9 key points of event planning!

This article will explain one by one how to carry out a good activity, from the classification of activities to the nine key points involved in a complete activity plan. How to use activities to recruit students?

In marketing operations, marketing activities, as the carrier of ground promotion and channel enrollment, undertake the important task of introducing and converting traffic. As practitioners in the education industry, the enrollment time node is crucial for campus principals and the market. The monthly market enrollment plan includes the planning of activities. Some educational institutions in the market mainly rely on activities to attract traffic and conversion, which fully reflects the importance of market activities in the enrollment process.

This article will explain one by one how to carry out a good activity, from the classification of activities to the nine key points involved in a complete activity plan. How to use activities to recruit students?

Let's first talk about the classification of activities:

01 Classification of Activities

Specifically, it can be divided into four categories:

1. Studying the law

Study method guidance mainly refers to courses such as study methods, which usually appear in lower grades. For children in lower grades, parents' needs tend to be focused on cultivating learning methods and habits. Learning needs to start from an early age, and the focus is on developing learning methods rather than improving academic performance. Looking at the experience sharing of top students, most of them are shaped by good study habits.

When developing marketing activities, the focus can be on developing good learning methods. Generally, the courses include: transition courses for upgrading to higher grades, focus courses on study methods, sprint guidance before the exam, and analysis lectures after the exam. In addition, regarding on-campus activities, the most common activity organized by the institutions is to collect books on campus. The contents collected are books about study methods or notes of top students. This kind of activity can greatly increase the visitor traffic and experience of the campus.

2. Education Consulting

Educational consulting services are mainly in the form of lectures, the most common of which are preparations for the transition from primary school to junior high school, the college entrance examination, and aspects related to filling out applications for colleges. It is said that a good educational environment is composed of three main parts: school education, family education and social education. Among them, family education is the most important part and has also been the focus of many educational and training institutions in recent years.

For tutoring institutions that provide cultural courses, they will promote family education. There are many such family education training instructors in the market now, and they are still willing to cooperate with institutions to achieve a win-win situation for all three parties.

Lecture-type marketing activities have low costs and high conversion rates. The early invitations and the setting up of the conversion links are critical. Because this type of activity is very cost-effective and the content is very informative, the visiting parents will appear to listen particularly carefully. However, it can easily lead to too few people attending, making the event seem unpopular, which will have an adverse impact on the next event.

3. Extracurricular activities

Extracurricular activities are relatively flexible and also more challenging. They mainly include time-node activities, anniversary activities, DIY activities, cross-industry activities, community activities, etc.

(1) Time node activities

Time node activities are easy to understand: they refer to the type of activities I can do at this time node. Every time I have a meeting at the beginning of the month, I ask everyone to take out their mobile phones and look at the calendar. What should they look at? What are the major events this month? This is particularly critical for marketers. For example, it is December now. Looking at the calendar, Christmas is a big festival and is definitely the most important one to celebrate.

Then there is the Winter Solstice. This season is very special, unlike other solar terms such as the Spring Equinox and Grain Rain. There is a custom during the Winter Solstice, which is to make dumplings, so do you have any ideas for activities? The two time nodes are obvious, but what are the invisible ones? For example, now that the final exams are approaching, have you worked with the academic affairs department to produce and promote the sprint test papers before the final exams? There is also an analysis class after the final exam. The key words are: filling in the gaps. Is it possible to stock up on a wave of new customer resources?

Different regions have different levels of importance for exams. For example, in Wuhan, the importance of the meta-exam is higher than the final exam. So the market focuses on the meta-exam.

(2) DIY activities

DIY activities are very special. They refer to activities that you create by yourself. For example, there are few activities during the period from March to April, but you need to hold an event. What should you do? Find the academic affairs teacher and count the birthdays of some students. Can we have a birthday party? Or how about holding a simple camellia party, organizing some sticky parents to talk about children's studies and share some parenting experiences? Or you can organize a basketball game or a spring outing, all of which can be planned.

