8 essential leveraging skills for event promotion!

If there is a way to make an event more effective, “taking advantage of the situation” is the secret weapon.

Sun Tzu's Art of War says:

Those who are good at war seek it from the situation, not from people, so they can choose people and take advantage of the situation.

The general meaning is: People who are good at using troops to fight wars always strive to seek a favorable situation instead of blaming their subordinates for everything, so they can choose talents to rely on and create a favorable situation.

Even in the military, it is important to take advantage of the situation. People who are good at organizing activities should also know how to seize highly-watched news events and hot figures in a timely manner, combine them with their own activity plans, and go with the flow to achieve the purpose of communication.

What kind of passionate sparks will be created when event planning meets leveraging the trend?

Activities taking advantage of holidays

1. Types and characteristics of holidays

(1) Chinese Festivals

Refers to the commemorative days and celebration days handed down by the Chinese people and the internationally recognized festivals recognized by China, mainly including the following festivals:

China's statutory holidays: New Year's Day (January 1), Spring Festival, Qingming Festival, International Labor Day (May 1), Dragon Boat Festival (May 5 of the lunar calendar), Mid-Autumn Festival (August 15 of the lunar calendar), National Day (October 1);

Chinese solar terms: Beginning of Spring, Rain Water, Waking of Insects, Spring Equinox, Tomb-Sweeping Day, Grain Rain, Beginning of Summer, Grain Full, Grain in Ear, Summer Solstice, Lesser Heat, Greater Heat, Beginning of Autumn, End of Heat, White Dew, Autumnal Equinox, Cold Dew, Frost Descent, Beginning of Winter, Light Snow, Heavy Snow, Winter Solstice, Lesser Cold, Greater Cold;

China Memorial Days: Hong Kong Handover Anniversary (July 1), Birth Anniversary of the Communist Party of China (July 1), Chinese People's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression Anniversary (July 7), Founding Anniversary of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (August 1), Victory Anniversary of the Chinese War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (September 3), September 18 Incident Anniversary (September 18), Macao Handover Anniversary (December 20), etc.

Chinese Art Festivals: China Peking Opera Art Festival, China Pingju Art Festival, China Dance Festival, China Shanghai International Art Festival, Shanghai International Film Festival, China Golden Rooster and Hundred Flowers Film Festival, China Changchun Film Festival, China Zhuhai Film Festival, China International Children's Film Festival, China Golden Eagle TV Art Festival, Beijing International TV Week, Shanghai TV Festival, etc.

Foreign holidays: Valentine's Day (February 14), April Fool's Day (April 1), Mother's Day (second Sunday in May), Father's Day (third Sunday in June), Halloween (October 31), Christmas (December 25), etc.;

Other Chinese festivals: Lantern Festival (the 15th day of the first lunar month), Dragon Head-raising Festival (the second day of the second lunar month), China Arbor Day (March 12), May 4th Youth Day (May 4), Qixi Festival (Qiqiao Festival), Laba Festival (the eighth day of the twelfth lunar month), Teachers' Day (September 10), Double Ninth Festival (the ninth day of the ninth lunar month), Singles' Day (November 11), China Journalists' Day (November 8), Telecommunication Day (May 17), China Tourism Day (May 19), China Maritime Day (July 11), National Fitness Day, etc.

(2) World Festivals

The main ones are: International Women's Day (March 8), World Consumer Rights Day (March 15), World Sleep Day (March 21), World Water Day (March 22), World Earth Day (April 22), World Intellectual Property Day (April 26), World Smile Day (May 8), International Nurses Day (May 12), International Children's Day (June 1), World Environment Day (June 5), International Film Festival (August 6), International Youth Day (August 12), Cannes Film Festival, Venice International Film Festival, etc.

(3) Large-scale e-commerce promotion festivals

The main ones are: Taobao New Year Festival, JD Butterfly Festival, Jumei 301 Store Anniversary, Miaya Crazy Shopping Festival, Gome Online "Black Friday", JD 618 Carnival, Suning.com 818 Fever Festival, Taobao Tmall Double 11 Double 12, Yangmatou Black Friday Carnival, etc.

These holidays all have one thing in common: their dates are fixed. Their predictability and inevitability greatly facilitate the use of momentum for activities, and planning and communication plans can be made in advance to achieve the best effect of leveraging momentum.

So, faced with such a rich and diverse range of holidays, how can we effectively leverage the momentum?

2. Tips for taking advantage of holidays

Speaking of taking advantage of festivals, we have to mention the Alipay lucky draw event that everyone enjoyed during the Spring Festival this year.

On January 13, Alipay’s official blog and WeChat account simultaneously released information about 2015 bill inquiries. Among the five posters about bills, there is an irrelevant picture of a red envelope. What is the purpose of this? This is the earliest pre-launch poster for the Spring Festival red envelope event. Although everyone’s focus at the time was on their shopping bills, did you notice the big word “咻” in it? In fact, there is a lot inside.

