Event planning and promotion process!

When talking about the "crash" experience of event operation, the operations partners are all very familiar with it. No matter they are newbies in the industry or senior operations professionals, when talking about the topic of event operation failure, they instantly become energetic and complain constantly.

When talking about the reasons for the failure, some complained that the boss was too stingy and refused to provide a budget, some complained that the activity goals were set too high and were completely unrealistic, and some even complained that they encountered bad teammates which caused the activity to fail. It can be said that the reasons are "too numerous to list".

Although rollovers are common, as operators, do we have a good way to avoid them in advance?

As a veteran operator who has been working in the industry for nearly a decade, I can tell you clearly that there are definitely avoidance plans, but the answer lies in long-term event operation practices.

As the saying goes, long illness makes a doctor. Here, based on my operational experience, from the perspective of avoiding event operation failures, and combining the complete event chain before, during and after the event goes online, I would like to share with you some of my personal experience in event operation. I hope it will be helpful to you.

1. Before the event goes online

If you plan ahead, you will succeed; if you don't, you will fail.

If the goal of successfully completing the event is compared to 100 points, then the importance of all the preparatory work before the event goes online will account for more than 60 points. At this stage, as operators, we must emphasize this. Especially the key points such as event planning , event preparation (warm-up + publicity), etc., which are explained one by one below.

1. Event Planning

At the event operation level, the quality of the event plan almost directly determines the final online effect of the event. Therefore, in the event planning stage, operations personnel need to plan carefully and think thoroughly, try to make the event effects predictable, and not just write plans based on their own ideas.

There are many templates on the Internet for writing event planning proposals, so I will not go into details and will focus on emphasizing these core points of event planning.

1) Activity goal: Focus + quantifiable

When I emphasize the event goals during the event planning phase, many operations staff may find it low-level and ridiculous. As the anchor point of the activity, why do we need to emphasize the activity goal?

I thought so at first, but after reading the activity plans and activity goals of many operators (including some from large companies), I was really shocked by their broad and unfocused activity goal copywriting. The following are some examples for reference:

In Case 1 , the original activity goal was to increase the monthly repurchase rate of old users.

At first glance, it does not seem like much, but if you think about it carefully, this cannot be considered an activity goal at all, because its goal is too broad and lacks quantitative assessment targets. After all, an increase of 1% and 100% are both considered to increase the repurchase rate of old users. In the end, which one should be used to measure the success of the activity?

It can be seen that the goal is not clear, which will inevitably lead to the distortion of the actions performed by the activity. Therefore, when designing activity goals, it is necessary to try to make them sufficiently quantifiable.

In case 2 , the activity objectives initially appear detailed and comprehensive, and appear good at the reporting level.

However, from the perspective of event operations, such event goals make the mistake of multilateralism, making it impossible for operators to know the ultimate purpose of the event. Goal one looks like a branding activity, Goal two looks like a recruitment activity, and Goal three looks like an effect-based activity, making it impossible for people to focus on and understand the core purpose of this activity. Therefore, it needs to be streamlined into a clear, quantifiable activity goal to avoid confusion.

Therefore, as the lighthouse and North Star of event operations, event goals must be focused and quantified, so as to unify the thinking of the operation team and work towards common operation goals.

2) Activity costs: focus on hidden costs

Cost is the basis of event operation, so I will not elaborate on it here. However, when calculating the cost of event operations, it is necessary to emphasize the concept of "hidden costs".

As shown in the figure below, when calculating the cost of an activity, do not only calculate the explicit cost (money) paid for the activity rewards, but also add all the manpower costs paid for the launch of this activity, such as the manpower costs of operations staff + product development staff + promotion staff (cumulative man-days). These are all the costs paid for the event to be finally launched.

Once you have the concept of hidden costs, you will have a new and more comprehensive understanding of activity costs (commonly known as the boss's perspective). From now on, you will no longer be interested in promotional rhetoric such as “0 budget brings x million users”, because you have realized that behind the promotion with 0 yuan explicit cost, there may be huge hidden cost expenditure.

3) Activity Mechanism: Making Good Use of Human Leverage

The activity mechanism mentioned here is what we often call the form of activity. Activities such as giving out red envelopes for registration, giving out discount coupons for spending a certain amount, and giving out red envelopes for inviting friends are all concrete manifestations of the activity mechanism.

