of each task can be tracked in real time.

2. Activity execution phase

After completing the event planning stage, it is time to move on to the event execution stage.

At this stage, I think there are four points that need to be noted:

First, test the campaign before you heavily promote it. Through A/B grouping and embedding, we select the channels and content (copywriting, poster design, process design, etc.) with the best promotional effect to ensure that the event information can be delivered to the target users to the greatest extent and arouse their interest to the greatest extent.

Second, in order to achieve the goal of attracting new users and promoting activation, the setting of the reward mechanism needs to be able to attract users to complete designated actions (sign up for activities/spread activities/send invitation links to friends, etc.) to the greatest extent possible. There are six principles that can be used as reference when setting rewards: necessity, additional rewards, altruism, real-time, ladder-like, milestones, and loss aversion.

This article will provide a detailed explanation of the reward setting and these six principles in the second part.

Third, to achieve long-term retention, there are three principles that need to be considered when setting up activities. First, the activity settings should be related to the core value of the product, so that users can experience the "aha moment" of using the product through participating in the activities. Second, various rewards should be set up in activities to attract users to invest more time and energy, and eventually develop usage habits. Third, activity settings should take into account the user’s growth path, make the activity theme extensible, and ensure that users are able to continue to participate in the activity and achieve long-term retention.

This article will explain these three principles in detail in the second part.

Fourth, pay attention to process data. Only by paying attention to the data can you know what is done well and what is not done well. In terms of content, we should pay attention to the number of clicks on the activity links, the number of views on the activity pages, the browsing time, the bounce rate, the bounce location, etc. In terms of interaction, we should pay attention to the number of users' likes, comments, reposts, the click rate of key buttons, etc.

3. Activity review stage

The review is divided into three steps:

First, pay attention to the result data and use the result data to determine whether the operational goals have been achieved and the extent of completion.

• New user data: how many new users registered accounts through the activity;
• Activation data: DAU, WAU, and MAU during the activity, and their respective increases; the total number of UGC during the activity, and the frequency of user participation in UGC;
• Retention data: how many users continue to use the product after the activity ends; how often they use it; 7-day retention rate, 15-day retention rate, 30-day retention rate, etc.

Second, what are the shortcomings of this activity and what are the reasons why it was not done well.

Third, what good experiences can be retained for future use , or even used as routines/templates to help companies carry out a series of activities on a large scale.

02 How to use an event to achieve operational goals?

By sorting out the structure of event operations, we understand how the event is built step by step. But it is not enough to just clarify the structure, we also need to understand the soul of it, that is, how to use activities to achieve various operational goals.

Use activities to achieve the goal of attracting new customers and activating them, that is, to get people to log in to the company's website to register an account ( attracting new customers ) and start using your products ( activation ) through participating in the activities. During the process and cycle of activity participation, the frequency and duration of product use gradually increase ( promoting activation )

So, how can we get users to participate in activities?

1. User behavior model

According to the behavioral model (B=MAT) proposed by Dr. Fogg, motivation, ability and trigger are all essential to promote the occurrence of a certain behavior.

• Trigger refers to external notifications, such as advertisements, self-media push, etc. Their purpose is to let users know that a certain product or event exists.
• Motivation is the desire that drives people to do something.

Eyal and Hoover believe that human desires can be divided into two main categories: the pursuit of happiness, hope and recognition, and the avoidance of pain, fear and rejection.

The seven deadly sins listed by Dante in "The Divine Comedy" can also be understood as the seven desires of human beings: lust, pleasure, greed, laziness, anger, envy, and pride.

Maslow's hierarchy of needs can also help us sort out the user's behavioral motivations. After all, people sometimes take action to meet certain needs of their own. Maslow believed that human needs can be summarized into five categories: physiological needs, safety needs, social needs, respect needs, and self-needs.

Ability refers to whether people can do something. Eyal and Hoover believe that "ability" is affected by six factors: time, money, physical effort, mental effort, social deviance (i.e., the acceptance of the activity by others), and unconventionality (the degree to which the activity matches or conflicts with conventional activities).

Therefore, if an activity wants people to "participate", the three elements of trigger, motivation and ability must be considered in the activity design.

The main types of activities currently on the market are:

Split the activity into:

Based on the above chart, we can see an activity aimed at attracting new users and promoting activation:

First, a clear trigger is needed to convey the activity information to the user.

