Ali Xianyu’s event promotion and marketing rules!

To organize a good event, you cannot rely on sudden inspiration and talent, but should have a set of methodologies that are honed and summarized over a long period of time.

In this regard, it is always right to "copy homework" from Alibaba's excellent cases!

For brands that want to become more "young", graduation season is an excellent opportunity to establish emotional identification between brands and young people.

This year’s graduation season marketing for 8.47 million new graduates is a “big test” that brands need to study hard for!

Recently, all new media accounts in the university circles across the country have been flooded with messages about an event! The "Cheat, Youngster" campaign launched by Ali Xianyu has attracted enthusiastic participation from thousands of universities across the country.

With the theme of paying tribute to the creativity of young people, a heartfelt promotional video, a college student creative competition launched on the APP, and 8 million people flocking to the APP as a result of the event, Xianyu cleverly awakened users' emotions with a small cost investment and ignited the spread of the event in college circles across the country.

How is such a brand activity achieved?

01 Off-site video + on-site competition! A "light" activity created with only two main lines!

Let’s first look at the activity breakdown of “Hack the Boys”:

It is not difficult to see from the picture that the main part of the "Let's Cheat, Young Boy" event created by Xianyu is not complicated. It is a typical event consisting of two parts: off-site traffic + on-site activities.

Why are users willing to forward promotional videos?

Because it answers the questions that all college students have been facing in their hearts:

If I were born ordinary

No halo of prestigious schools

No big company experience

You may not even be in a big city after graduation.

How can ordinary college students like me find our own path in life in the face of today's uncertain times? Just like the question deep in the heart of every young person in the promotional video: Where are we young people going?

In the past two years, there have been more and more voices saying that this generation of young people "has a hard time" and "life is too difficult." Especially this year, 8.74 million graduates are facing the post-epidemic job market, which is called the "most difficult employment season in history."

The job market is highly competitive, and "involution" has become a consensus among young people. For most young people, they have never been so lucky. They are born in "Rome", without the halo of a prestigious school and without work experience. What will the future be like? I dare not even think about it.

However, although they dare not think about it, everyone really wants to know the answer, and the promotional video of "Young Man with Cheats" gave them some real answers.

The four cases in the promotional video are all real people:

• A post-00s girl from Wuhan who experienced the tragic epidemic is now anxious about graduating;
• The Hangzhou guy who is addicted to the "second dimension" is considered to be not doing his job properly;
• College girls in third-tier cities often face discrimination based on their academic qualifications;
• Young people from small towns who are skilled in craftsmanship and second-generation farmers who yearn for the city.

The four young men are ordinary people who can be found everywhere. None of their resumes is glamorous and perfect, and the difficulties they face are progressive, real and cruel.

But at the end of the short film, they used their own efforts to tell everyone that they did not "Buddhist"ly bow to reality like the people around them, nor did they become "discouraged" and give up on themselves, nor did they "slack off" and give up their dreams while talking about "involution". Instead, he tried little by little and turned his hobby into a career of his own by leveraging the dividends of the Internet era.

It is the inspirational examples of these ordinary people that give new hope to the confused group of college students.

This year, many brands are keen on promotional videos, from "The Next Wave" to "Seeing" and this time's "Go Go Squid!" brand promotional video. We need to think about a question: how do they promote user self-propagation?

The key is 4 points!

Four keys to achieve self-propagation of promotional videos:

1. Relevant to me: When making a video content, it must first of all be in line with the user's "current state of mind". Among the college students who are targeted by "Cheat Boys", the most realistic state of mind is confusion about the future. Therefore, most users will tend to open it and see how their peers find their life direction.
2. The content should be easy to understand: the threshold for understanding the content and generating emotional resonance should be as low as possible. Only in this way can the maximum number of potential users be attracted.
3. Media effect: According to Maslow's theory, every individual actually needs to be seen! When ordinary college students see CCTV, the Communist Youth League, Alibaba and other institutions and media cheering for them, they will naturally develop a sense of pride of being respected and recognized.
4. Feeling inspired: I have always said that videos should be "heartfelt". In fact, I understand that heartfelt does not mean that the producer is attentive, but that allowing the viewer to feel emotional "resonance" will make it easier for readers to be emotionally impacted. Receive encouragement for action, which in turn leads to forwarding, sharing and participation in finding out more.

The protagonists chosen for Xianyu’s promotional video of “Youngsters Who Cheat” are not “other people’s children”. The four young people are all ordinary people, but they give the college students who watched the short film a real sense of power.

The audience will feel that if they can do it, maybe I can too?

02 Integration of product and effect! Cleverly design the threshold for activities within the site, first refresh the screen and then land on the APP!

It is not enough to just have a touching promotional video! As a qualified marketing activity, we also need to think about how to implement the activity on the APP to achieve real growth?

This raises the requirement of how to achieve brand and effect integration for the event?

If the previous promotional video was mainly used to achieve brand communication, then the second part of "Let's Go, Youngster" is about the design of the nationwide college creative solicitation activity that fell on the Xianyu APP.

This creative solicitation activity is truly aimed at attracting young users to experience the core of the Xianyu APP for themselves. Why has it become so popular in college circles across the country? Because this activity is simple enough and it is fissionable.

