The 4 elements of event planning and event format design!

I am here again to share with you the knowledge of the Internet and overall marketing. This time I want to talk about the skills of event planning. No matter we are individual entrepreneurs or event planners in a company, we will feel uneasy and embarrassed when preparing for an event for the first time due to lack of experience. Here I want to share with you how to systematically understand the planning process of an event and the key factors that need to be paid attention to. I hope to help you plan an event better.

Four elements of activity positioning

Before holding an event, we must first confirm the positioning of our event. An event with unclear positioning can easily lead to problems such as confusion between priorities, neglecting one thing while focusing on another, and chasing after the trivial. At the same time, it will be difficult for the boss to approve our event proposal. The proposal for an event consists of four parts: event background, event purpose, event theme and event time. Next, I will introduce these four parts one by one and how we should design and improve these four parts.

1. Activity Background

Among all the elements, the background of the event is the most important. It is responsible for telling the boss (or letting us clarify it ourselves) why we are holding this event and what value this event can bring to our company/enterprise. At this time, we can lay the atmosphere of the event through five dimensions.

First of all, the product data. We can analyze the data in combination with the company's direction to clarify the main goal of our event. For example, the company makes a paid software. The customer retention rate has continued to decline in the past six months. In addition to reflecting on whether our own products have imperfect functions, whether there are better products on the market, and whether users' demand for the services we provide is decreasing, we can also increase customer retention by holding some welfare activities. I will talk about how to do it later. Now we just need to understand that we can find the current urgent needs and the direction of the activity by analyzing product data.

Next is market hotspots. Activities that seize market hotspots are generally not because the company has any current situation that needs to be changed urgently, but because by taking advantage of the hotspots, the company can bring a lot of traffic and revenue. These are activities that can generate a lot of value if they are seized. It is worth noting that the hot spots here can be divided into two types. The first type is predictable hot spots such as holidays and technology product launches, which can be marked in the calendar in advance.

The other type is sudden hot spots that we cannot predict in advance, such as the Kunshan Long Ge case and the South Korean N Ward case. This sudden hot spot is not suitable for activities, because from the time we learn about the hot event, draw up the event plan, prepare for the event, and finally start the event, more than ten days have passed. New hot events have already appeared, and the original hot spot is no longer a hot spot. Therefore, when preparing, remember to plan well on the schedule to ensure that the hot spot can be used most efficiently.

The third dimension is competitor dynamics. On the one hand, adopting this dimension saves our thinking costs and allows us not to worry about the form and content of the activity. On the other hand, it can help us convince our boss because it utilizes two psychological factors: confrontational emotions and path dependence. When making comparisons, everyone will feel that since others can achieve good results by taking certain actions, then I can do it too. In this way, we can dispel the BOSS's doubts about the final results through the effects, and make him feel that this should be an effective means.

The fourth dimension is to start from our target population. Generally, these are welfare-oriented activities targeting two types of people: those who are willing to invest a lot of time or money in our products and those who are very active in our communities or official platforms. These two types of people are our core customers and have high commercial value. They are strong enough to drive the core data we care about. Holding events specifically for them can make them feel valued by us and further strengthen their loyalty.

The last dimension is specifically used to persuade our leaders. On the one hand, we can recall what requirements and instructions the leaders have put forward for us, and link these instructions with our plan in the plan or report to the leaders, and actively respond to the call of the leaders. Since we made this plan under his inspiration, it will not be so easy for him to refuse. On the other hand, we can also think from the leader's perspective about what value he needs most now. As long as our activities can meet his needs, he will be more willing to allocate funds to us.

2. Purpose of the activity

The significance of the event background is to provide a demand or opportunity, a reason for doing the event. How we should do the event, what goals the event is based on, and what the specific indicators are are what the purpose of the event is to solve. Generally speaking, the purpose of the activity is a supplementary explanation of the background of the activity, which breaks down our big goals into small goals and breaks down vague concepts into specific, achievable and measurable indicators.