(3) Cross-industry activities

This is great news for institutions where market costs are not very affordable. The development model is mainly joint, in addition to courses, there is also the most critical fee category.

The activity needs to be carried out, but there is no money. So I looked for a dental hospital and saw if it could add additional services to members to encourage old customers to bring in new ones. We can organize activities together with art organizations and promote each other. You provide the money and I provide the manpower. Is that okay? There are many similar ones. Of course, if there is a fee, there will be more ways to play.

(4) Community activities

Community activities fall under the category of extracurricular activities and can also be listed separately. Community activities can be synchronized with activities within the campus. However, community activities, generally organized by organizations, are concentrated during the winter and summer vacations.

For example, during this summer vacation, an organization joined hands with the Hubei Red Cross Foundation to carry out a public welfare activity of donating books in exchange for classes. During the period, 8 leads were converted with a conversion amount of about 120,000 yuan. The books were then donated to Yanchao Primary School in Enshi, and the Red Cross Foundation also published a column to thank the organization.

This activity not only gained brand exposure, but also contributed to society from a social perspective, and those children can also read more extracurricular books.

4. Psychological counseling

Psychological counseling activities mainly include: pre-exam mentality adjustment, pre-school focus classes, psychological counseling lectures, and parent-child relationship management. The first two are about exams.

Nowadays, many children tend to become nervous, anxious, and unable to sleep before exams. During exams, their minds go blank, they panic, and they have to go to the bathroom, which leads to careless mistakes on questions they know how to answer, resulting in unsatisfactory test scores. Few institutions offer psychological counseling lectures, but most schools have such a department because almost every school has students like this.

Education needs to be guided from many aspects, so the handling and improvement of parent-child relationships need to receive enough attention. The same goes for market enrollment. Would it improve the campus' enrollment situation if we offered special lectures and classes for these types of children?

02 Event Planning

A complete event planning proposal involves nine major aspects. If you search on Baidu, you can actually find quite a few actual cases about event planning proposals, some of which are very comprehensive and some are very simple. However, the author believes that as long as these nine aspects are clearly grasped, it is actually very complete. It cannot be more or less. What are they specifically referring to?

1. Activity Theme

The theme of the activity is essential. It needs to be combined with the content that the activity wants to express, and parents need to understand it as soon as they see it. For example, “Birthday Party for Classmate XX” is simple, intuitive and easy to understand.

The author organized a Dragon Boat Festival event a long time ago, and the memory is still fresh in his mind. Because this event was very important, a lot of time and energy was spent on it, and the details of the event were refined. Many colleagues later used it as a reference and are still in use today.

I can’t remember the settings of the activities very clearly, but the theme of the event is hard to forget: "Enjoy the Dragon Boat Festival, and let the rice dumplings overflow in Longcheng". This event was held in Longcheng International Community in Shenzhen. The time node was the Dragon Boat Festival, and the company I was in at that time included the word "joy". The name incorporates elements from three parties and was unanimously approved when it was first thought of.

2. Event time

There are generally two points to consider when it comes to activity time: one is whether parents’ participation time is allowed, and the other is whether personnel and venue can be reasonably arranged during this time period.

Therefore, most of the activities we have seen are concentrated on Saturdays or Sundays, and the specific time period is basically in the afternoon. We have also seen quite a few lecture activities in the morning. There are not many activities during the week, and even if there are, they are concentrated after five o'clock, which is after school.

3. Event location

There are few issues to consider when choosing the venue for activities, as activities on campus are basically held in study rooms, which have relatively larger spaces. For activities outside the school, the venue selection is also relatively fixed. However, the activity plan needs to tell everyone, including parents, where we are going to hold this activity? What type of activities?

4. Activity Target

The purpose of setting the activity objects is mainly to make enrollment more accurate. Due to the planned nature of the activity, it will involve the distribution of current students and the allocation of grade ratios, so the objects of the activity will also have corresponding selectivity.