Usually, an activity mechanism that is interesting and beneficial to human nature can greatly enhance the effectiveness of the activity. Take the PDD's "Knock a Knife" event, which is often ridiculed and complained by everyone. Although the event routine is complicated and the rules are tricky, it is undeniable that the event mechanism of inviting friends to cut a knife and get valuable goods for free can indeed greatly stimulate the interest of participants (for a comparison of the effects, refer to the figure below).

Therefore, when designing activity mechanisms, event operators should try to utilize the weaknesses of human nature to design activity mechanisms, such as making good use of raffles, games, and fission activities to design activities, rather than simply and crudely setting up routine task-type activities such as full-discounts, registration gifts, and consumption gifts. In today's era of over-marketing, consumers have long been numb to these.

2. Activity Preparation

In order to ensure the smooth implementation of the activities, the operation team will usually carry out a series of preparatory work before the operation activities are carried out, such as the preparation of channel promotion materials, the application of marketing budget, the writing of online tweet copy, etc. These are all old stuff. What I want to emphasize here are the following two activity preparation tasks: event warm-up and event promotion.

1) Activity warm-up

Just as athletes need to warm up before a competition, operational activities also need to be warmed up before they are officially launched. Activities without warm-up may even attract complaints from users (why did I just buy it yesterday and the price has dropped today).

Taking the common Double Eleven promotion as an example, large e-commerce platforms such as Alibaba and JD.com usually conduct pre-promotion one or two months in advance to build momentum for Double Eleven, with continuous social media marketing such as elevators, Douyin, Weibo, and Xiaohongshu. However, as a small and medium-sized platform, it is impossible for us to carry out pre-promotion on such a large scale, but pre-promotion within our own channels is still necessary.

For example, we can promote the countdown of the event on the official website or the homepage of the APP, or interact with existing customers in advance through WeChat public account tweets, or make advance announcements among the customer base through customer service or sales... Through this series of warm-up actions, combined with relevant data and user feedback, we can perceive the user's attention and response to the event in advance, and make full psychological preparations and expectations for the subsequent online activities.

2) Activity presentation

As we all know, a good event is not the exclusive credit of an operator or an operation team, but the result of the full cooperation of the entire company. Once the event is launched and promoted, it usually requires the joint efforts and collaboration of various departments of the company. Therefore, sufficient internal publicity is needed before the event goes online in order to achieve the best event effect.

However, the activity briefing mentioned here does not mean convening everyone to a meeting and simply introducing the activity rules (many companies actually do this), but at the same time, it means designing and synchronizing a well-planned and strongly tracked activity calendar. It requires each department to clearly express their cooperation mechanism, which should be reflected in the daily report after the subsequent launch, rather than being just a few words.

Usually, about a week before the start of the event, the party leading the event operation needs to convene all the collaborating parties after the event goes online (product department, operation department, customer service department, sales department, etc.) to give a detailed presentation of the event and answer questions. Based on the event promotion requirements, a detailed event launch - a complete calendar for the promotion/marketing period should be formulated, with responsibilities assigned to individuals and time accurate to the day. Once everyone reaches a consensus and all parties have no objections, they can then implement it.

2. Activities in progress

The launch of an activity marks the first step towards success, but in order to ensure efficient achievement of the activity results, operations staff need to continue to work hard. In particular, it is of utmost importance to combine the real-time dynamic data after the activity is launched and to optimize and adjust the activity in real time.

For example, at the beginning of an activity, operations need to check for omissions and fill in the gaps through the data operation platform or data collection points before the activity goes online, quickly verify whether the entire user chain of the activity conversion is unobstructed, and use funnel data to quickly analyze whether each conversion node is abnormal; if there are any abnormalities or bugs, promptly notify the product and technology department for rapid repairs, and inform the customer service department to respond to customer complaints in a timely manner.

Then, as the activity progresses, the activity effects of each channel gradually become apparent. At this time, activity operators are needed. In the early stage, it is best to summarize and analyze user activity data of each channel on a daily basis. Once the conversion rate of a channel is found to be abnormal, the marketing strategy should be optimized in a timely manner. Such as appropriately increasing the marketing budget of the channel, adjusting the marketing copy of the channel activities, tilting the event promotion resources toward this channel, etc., thereby improving the effectiveness of the channel.