You just need to “publish your creativity” and then “share and collect likes” to get the opportunity to participate in the event.

The number of votes is also based on the recognition of netizens and the likes of relatives and friends.

College students can participate by developing their professional skills, hobbies, two-dimensional creativity or art crafts in their lives.

The winning participants will not only receive prizes from a generous prize pool, but will also have the opportunity to become an Alibaba intern, study at Alibaba’s headquarters’ Xixi campus, or receive an Alibaba offer as an Alibaba intern.

For college students, the cost of participating in this activity is low enough and the value is good, so it quickly attracted enthusiastic participation from college students across the country.

03 What inspirations can operations and marketers learn from the “KaiCheat” event?

Many people who read this will actually think, can I replicate activities like "Young Man Who Cheat" in my work?

From the above activity analysis, we have discovered that as a typical promotional video + product activity combination, the structure of the entire event is not complicated, but there are still many highlights that bring some inspiration.

Inspiration 1:

To attract more users’ attention, the participation threshold should be as low as possible when designing activities, and the gameplay should be simple but interesting.

How can an event attract as many people as possible?

First of all, we need to make the entry threshold of the activity as low as possible. Because when planning a marketing campaign, the most taboo thing is to make the gameplay too complicated!

If you think of a brand activity that attracts user participation as a funnel, the opening at the top of the funnel must be as large as possible.

When designing an activity, we must make the threshold of the activity lower. The role models in the promotional video of "Cheat Boys" are all ordinary people. The award-winning teenagers in the college creative collection activity are just ordinary college students, and the works they created with their ordinary talents:

Hand-made miniature Gundam, architectural restoration, hand-drawn comics, 3D design, these are the daily interests of ordinary college students.

When other users see highly voted works, they will think: That’s it? ! I can do this too!

This is a good way to accurately attract the broadest target population, and also reflects the starting point of the event: to expand the pool of activities that attract users as much as possible so that ordinary people can also show their talents.

Inspiration 2:

In order to make the activity spread on its own, it is necessary to provide users with enough motivation to spread it.

How to achieve person-to-person fission in the dissemination of event content?

In order to make users willingly spread the word on their own, they must be given sufficient motivation to behave!

In the "Let's Cheat Boys" event, the key words are "touching" and "reward". The story in the video is responsible for "touching", while the prizes in the event are responsible for "reward".

Whether you are moved by the promotional video and share it as a social currency, or you actually participate in the competition for the opportunity to win the creative solicitation event prize pool and Alibaba.

The Xianyu team, the organizer of the event, is trying to find ways to give college students more reasons to participate in the event and forward it from all directions.

The prize pool prizes in the event, study tours at Alibaba, internship offers, etc., although not huge rewards, are very much needed by the college student community. Moreover, the cost of participating in the event is not high, which strikes a good balance.

All of this forms a basic chain of self-propagation. Subsequently, through continuous optimization, more people will be able to access the Xianyu APP by participating in the event, which will ultimately achieve the purpose of the event.

Inspiration 3:

To attract media attention, in addition to the theme of the event being in line with the main theme, you also need to be sincere

Many people may be worried that their company is too small and their brand is too weak. How can they get more media attention?

Take a look at Xianyu’s activities. Why can these activities not only resonate with college students, but also be reported by CCTV, Xinhua News Agency, and the Communist Youth League?

If we simply say that the answer is because of Alibaba, that would be inaccurate. Although Alibaba is big, the media does not necessarily need to please the brand. The real answer is that the theme of the event has practical significance.

Because this year is known as "the most difficult year for employment in history... The anxiety of exiting the university as graduation approaches is a problem that every college student has to face." This is not only a problem that college students think about, but also a huge social topic that many media outlets pay attention to.

The operations or marketing of general companies may easily overlook this part. If you work in Alibaba, you need to pay attention to this part: Is the purpose of the event high? Is it newsworthy? Does it conform to the mainstream values?

In this way, you can gain more exposure resources for your activities at work by making a small investment for a big return.

This may also be an area that many marketing operators of small companies tend to overlook when planning activities in the past.

How to accumulate and maintain your own media relations?

Every market operator may accumulate some friends in the media and public relations field on a daily basis. Never treat the other party only as a resource and then ask for "free help" when you need it. This is obviously disrespectful to the other party.

You might as well do this: when you have time, really pay attention to the growth of the media friends you know. You must know what he cares about in the picture above, so that you can have the opportunity to "chat out good news" together in the future.

In this way, when you design and plan a marketing event in the future, you will have the confidence to promise that the event you plan can get high-quality exposure resources and positive interpretation.

Inspiration 4:

Try to help users face practical problems, or at least give them some inspiration.

This time, Xianyu’s “Cheat, Young Man” campaign did not stop at the brand and product promotion level, but hoped to be truly implemented.

In any case, the lives of those award-winning teenagers who finally expressed themselves bravely may have been changed profoundly because of this trip to Alibaba. Maybe some of them can get an offer and have a good job. Perhaps some people have broadened their horizons and determined their life goals through studying abroad.

For more college students who participated in the event, at least "Cheat Boy" also planted something in their hearts:

Pessimists who always talk about "involution" will of course always be right, but the future does not belong to them. The future belongs to those who are positive, optimistic and courageous in action.

Author: She Yuxiong

Source: She Yuxiong