For example, the policy lectures for the high school entrance examination are aimed at junior high school students, and basically they are students in the third year of junior high school. Even if there are any lectures for students in the first and second year of junior high school, they will be relatively few. As for fun activities, most of the participants are usually children in primary school grades. Activities within the campus can ensure that they are all primary school students. Community activities will also involve children who are no longer within the enrollment range.

5. Activity Content

The content of an event involves the quality level of the entire event. In this era of "content is king", the same is true for event planning. The activity content will be designed in conjunction with the activity process.

In primary education, we prefer to use the "edutainment" approach to teach and guide children, so the content of the activities can be oriented towards this theme. Many organizations’ activities are mostly about gaming, and they focus on how to play.

In fact, it is meaningful to incorporate our educational philosophy and let children learn happily while having fun. For example, "Encyclopedia Knowledge Competition" is a common activity type in primary schools, junior high schools, and high schools. English institutions often add English spelling, reading and writing to the game sessions, which is what parents want to see.

Secondary school education is more of a "cramming" type of education, and the main demands of middle school students and parents are "improving grades and going to higher education", so the activities of the institutions tend to be lecture-type and exam-type.

6. Event Promotion

Event promotion is generally divided into online and offline, and is also a guarantee of the number of visitors to the event. An event is like a movie. Even if there are big-name stars, it seems difficult to get high box office without publicity and roadshows. Unless word of mouth is very good, people who have seen it are willing to share it, and it can also gain popularity through online dissemination. However, the activity only has an early stage and no mid-term fermentation. If you don’t come to participate, you will miss it.

The existing online communication is still based on H5 production and promotion, collecting lead information and then making invitations. Most activities are promoted through poster design, with QR codes added for publicity and promotion. Compared with H5, you can browse the content without opening the poster. Make it simple, reduce the number of steps for users to follow, and make it easy for them to understand at a glance. This is crucial.

Online communication, a customer acquisition model based on the principle of infinite fission, is also a major highlight of enrollment.

As for offline publicity, I often set visit targets for the departments and then carry out publicity. The usual methods are to make follow-up phone calls, conduct door-to-door publicity at the school gate, distribute invitation cards, place promotional banners and display stands, etc. So how many visits do we need to guarantee through telephone invitations for the course, how many visits do we need to guarantee through market promotion, how many visits do we need to guarantee through online promotion and follow-up visits from VIP groups, and then based on the promotion cycle, we can roughly estimate the number of visits to the event.

7. Activity Process

The activity process is combined with the personnel arrangements of the activity, that is, the time and who does what. Just arrange the appropriate people according to the content of the activity. This link requires someone to coordinate and arrange the most critical people in the right positions to ensure that there will be no problems in the entire event.

8. Estimated visit rate for the event

The key word to ensure visits: watch the numbers! The estimated door-to-door promotion of activities and the cost of visits will also involve expense budgeting. Only by keeping a close eye on each department, daily data, and event visits can the appearance be smooth. Remember not to assume that there will be a lot of people attending the event and just promote it one or two days in advance. Such activities can easily result in "abortion" or "stillbirth".

9. Cost budget

Cost budgeting is actually the first step of the entire event. If it does not involve event costs, you can just design it according to the procedure. If expenses are involved, the activity plan needs to be designed according to the budget in advance.

Many companies need to apply for expenses in advance before they can do anything. A budget of 200 and a plan of 500 is obviously not feasible. The purpose of making a budget is to control the cost of the visit.

at last

In summary, this article mainly talks about the four major classifications of marketing activities and the nine key points of event planning. By mastering the classification of activities, you will have a clear understanding of the planning of marketing activities; by mastering the nine key points, you can control the quantity and quality of event visits and increase the chances of sales conversion.

Author: Hui Ge Xiaosheng

Source: Hui Ge Xiao Sheng