The trigger can be an event page, or a poster, link, or invitation code generated by the invitation mechanism. This step requires data monitoring and testing to help companies select the trigger channels and trigger content with the best guidance effect.

Second, give users enough motivation to participate in the event, which can be achieved through the setting of reward mechanism.

Rewards are divided into physical rewards and virtual rewards.

• Physical rewards : cash, prizes, coupons, etc. - Taking advantage of human greed
• Virtual rewards : identity badges/certifications, free membership, resource information sharing, etc. - taking advantage of human greed, enjoyment, vanity, and people’s needs for self-realization and social interaction.

The setting of rewards should not only consider the needs of target users/user pain points, but also be combined with the characteristics of the product itself. This can not only ensure that the rewards can attract the target group to participate in the event, but also encourage the rewarded users to continue using the product, ultimately achieving user activity.

For example, the reward for Didi Taxi can be a taxi coupon, so users who receive the reward are likely to use Didi again in order to use the coupon. But if Didi Chuxing gives users rewards that are not related to its own products, such as doll pillows and amusement park tickets, then even if such rewards can motivate users to participate in activities, they cannot encourage users to continue using the product. From an operational perspective, this type of reward setting can only attract new customers, but cannot help the product retain customers.

At the same time, the following seven principles can be referred to when setting rewards: necessity, additional rewards, altruism, real-time, ladder-like, milestones, and loss aversion. These seven principles can stimulate users to take specific actions (participate in/promote activities/invite friends, etc., to help companies attract new users and promote activation)

1. Necessity : There must be a reward for completing the specified behavior commitment, giving users clear expectations to enhance their desire to participate. For example, Didi Finance once launched a lottery event where by following the official account, one could participate in a "100% winning" lottery.
2. Additional rewards : users can get the maximum amount of rewards when they complete the specified behavior for the first time, in order to motivate users to complete the specified behavior. Taking Kuaishou inviting new users as an example, Kuaishou stipulates that as long as the user completes the invitation, he will receive some cash rewards, and when the cash accumulates to 66 yuan, he can withdraw it to Alipay. But in fact, users can get a cash reward of about 50 yuan after completing the first sharing. Since they are already very close to the goal, users will naturally be motivated to continue sharing.
3. Altruism : When a user completes a specified behavior (such as sharing), not only can he or she receive a reward, but the user whose content is shared can also receive a reward or discount. Taking WeChat Reading as an example, users can get free reading days by sharing links with friends, and the users who share can also get free reading time.
4. Real-time : Once users complete the specified sharing behavior (participation/sharing), they will be rewarded immediately. For example, in the "Summer Show" submission activity launched by Bilibili, users who submit their works can obtain avatar pendants and be eligible to share 50,000 yuan. Another example is the “Monthly Card Save Money” campaign launched by Pinduoduo. After purchasing a monthly card, users can share it with three friends and immediately receive large coupons from Pinduoduo. The coupons received can be used for this consumption instead of waiting until the next time.
5. Tiered : Give different levels of rewards based on the number of specified behaviors completed by users, guiding users to get more by doing more. Taking WeChat Reading as an example, users can get a 2-day unlimited reading card after completing one sharing, but can get a 7-day unlimited reading card after completing three sharings.
6. Milestone : When a user completes a certain number or degree of specified behaviors, the company will give the user a milestone reward. Taking Bilibili's "Flying Across the Funny Universe" submission activity as an example, as long as the user completes one week of submission, that is, completes one station check-in, he or she can get an exclusive avatar pendant on the official website to show his or her identity. After completing two weeks of check-ins, he or she can share 60,000 submissions. After completing three weeks of submission check-ins, he or she can share an additional 20,000 cash.
7. Loss aversion : Remind users that they are just a little bit away from receiving the reward, and use the user's silence cost to urge users to continue the specified behavior. Taking Pinduoduo’s “Duoduo Orchard” game as an example, the game uses a progress bar to tell users that most of the task has been completed, and they only need to perform a few more specified actions to redeem rewards. In this case, users will continue to perform the specified behavior in order to avoid losing the cost of silence.

Third, we should enable as many users as possible to participate in the activities.

"Capability" is affected by two factors: the user's internal ability and external resistance.

Intrinsic ability refers to the user's own ability to do certain things , such as having enough time, physical strength, mental strength, and money to complete something.

Generally speaking, the lower the threshold of an activity, the smaller the ability requirements, and the larger the user base participating in the activity.