On the same day, Alipay launched a new feature called “咻一咻”, which corresponds to the word “咻” on the poster, implying that this time the red envelope has to be “咻一咻”.

On January 28, Alipay's red envelope blessing event was officially unveiled: the huge amount of cash red envelopes immediately captured users' desire to gain benefits, and they were eager to get rewards; the competitive and challenging gameplay satisfied the human nature of being competitive and showing off, greatly increasing the desire to participate; the entire event took advantage of the gimmicks of the Spring Festival, the Spring Festival Gala, and blessing, and conformed to the Chinese people's preference for lively and festive occasions. Therefore, a nationwide participation enthusiasm has been ignited, and "Have you collected all five blessings?" and "Please ask for the blessing of diligence" have become people's daily conversations.

Judging from its participation, dissemination and influence alone, it can be considered a very successful Spring Festival event. What tips can we learn to take advantage of festivals from a blessing-collecting event like Alipay?

(1) Seize the best time to take advantage of the opportunity and prepare for the event and launch in advance.

The use of holiday leverage is predictable and there is more time, which puts a great test on the timing of leveraging leverage. For predictable and accurate dates, the timing is no longer about how fast or how quick, but about reasonably arranging the time for each stage of the event. To put it bluntly, it is to solve the following problems: How many days before the holidays should we start releasing content to warm up the event? How many stages does the preheating process consist of? In which time period should we focus on promotion? Will the event be officially launched on a holiday or at another time?

Making these choices requires a full understanding of the attributes and characteristics of holidays in order to grasp the timeliness. The Alipay lucky draw event started its first warm-up more than 20 days before the Spring Festival; it was then launched online ten days in advance to give enough time to participate in the collection; from the launch to the day of the Spring Festival, publicity was continuously intensified, and even strategies were released to create a hot atmosphere for the event; finally, it reached its climax during the Spring Festival Gala and produced results. Seizing the opportunity can often bring positive effects to leveraging the momentum.

(2) Find the best points for activities and holidays, and combine the two organically.

Find the common points between the two based on the purpose of the event, the target audience, the prizes, the overall atmosphere of the holiday, customs and habits; starting from the common points, choose a suitable form of activity to closely link the event and the holiday together, and through vigorous publicity, achieve the goal of being deeply rooted in the hearts of the people, so that everyone will even think of such an event when they think of the upcoming holidays.

Just like Alipay took advantage of the festive atmosphere of the Spring Festival and the custom of sending and receiving red envelopes, and widely distributed Alipay red envelopes in a way of collecting blessings. It was very timely and appropriate, catering to the festive atmosphere, and taking advantage of the event just right. Finally, Alipay also promoted its new feature “咻一咻”.

(3) Be good at using the characteristics of festivals to target the exact audience for activities and take advantage of the situation effectively.

The most important thing about an activity is people. Only when you find the right target can you target it effectively. Some holidays are for the whole nation, while others are only for a certain type of people. You can make full use of this to select the target of the activity.

According to the characteristics of holidays, we can find the main target audience groups, analyze the psychological attributes and preferences of this group of people, and closely match the time, form, prizes, and copywriting of the activities to create activities that the target group will like. For example, International Women's Day is a festival for the general female population. When leveraging this event, you can make all women (or women segmented by age groups, occupations, etc.) the target audience, understand their basic attributes, habits and hobbies, and psychological characteristics, and make the event more targeted and precise.

(4) Prepare a holiday schedule for yourself to make it easier to organize activities.

Just like Strawberry has simply listed some holidays before, in daily life, you can use tools such as Excel and Word to make a detailed holiday list, mark the time, and even summarize some points that can be leveraged, and add them in, so that you will not miss or forget the upcoming days.

Activities leverage popular events

Hot events refer to those events that have a significant impact, are widely spread, and attract a lot of attention and discussion at the same time.

Unlike holidays, hot events can be divided into predictable and unpredictable ones.

Predictable hot events include various new product launches (such as Apple’s fall launch, Xiaomi’s new product launch), large-scale events (such as the World Cup, the Olympics, the European Cup), etc.; since the time of these events can be predicted in advance, the method of leveraging momentum is similar to that of holidays, so I will not elaborate on them here. The focus will be on taking advantage of unpredictable events.

Unpredictable hot events, as the name suggests, are things that happen suddenly and cannot be known in advance.

Let’s first look at an example of leveraging the momentum of a sudden popular event. A story about a "blue and thin mushroom".

A young man from Nanning was heartbroken, so he recorded a video and posted it on Weibo to express his sadness. As a result, he became famous... famous... famous...

