Break down event planning and promotion in three steps!

Many times, when we organize a marketing campaign or launch a new model, we like to draw on some successful models in the industry. It is certainly a good thing to learn from others' success or failure experiences, but if you misunderstand the core elements of others' success or failure and apply them to your own projects, you may suffer a greater failure.

Although the principle is simple, many people fall into this pit from time to time in actual application, and "you" may be no exception. Don’t believe it? Let’s try it.

Do you know the meaning of a last-ditch effort? The vast majority of Chinese young people who have received nine years of compulsory education will blurt out: When facing an enemy with many times more troops than your own (or whose strength far exceeds your own), you must leave no way out, fight to the death, and exert your greatest potential to defeat the enemy.

If you think so too and think this strategy is impeccable, then please read on. In the case of the battle of one's back to the river, Yu Jin, a general of the Wei Kingdom during the Three Kingdoms period, also wanted to emulate Han Xin's "battle of one's back to the river". So he lined up his troops along the river bank to confront the Shu army. What was the result? Tens of thousands of soldiers were killed and the entire army was wiped out, and Yu Jin himself also lost his life. When Cao Cao heard the news, he was also furious and scolded Yu Jin for knowing the facts but not knowing the reasons.

So what mistake did Yu Jin make? It turned out that when Han Xin chose to fight to the death, he did not deploy all his troops on one side of the river to fight the Zhao army. He also deployed two other armies. One army served as a support force to provide assistance and support when the main force was fighting with the main force of the Zhao army, and also to send positive signals to the soldiers who were fighting.

The other was to deploy a surprise force behind the Zhao army's main camp, and when the two sides were fighting fiercely and the main force of the Zhao army was out in full force, suddenly emerge and rush into the Zhao camp, pull out the Zhao army's flag and then claim that the Zhao army was defeated. After hearing the news, the Zhao army at the front line became demoralized and suffered a major defeat. Han Xin used this method to defeat Zhao's army of 200,000 with only 20,000 troops.

So sometimes, when we are faced with something that seems very familiar, we think we have grasped the whole situation of the matter. In fact, we only know the methods or means of this matter, but we know nothing about the conditions and background under which this matter happens. As a result, when we are doing another thing, we mistakenly think that it is the same thing as what is happening now and we can use the same means. As a result, when we find that the effect is not ideal, we begin to sigh: the activities of other people are the ones that work well, and our own activities never work well.

In fact, the occurrence of an event is often determined by the influence of multiple conditions. For example, background, target population, risk preparation, etc., take the example of the last stand above.

First of all, this incident happened in ancient times. Due to the poor communication equipment in ancient wars, marching and fighting often relied on "morale". Everyone could only see the performance of the people in front and behind him. Therefore, once news that was not conducive to the war situation came out, the result would turn into a major defeat in which everyone had to escape for their lives. There are many such scenes in our daily project work. We thought we were learning from other people's classic operational cases and wanted to apply them to the project we were responsible for, but we found out that we had no idea how to use them, or we used them but the results were very poor. So how do we solve this dilemma?

Step 1 of the element decomposition method:

Break down activities or projects into element levels

From the above description, you must have understood that simply reusing the methods that others have done well is unlikely to work. However, if you further break down the methods into elements and see what kind of methods should be taken under what elements to be effective, it may be an important way of learning.

The factor decomposition method is actually to divide a thing according to different factors, mainly including the application population, application purpose, application product type, application implicit conditions, application method, and the effect achieved.

Take the New World Event as an example. If you just copy and imitate it as a hit event that sells anxiety to people in first-tier cities, it will be basically difficult to succeed. In the end, you can only sigh that the hit content and events are done by others, so why no one is interested in your anxiety sales.

But what if we apply the element decomposition method to analyze it further? The New World View event is an event with content nature (application product type) held for the post-90s generation (application population) in order to trigger fission sharing (application purpose). It successfully aroused discussion, sharing and dissemination among the target population by creating a sense of anxiety (application method) (application effect 1). However, from the perspective of order effects, the increase in flight steward orders was not obvious (application effect 2).