We need to break down our goals into specific visual data and make sure to plan them well before starting the event. This way we can evaluate the final results of our event and what attitude we should use to evaluate it.

After breaking down into measurable indicators, the qualitative problem has been solved, but the quantitative problem has not been solved: How should we design the expected value of each indicator? For example, if we mainly evaluate retention, then our goal is to achieve a satisfactory retention rate on the second day. How low must the three-day retention rate be before we fail to achieve the purpose of holding this event?

At this time, we can set our goals based on two reference points: the indicators of our competitors and the indicators of our colleagues. Generally speaking, an improvement of 15% to 20% over their normal performance is a satisfactory result. If we do not have such information, we can always get our company's normal data, and make appropriate improvements based on this data. Generally speaking, an improvement of 20% over the normal value is already a very good result.

Theme and time of the event

In the previous sharing, the uncle talked about the four elements of an activity, but the last two have not been analyzed in detail. Here, I will analyze these two elements first.

3. Activity theme

The theme of the event is different from the previous two elements. The previous two elements are aimed at ourselves and our leaders, and are efforts to make the structure of the event clear and feasible. The theme of the event is aimed at the object of our event. Its main goal is to quickly attract the attention of tourists and clearly show the content of the event. Here, I also provide four dimensions to analyze how to write a good event theme:

The first dimension is to clarify our target audience. Who is the target group of our product? What are their age, gender, occupation, city, income, family situation, interests and hobbies, and educational background? After doing a good job of crowd segmentation, we can better design the content and expression of the topic.

The second is to start from our services. What services do users want from us? Why do they want it? What problems may they encounter during the process that require our services to help them? Which is the most differentiated or eye-catching point of our service? Through this dimension we can find the elements that should be prioritized in the theme of our activity.

The third dimension is to increase the attention of the event by taking advantage of hot topics and celebrities. I have talked about this before, so I will not repeat it here.

The fourth dimension is to find the common pain points and resonances among users. Through resonant topics, users can spontaneously discuss and take action.

4. Activity time

The cycle of the activity is the last factor we need to determine. Generally speaking, the longer the cycle of our activity is, the better, because the longer the duration means the longer the effect of the activity can last. However, we must pay attention to two points: the first is our budget. Many times with a limited budget, a well-organized small activity will be better than a shoddy long-term activity, so we must take the budget into consideration before thinking about the form of the activity.

The second is that we do not extend the event just for the sake of extending it, so we must first ensure that we have enough content to fill the activities within this cycle. Don’t make the activities large and empty with high repetition rates, as this will tire users and have the opposite effect.

It is worth mentioning that the activity cycle does not only refer to the cycle of one activity, but to the cycle of a series of activities. Multiple activities can be held in one cycle, and as long as it is a series of activities, they can be planned in one cycle.

Design of activity form

After designing the activity positioning, we need to determine the activity form. In the process of designing the activity form, many new planners will go to two extremes: too simple or too complicated. I will first explain these two most basic issues.

Both opposite extremes can easily lead to a failed activity. An overly simple activity is generally reflected in the fact that the rules are not clearly written or incomplete, and users are confused after reading them: What should I do? Careful users will look at the activity introduction again, but still won’t get the answer because we don’t have any design at all. If we are vague when designing the event format, it will not only hinder our team from executing the event plan, but also fail to guide users well. Even if users want to participate, they will be confused.

On the other hand, if the format is designed to be too complicated, users may have to go through ten thousand steps before they can get the benefits. If we design our gameplay to be very complicated, we are actually increasing the user's participation cost in disguise. Especially when we are doing some welfare activities, if we write very long rules and steps, it will arouse people's suspicion: first, it seems that we don't want to give out benefits at all; second, users may feel that we are doing some fancy operations in the process of asking them to continuously execute our process. In general, designing the links too complicated will make users feel insincere.

Author: Drunk Uncle

Source: Drunk Uncle ( guodada128 ）

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