Taking past cases in the Internet finance industry as an example, in order to efficiently attract new users to the platform, the platform planned to cooperate with WeChat self-media channels to carry out soft-text promotion, and then supplemented it with investment reward cash red envelope activities to carry out a combined new user acquisition. In order to improve the effect of the event, the platform event planners deliberately "borrowed" the past successful cases of a certain industry giant and made the following design:

However, after the first tweet was sent out, we looked at the user data of the next day and found that the effect was not significant. Although there were red envelope incentives, the number of investing users and the cumulative investment amount did not increase significantly compared to other channels in the past (probably less than 50 new investing users were added for a single tweet).

At first, we thought that the author’s account was inflated and the user data was falsified, so we deliberately replaced it with a well-known celebrity. After observing the user data, we found that although the number of article views and activity page visits increased significantly, the investment data did not increase much, and the growth was far below expectations.

After some internal discussion, we suspected that there was a problem with the copy of the tweet, so we immediately asked the planner to produce two new articles and then launch the promotion.

But what is surprising is that the daily cumulative investment data growth is still limited. What’s more, the number of readers of these two articles is even lower than before, which is really incredible.

Finally, out of desperation, everyone simplified things and started directly by increasing the rewards, gradually increasing the basic reward from the initial 100 yuan to 150 or even 200 yuan, relying on high rewards to attract users.

Initially, this approach of increasing rewards did significantly increase the cumulative investment amount of new users, but the impressive data is difficult to sustain in the long term, and can only be further improved by increasing the activity benefits step by step.

However, the average customer acquisition cost of new investment users on the platform rose rapidly, and the high reward expenditures soon exceeded the upper limit of the platform's tolerance. Finally, the platform had no choice but to stop the activity after a brief promotion and put it online again after optimization.

Just when the operations department was puzzled, an investor data disclosed by a peer company caught everyone's attention. As the object of imitation in the activity, its executives revealed in a public interview that the first investment amount of its new users was close to 20,000 yuan, almost four times the average level of its peers.

The moment the event planner saw this data, he was awakened and immediately asked the data department to derive the average investment amount of new users on the day of registration in the past six months. In the end, he found that it was less than 8,000 yuan.

This quickly made us realize that it might be because we set too high a user threshold when copying the activity operation work. Then we quickly modified a version of the activity, as shown below:

In order to go online quickly, the operations department reused the previous WeChat copy for a small-scale launch. The results the next day far exceeded expectations. The number of investing users increased by 150+ on the day of launch, and the data for the next day showed a trend of gradual improvement.

After receiving such data feedback, we acted quickly, immediately asked our boss for budget, and quickly rolled out the campaign through WeChat self-media channels. The result is predictable. After nearly two months of operation, the platform has attracted thousands of high-quality investment customers, and the customer reinvestment rate is much higher than others.

Afterwards, when comparing the two activities, I didn’t expect that simply lowering the threshold (and even reducing the reward) could increase the effectiveness of the activity by nearly 3 times, which is really incredible.

But considering the background of the entire Internet finance industry, we understand that because Internet finance is a high-return and high-risk investment, the audience, especially new users, will not invest heavily without understanding the platform, and will not continue to invest just because the rewards are generous. After all, they have to consider the safety of the principal.

When designing the activity plan, the platform roughly imitated the operations of well-known giant platforms and raised the activity threshold to 20,000+, which obviously far exceeded the tolerance threshold of new users (compared to the average amount of 8,000 yuan for new users on the platform), so they will not buy into it like they did before when investing in large platforms.

But after lowering the threshold to 10,000 yuan, it is within the reach of new users. They only need to increase their investment by 2,000 yuan (within the critical value of fund safety) to get an additional reward of 50 yuan. Coupled with the endorsement of a big V on the official account, it is obviously worth a try, so this is the logic behind the event becoming so popular. After the event ended, more than 90% of users chose investment thresholds of 10,000 and 15,000, which indirectly confirmed the correctness of our logic.

Therefore, the process of this case from failure to adjustment and then to success is the result of continuous optimization and adjustment based on user data and characteristics after the activity was launched. Although it was ultimately successful, the adjustments in the process, such as adjusting the WeChat copy, changing the delivery channels, and multiple attempts to increase the reward amount, are all necessary "detours" in the activity optimization process, which require gradual accumulation and polishing by the operation team.