The implicit conditions of the activity include: cooperating with flight stewards to share the cost of the activity; the activity may have undergone countless internal optimization tests (implicit conditions).

Step 2 of the element decomposition method:

Matching feature application points with effect attribution

After breaking it down like this, what you need to do next is to further match the element application points with the results to find out which element application points lead to this result.

For example, in the New World event, if we break it down, we can see that anxiety is indeed a psychological resonance among young people living in first-tier cities, because we can see that many participating users discuss this point; at the same time, a large proportion of New World media’s own users also participated in the initial event fission, indicating that the attributes of New World users and the tone of the event match, and the base number of the initial fission population is also very important (the above can be observed based on data analysis results).

However, the reason why Xin Shixiang’s users do not make many orders may be precisely because there is a disconnect between the point of users’ anxiety and the final step of purchasing plane tickets for travel. This is because users can relieve stress in many ways by being anxious about their lives, and they do not necessarily have to buy plane tickets to travel. (The above can be learned through user interviews or other methods. I am just proposing a possible fantasy.)

Therefore, you need to realize that no matter how successful an event is, not all of its elements are worth learning from. On the contrary, no matter how unsuccessful an activity may be, there will always be elements worth learning from.

So what we need to do is to face an activity, disassemble the elements in the activity, and deeply match the elements with the results to determine which good elements are worth learning from and which poor implementation methods are worth avoiding.

Step 3 of the element decomposition method:

Disassemble and match your own project or product according to step 1

Determine which one or several important factors affect the project, and then find the effective application points of the factors, and seamlessly embed them into the core product links that users have to use, to form a unique USP for the product.

Of course, completing the above two steps can only allow us to absorb some experience in a scattered manner. When it comes to the systematic issue of how to carry out our own activities, we still seem to have no idea where to start.

At this time, the third step requires us to establish a systematic factor construction model and absorb the factor experience learned from the previous decomposition into this model, so that we can form our own specific response methods when facing specific problems.

Let’s take another practical example. Amap and Baidu Map are two bickering rivals in the map field, and have been in a love-hate relationship with each other for a long time. Later, Amap innovatively developed the celebrity voice feature. The two versions with Lin Chiling and Guo Degang quickly gained everyone’s love and also contributed to the high growth of Amap.

In fact, if we take a closer look at this function, according to the previous method of factor decomposition, it is aimed at the public's star-chasing psychology (application population), based on growth goals (application goals), and oriented towards tool-type products. It achieves a high growth in users (effect) through the star-like implantation of the product (application method).

If we look at this function from the perspective of the corresponding effects of the elements, it actually seamlessly embeds the elements and features of application methods that have been verified on the market (celebrity-endorsed products have high sales, high public recognition, and strong entertainment attributes) into the core link that users have to use (i.e. navigation voice), forming AutoNavi's unique USP.

If you think about the process of presenting this result, it might be like this.

First of all, maps are used by a wide range of people, so an application targeting a wide range of people is needed to capture users. At this time, celebrity endorsements of this application are attractive to all kinds of people. Of course, similar universal methods also include profit-based, hot-spot-based, etc., but profit-based methods also mean more cost expenditures, and hot-spot-based methods are less timely. Relatively speaking, celebrity endorsements are indeed a long-term and effective way to reach a wide range of people.

Of course, it is not enough to just confirm this point. The next step is to determine how to naturally present this method to users. The most effective strategy here is not to create demand where there is no demand, but to naturally embed the application method into the product path that users have to use. Amap's approach is to successfully embed the "star" application method into its own product voice, making this method a natural display for users in the navigation voice scenario, thus achieving huge success.