This awesome guy said the following:

I feel so sad and depressed. I was so happy today, why did you say such things? I'm so sad. The mushrooms are here. The first wing for a girl is so mushroom, so sad. Why do you have to say such nonsense and leave me here alone in the sun?

In the past two days, all kinds of imitation videos, texts, and emoticons have emerged one after another, and "Lanshou, Xianggu" has magically swept the entire Internet.

The public account "Kuashou.com" took advantage of the Lanshou Mushroom incident and planned a small and clever activity - a game of picking Lanshou mushrooms. Using its own official account as the venue, it quickly achieved over 100,000 readings once launched, attracting a large number of netizens to participate.

Strawberry believes that this is a very successful plan: the entire event is closely related to the entire hot event, from pictures to copywriting to the props of the game itself, all are related. The features of high relevance, fun, easy operation and slight stimulation make people who see it can't help but move their fingers to play it.

Of course, the end page of the game also reminds participants to share the results, taking advantage of the audience’s desire to show off and expanding the scope of dissemination.

What can we conclude from this about how to take advantage of unpredictable hot events?

1. Focus on effectiveness and respond as quickly as possible

When it comes to sudden hot spots, what we race against time is speed. If it is an event that has been planned long ago and happens to coincide with a hot topic, you can release promotional posters or copywriting as soon as you become aware of the hot topic, or quickly make an event poster that is more in line with the hot event, and try to release the news when it attracts the most attention.

If you want to take advantage of this hot spot and plan an event to leverage the momentum, time must also be given priority. During the intense event planning, we must also pay close attention to the developments of hot events and flexibly grasp the timing of hot spots so as to be able to respond flexibly. Try to launch the event online when the event reaches its climax. When you find that the event planning time is too long and the popularity has begun to decline, you need to re-evaluate the pros and cons of continuing the event to see if it is still necessary.

2. Keep it simple. Keep the way of leveraging activities simple.

As mentioned before, when it comes to unpredictable hot events, time is of the essence. How can we plan a campaign that can be launched online more quickly? Abandon the idea of ​​striving for perfection and always wanting to make things more and more complicated. Empty your mind, make the activity as simple and easy to operate as possible, and save time on going online.

Lanshou Xianggu's small event was done with extreme precision and simplicity in both form and content: the posters and copywriting were just pictures that can be found on the Internet, which saved production time; the rules were simple and clear, and were explained in just three sentences, without any unnecessary things... In short, the simple technology + planning helped the event to gain an effective release opportunity.

In other words, try to make the best use of existing internal and external resources; keep the form of the activity simple while sticking to hot topics; the rules should not be complicated, and the copy should be short and concise.

3. Event operators need to have keen insight and responsiveness

If you want to successfully take advantage of popular events when organizing an event, it is essential that operators discover, judge and respond quickly to hot spots. Although unpredictable hot spots are difficult to control in advance, some signs can be found, which tests the ability of operators.

The Internet is a hotbed for hot spots and the best place for operators to capture them. Many hot events ferment on major forums, BBS, WeChat, Weibo and other platforms. For example, the Lanshou Xianggu incident originated and spread on Weibo. People with strong observation skills, when they saw a few Weibo posts about this video, had already thought about whether it could develop into a hot topic.

Therefore, as an operator, you can pay special attention to active big Vs on Weibo, WeChat, etc., pay attention to the dynamics of these big Vs and their interactions with fans, be good at picking out words, digging out hot words, and even predicting whether a piece of information with unusual comments and reposts will become a new hot spot; in addition, current affairs, related industry trends, hot topics on the Internet, etc. should be the focus of attention. Always pay attention to the latest developments and dig out and filter out hot spots that you can use from a lot of information.

As long as you are one step ahead in predicting popular events, the chances of your event being successful will increase.

4. Don’t be blind and don’t let the opportunity ruin the entire event

There must be a limit to everything you do, and leveraging events is no exception. The blind idea of ​​"it is better to kill a thousand people by mistake than to miss one" is not desirable.

Not all popular events are positive and popular with the public. Sensitive, serious events involving politics, law, and those with negative impacts should not be taken advantage of casually. Such leverage often backfires, arouses public doubts and even angers.

Various "xx gate" incidents that have occurred in recent years are negative hot spots. If you insist on taking advantage of the momentum to organize activities, or use hot searches to release your own activity information, it will only make people dislike or criticize you, bring negative effects, and even greatly reduce the image of the entire brand or company.

Therefore, you need to be cautious when taking advantage of opportunities, learn to judge the pros and cons, and don't let taking advantage of opportunities ruin everything.

Finally, in addition to leveraging holidays and popular events, activities can also leverage popular figures, such as the wild girl Fu Yuanhui who became popular during the Olympics, and Zhang Jike in Don’t Wake Me Up, etc. The method of leveraging momentum by popular figures is the same as the one introduced earlier, so I will not elaborate on it here.