PS: The platform described in the case was later exited in a benign manner under the guidance of the government and returned all principal and interest to all users.

3. After the event

The event deadline has passed, but the event operation has not ended. In addition to arranging the distribution of rewards in an orderly manner, post-event review and reflection, which senior operations repeatedly mention, is an essential part after the event.

From my years of experience in operations, I know that an efficient event review meeting will be of great benefit to individuals, operations teams and even the entire company.

Below, I will use my past work experience to explain to you the accumulation and value of review.

In the early years, in order to cooperate with third-party community channels to attract traffic, the team planned a very common and fun activity, that is, an activity to draw a grand prize by purchasing products.

The prizes include Dyson hair dryers, cosmetic sets, household cleaning products and other items. Before going online, no one noticed anything unusual and everything was prepared as usual. However, after going online, it was discovered that the data was unusually ugly. Compared to previous lottery activities, the data dropped by more than half.

After much research and understanding, we found that the mainstream target users of this channel are mainly male, mostly aged 30-50. They are not interested in these feminine prizes at all. Therefore, the prizes have lost their appeal and the effectiveness of the event has been greatly reduced.

After the event, we held a day-long meeting to review this failed event. We concluded that the reason the team chose these feminine prizes was that the event planners and team were mostly female. If they were not careful, they would easily choose products based on their own gender and personal preferences. However, because most of the team members were women, they did not notice anything unusual. As a result, the tone of the product did not match that of the mainly male target users, which ultimately led to failure.

In order to avoid such situations from happening again in the future, everyone brainstormed the following solutions at the review meeting.

Option 1: The prizes for the lucky draw should be products with high liquidity and public acceptance. Products such as Apple series electronic products, JD shopping cards, cash red envelopes, mobile phone bills, video website memberships (Tencent Video memberships, iQiyi memberships), etc. The advantage of such products is that they are highly accepted by the public and are suitable for both men and women, young and old, so there will not be too many problems.

Option 2: Select activity prizes based on the user characteristics of the channel; that is, when jointly promoting an activity with a channel, first obtain a relatively accurate user portrait from the channel, or recommend activity prizes through the channel side, and let the contact person on the channel side recommend corresponding customized gifts based on their long-term user communication experience.

For example, if the channel side is a forum for mothers, then choose baby products as prize incentives; if the channel side is an animation community, then use animation-related products as rewards... in order to cater to the tone of users on the channel side.

Option three: Select event prizes based on the results of user research. It is said that without research, there is no right to speak. In order to understand users' preferences for prizes, the most direct and effective method is to conduct user research.

To this end, before the event starts, the platform uses the data operation platform to first circle out the target audience of the event, and then screen out relatively active users. Then, user surveys are conducted on these users through text messages or customer service calls, allowing them to vote for their favorite prize type.

Alternatively, before the event begins, you can conduct event warm-up and research simultaneously through WeChat official account tweets, and then use a series of products with the highest votes from users as prizes for the event. In this way, the purpose of preheating the interaction of the event is achieved, and relatively accurate and popular prizes can be selected.

As shown above, through the review meeting of this failed event, the team summarized the three solutions mentioned above, which basically avoided the situation where the prizes were wrongly selected due to the "personal stance/preference" of the planners. Similar problems never occurred afterwards. This is the value of review.

In addition, the operations team can also think about the reusability of operations tools through multiple operations practices. Especially for lottery, sign-in, and invitation activities, their operating models, activity methods, and even the codes in the development process are all similar. The operation and product teams can precipitate them into activity templates for subsequent reuse. This can not only save activity development costs, but also shorten the time it takes to launch later activities.

Especially for large companies, event operation is one of the important means of regular customer acquisition. For such operation teams, after the event, the operation team can even work with the product team to create an event middleware product with good versatility and reusability, thereby empowering the operation team horizontally.

To sum up, the anti-rollover measures for event operations are actually the summary and accumulation of many years of personal practical experience in events, through in-depth thinking and analysis of the whole chain marketing before, during and after event operations (especially before event operations). Although it is impossible to completely avoid rollovers at events, it can reduce the probability of rollovers to the greatest extent, especially in avoiding risks of major events, which is really helpful.

Therefore, in the future, when you receive activity operation tasks assigned by your leaders, you might as well combine the author's cases and sharing to think comprehensively about the operation activities, which will definitely be of great benefit.

Author: Monk

Source: Monk