In order to enable more users to participate in various activities, Douyin has developed a series of video templates and game props (such as one-second comic faces) to reduce the difficulty of user participation.

In every activity launched, Bilibili will provide similar videos as demonstrations to reduce the difficulty of user cognition.

Whether it is Tik Tok’s template props or Bilibili’s sample videos, their essence is to reduce the difficulty of participation so that more users can participate.

External resistance refers to the situation where users lose the ability to continue participating in an activity at some point due to problems with the activity settings .

For example, if the process design of the key activity page is too complicated, the button placement is not obvious, the guiding language is not clear, or the reward mechanism is not attractive enough, all of these may hinder users from continuing to participate in the activity.

Therefore, when designing activities, operators should use funnel analysis to monitor the conversion rate of each link, and use embedding points and A/B testing to track user behavior, so as to select the most effective promotional language/copywriting/posters/H5 designs, buttons/key page processes, etc., to ensure that users are able to pass through each activity path and finally enter the next funnel.

From the above, we can conclude that if an activity can set up appropriate trigger mechanisms and reward mechanisms, and continuously optimize interactions and copywriting through data tracking to reduce the difficulty of participating in the activity, it can at least ensure the completion of the task of attracting new users and promoting activation.

However, it is important to note that the ultimate goal of a business is to make a profit . In other words, the company hopes that the users acquired through an event will be able to complete each stage of conversion (attracting new users, promoting activation, and retaining existing users), ultimately bringing the company sustained revenue growth.

Image source: Growth Hacker by Morgan Brown

There are two key factors to achieve this goal:

1. The number of new users attracted by the activity must reach a certain level (the base number of new users must be large enough)
2. The conversion rate at each stage must meet certain standards (conversion to achieve retention)

Based on the above analysis, we know that the goal of attracting new users and promoting activation is mainly achieved through triggers, reward mechanisms and data tracking.

So when users are attracted by an event and the company has completed the task of attracting new users and promoting activation, how can it use the event to increase their retention?

The author believes that this also needs to follow three principles

First, the design of the activity should be related to the core value of the product.

Morgan Brown writes in Growth Hackers that great products create an experience that is irresistible to users and satisfies a real need for a large number of users. The moment when the user's eyes light up due to this experience is defined as the "aha moment", which is the moment when the user truly discovers the core value of the product (that is, what the user can get from it).

For Didi users, the "aha moment" is when they need a car, they just need to call a car on their mobile phone, and a car will come to pick them up soon; for Pinduoduo users, it is the moment when they buy a satisfactory product at a favorable price.

Morgan Brown believes that in the early stages of retention, users should be allowed to experience the "aha moment" of using the product as soon as possible, so that users can establish an understanding of the core value of the product.

Professor Yu Jun also believes that the user's preference cognitive function for a product will have an impact on the user's usage behavior. In other words, if users can experience the "aha moment" when using a product, they will have an understanding of the utility of the product, that is, they will know what the product is useful for and how useful it is. Then the user is likely to continue using the product in similar scenarios. At this point, the company has achieved user retention.

Therefore, a good event should not only attract more people’s attention, but also allow users to feel the core value of the product while participating in the event.

Take the “Duoduo Orchard” mini-game launched by Pinduoduo as an example.

In order to qualify to buy fruit for free, users need to log in to the Pinduoduo APP every day to water and fertilize the saplings in the game and invite friends to help. This kind of activity setting will undoubtedly increase Pinduoduo's new users, daily active users and user usage time. ——Achieve new customer acquisition and activation

But it is worth noting that during the game, "Duoduo Orchard" will also guide users to browse product pages and encourage users to place orders to obtain game rewards (i.e. "water drops" and "fertilizers" in the orchard game) to help trees grow faster so that they can redeem the prizes (free fruits) displayed to users at the beginning more quickly.

In this process, users will be guided by the game to place orders and purchase, thereby buying high-quality products at lower prices on Pinduoduo, thus experiencing the core value of Pinduoduo - high quality and low price . Once users taste the sweetness of consumption, they are likely to use Pinduoduo again whenever they have similar needs in the future.

At that time, there will be no need for external stimulation (prizes, game incentives), and users will also behave spontaneously because they have gradually established cognition and trust in Pinduoduo through past consumption (user cognitive preference function). As the number of uses increases, users gradually develop usage habits. ——Achieve retention

Second, set up various rewards in the activities to attract users to invest more energy and time, so as to develop usage habits

Hoover and Eyal believe that investment in a product will form user preferences because humans tend to overestimate the results of their labor/sunk costs and try to be consistent with their past behavior to avoid cognitive dissonance.