Of course, there are many similar strategies for products that imitate the rocket's rise in order to highlight the speed of their products or services. This is also a way to seamlessly integrate the consensus of "rocket = fast" into the product and thus achieve the goal.

Of course, you might say that the above examples are all relatively simple products or activities that can be used as reference. If my product is complex, how can I apply the element decomposition method?

First of all, I need to explain that no matter how complex your product is, there are often only one or two features that can truly impress users and make your product different from competitors. The other features may not need to be too different from your competitors or may be derived from the key elements of differentiation.

When faced with complex products and projects, you first need to break down your product according to the application population, application purpose, application product type, application implicit conditions, application method, and achieved effect. Find out what are the most effective methods under different factors. This method can be one that you have practiced or one that is widely used by others to achieve the effect. For example, the high attention paid to celebrity-endorsed products mentioned above is a method that is widely used by others to achieve the effect.

Then you need to analyze which one or several elements in your project or activity are most likely to become the growth point that truly impresses users, and finally combine this element with your own product to form a USP unique to your product. For example, in the example of AutoNavi Maps above, the AutoNavi team at the time innovated on the application method, using celebrity voices to replace normal people's voices, which led to huge growth.

If we innovate based on the application population, can we also consider launching a completely new version of the application for the two-dimensional population, from the interface to the image to the voice? At this point you may have discovered that we may have launched a voice innovation method for users, but the original intention and consideration angles for achieving this result may be completely different.

If you don’t understand the factor decomposition method, you might mistakenly believe that both use the same means to achieve growth, and naturally should have the same goal. By breaking down the elements of your own products and then matching them to the proven element-level response methods on the market (other people's products and activities, as well as the methodology that everyone has reached consensus on), the success rate and conversion rate of the project or activity will be improved to a certain extent.

It is also worth noting that doing the above can only ensure that we use a better method to approach the effect. The final result is actually largely limited by another factor: invisible players.

Invisible players refer to points that may appear or be applied unexpectedly when doing something, but these points have a very important impact on the outcome of what is done. For example, the New World mentioned above may have gone through multiple rounds of optimization before the event was officially launched (for example, this may not be the case in reality). Therefore, in addition to designing the above elements, we must also pay special attention to those points that may exist but we are not aware of.

Hearing this, you may ask, since these points are invisible and I can't even notice them, how should I design them? The more important thing here is to think one step further. When encountering something, think about whether there are any overlooked points or things that are "ignored" because they are "obvious".

For example, the prerequisites of the question, the background or other things. As long as you can think of one more possible situation, you can avoid making mistakes during the actual operation process. This "invisible player" factor also reminds us to be prepared for a long battle. Don't think that you will succeed in one step if you are fully prepared. Small steps, trial and error, iteration, optimization, and combining factor decomposition method to continuously improve the probability of achieving results are the correct ways to implement something.

Summarize

To summarize the content of this article, we spent a lot of space at the beginning to tell you a case: a fight to the death. Let everyone understand that what we think we understand may not be the whole picture of a matter. Only by having the ability to break down means into factors and then matching the relationship between attribution factors and effects can we better find effective application points of factors to achieve effects.

Secondly, when faced with the specific problems we want to solve, we still need to first break down the project into elements, determine which is the important element or elements that affect the project, and then find the effective application point of the element based on the market or other competing products, and seamlessly implant it into the core links that users have to use, to form a unique USP for the product.

In addition, we should also note that even if we have mastered effective solutions to specific problems, when facing specific problems, we may still be limited by some invisible factors that we don’t pay much attention to. Therefore, we need to think one step further during the actual operation process, go through all the key factors that affect the results as much as possible, and then find the most effective influencing factors.

If we still cannot fully consider all situations and possibilities, we must also be prepared to make small steps of trial and error and iteration, and strive to achieve our goals within one cycle by constantly optimizing factors. After all, only a few people can achieve success overnight.

I hope you can gain something from this article.

Author: Wang Yuting

Source: Wang Yuting