Therefore, attracting users to invest in products through activity mechanisms can help companies achieve user retention.

The key to attracting user investment is to rely on variable rewards. Hoover and Eyal believe that rewards can be divided into three categories: social rewards, prey rewards, and self-rewards.

• Social rewards refer to the interpersonal rewards people get from products through interaction with others.
• Prey rewards refer to the specific resources or information people obtain from products.
• Self-reward refers to the sense of control, achievement and finality that people experience from the product.

It should be noted that the reward setting mentioned above refers to using rewards to guide users to complete a certain behavior, mainly used to attract new users. The reward here refers to cultivating users' long-term usage habits through different rewards, which is used in conjunction with retention goals .

Take the "Summer Food Wars" event, which encourages users to create, as an example.

The activity stipulates that newcomers who submit their works for the first time will be eligible to share 50,000 yuan. This reward can motivate users to participate in the activity. ——Incidental behavior under external stimulation .

However, the event also announced that it would select high-quality potential contestants to provide traffic support and help increase fans.

This means that users with outstanding performance can not only receive official support for increasing fans and traffic, thereby gaining more fans (i.e., increased social rewards ), but can also receive official operational guidance, thereby gaining valuable operational experience (i.e., increased prey rewards ). The most important thing is that users will gain the project experience of building an account from 0 to 1, which will undoubtedly increase the user's sense of accomplishment (that is, increase self-reward )

The up-masters cultivated under this activity mechanism are more likely to operate their accounts for a long time. On the one hand, it is because people tend to overestimate and cherish the fruits of their labor, and on the other hand, once they give up continuing to operate, the various remunerations obtained through early investment will have no place to be used.

Third, activity settings should take into account the user’s growth path, make the activity theme extensible, and ensure that users are able to continue to participate in the activity and achieve long-term retention.

Mr. Yu Jun told us in "Product Methodology" that users are situational, and they will have different reactions and behaviors in different situations. This sentence can also be understood as users at different stages have different needs. Therefore, operators must consider the complete user demand growth path, make activity design scalable, and increase the possibility of users using the product for a long time.

For example, an activity with the theme of "pets" can gradually evolve into a series of activities such as "How to adopt a pet", "How to choose the first pet", "How to choose cat food and dog food", "How to sterilize pets", "Pet mating", "Pet schooling", etc. according to the user's growth path, to cope with the problems that users will encounter at every stage of their growth from pet novices to pet experts. Therefore, increasing the number and possibility of users participating in activities can help the product extend user retention time.

For example, the "Online Charity Marathon Event" once launched by the Keep official account. The event encourages users to use Keep to record their running mileage, and they can redeem prizes when they reach the target mileage.

The difficulties and needs that users who participate in this activity will encounter at different stages are shown in the following figure:

User demand growth path

In order to cooperate with the marathon event, the Keep official account launched a series of tweets closely related to the needs during the event:

• "Marathon Class Schedule - Even Zero Basics Can Easily Win a Marathon" - Getting Started Guide
• "I learned this "magic" of running and finally got the joy of running" - Mentality Guidance
• "No knee injury, no retirement? You have to run like this" - Sharing of methods and techniques
• Is fruit meal replacement really reliable? 》—— Dietary guidance
• "How miserable it is to not wear a sports bra properly" - A guide to choosing equipment

Under this activity setting, users will naturally continue to pay attention to and use the Keep official account in order to meet their ever-changing needs. This not only contributes to the daily activity and user usage time of Keep, but also helps to extend the user retention period, because at least during the event, users will continue to read the tweets of Keep's official account.

Summarize

This article discusses the process of event building and the principles that need to be followed in event design.

When setting up an event, you must always be data-oriented. In the early stages, you should plan events based on user, competitor, and past event data. In the mid-term, you should optimize event settings based on process data monitoring. In the later stages, you should summarize experience based on result data.

In principle, in order to achieve the goal of attracting new users and promoting activation, the participation threshold of the activity should be low, and the reward setting needs to be attractive enough for users to complete the specified actions. In order to achieve the goal of retention, the design of the activity must be closely linked to the core value of the product, while taking into account the user's growth path, and attracting users to invest more time and energy through the setting of rewards, and ultimately develop usage habits.

Author: FreshMilk

Source: FreshMilk