How to plan a screen-sweeping event, 4 tips!

How to plan a screen-sweeping event? Just read this article!

Whether an event can go viral depends not only on the ability of the planners, but also on whether the company and the product have the genes to become popular.

Nowadays, when it comes to event planning, many people think of raffles, gift collection, and buy-one-get-one-free promotions. When many planners encounter the need for event planning, the basic method of operation is to come up with a theme, set the time and location of the event, design the event process to be simple, and finally add a prize. What's worse, some companies simply copy other companies' activities and never analyze the purpose behind the activities.

A company's marketing activities should have three major functions:

1. Strengthen the connection between brand users;

2. Deepen the experience of brand value;

3. Accelerate brand consumption actions.

Event planning is to solve one or more of these problems. User interaction, value experience, and consumer conversion are also the criteria for measuring the quality of event planning.

I have planned many events, some of which were very successful, but there were also some failures. The following content is a summary of my own planning experience and also provides advice to new friends who have just entered this field.

1. Insight into human nature: the soil and nutrients for event creativity

To put it simply, participating in activities means getting alive and moving. Make the brand come alive in the minds of consumers, increase the brand's activity and influence; make it active in the consumer circle to attract more new users. To achieve this, we need a deep insight into consumers and human nature. If I could only use one sentence to express the whole article, I would tell you: "Insight into human nature! Insight and insight into human nature again! Insight, insight, and insight into human nature again!"

Only human nature is the soil and nutrient of creativity, and the source of all needs! Claude Hopkins once mentioned in his book "Scientific Advertising": "We have always been looking for people in the advertising industry who can grasp the pulse of the public. The deficiencies of literature and education can be made up. If you understand human nature, then we welcome you with open arms!"

The biggest benefit of insight into human nature is that it can resonate with users. Attract their favor and make users the tap water of your activities.

The first principle of Apple’s marketing philosophy is resonance.

Resonance: Closely connect with customer's feelings. “We understand the user experience better than any other company.”

Focus: In order to do what we do well, we must say no to all unimportant opportunities.

Indoctrination: This involves how people form judgments about a company or product based on the signals it sends. People do judge things by appearance. If we have the best products, the highest quality and most practical software, etc., if we present them in a sloppy and careless manner, customers will think that our products are also sloppy and careless; if we present the products in an innovative and professional manner, then the image of quality will be instilled in the minds of customers.

NetEase Cloud Music’s “Music Review Train” became a hot topic in 2017 and is still talked about by people today. Li Yin, vice president of NetEase Cloud Music, believes that the reason why this event was so successful is that they did a lot of user insights. What is the humanity of people who listen to music?

Countless studies have found that people who like to listen to music are mostly lonely.

Loneliness became the entry point of this event and also a booster for screen-sweeping. One of the main features of NetEase Cloud Music is that in the reviews for each song, there are touching or funny words written by netizens, which can resonate with countless people. Isn’t this a good medicine to cure loneliness?

Marketing techniques are changing rapidly, and activities are changing in various forms, but human nature remains unchanged. A good marketer should always keep his eyes on two things: one is human nature and public sentiment, which can make your creativity full of vitality; the other is technology. Making full use of new media enabled by technology can make your communication more efficient.

2. Social Effects - Good Winds Help

What are most precious to consumers now are time and attention. The competition between Tencent and ByteDance is also a competition for consumers’ time and attention.

But the planning and implementation of an event can take at least a week or even several months, so consumers’ attention has already flown away.

How to capture consumers' attention has become an important issue that event planners need to solve.

The essence of advertising is a kind of popular culture, so at the beginning of event planning, planners must understand the social environment and culture we are in today, understand social psychology, pay attention to what consumers are paying attention to, what interesting things they are chasing, etc.

In a word: learn to take advantage of the situation and make the best use of it.

There are two types of leveraging: one is leveraging social culture, and the other is leveraging social hot spots.

1. Social and cultural leverage

As mentioned earlier, the essence of advertising is a kind of popular culture. Only when a brand event is supported by social culture can it become a topic and hot spot of national concern. The most obvious example is the holiday marketing of major brands.

To leverage social culture, the most important thing is to find those “communication elements” that can attract the attention of the general public. Communication elements are a kind of cultural gene that carries a huge amount of information and emotions. These communication elements will continue to replicate and spread among people with similar cultural backgrounds and value identities.

On the first day of the 2018 Spring Festival travel rush, Apple released a short film shot by director Peter Chan using an iPhone X. The content was adapted from a cherished story and told the story of a train conductor mother and her son spending a brief 3 minutes together on the platform. This short film became extremely popular on the Internet. Friends could be seen forwarding it everywhere in their Moments. There were widespread reports on the Internet praising Apple's marketing campaign, so much so that I was waiting for their new commercial during the 2019 Spring Festival.

There must be many factors that led to the popularity of the commercial "Three Minutes". The adaptation of a true story and the support of Chen Kexin and iPhoneX are all reasons for the success of this film. But I think there is another more important reason, which is that this commercial was very suitable for the communication environment at that time.

The Spring Festival travel rush is a big event for the Chinese people. It is the world's largest annual population migration, involving 500 million Chinese people. Releasing a short advertising video on the topic of Spring Festival travel at this time will naturally be at the forefront of the trend. Moreover, Chinese people have a strong sense of hometown and want to go home during the Spring Festival to reunite with their families. However, there are still many people fighting on the front line who cannot reunite with their families during the Spring Festival because they have to stick to their posts.

"Spring Festival", "Going home for the New Year" and "Staying at work during the Spring Festival" are all huge communication elements during this period, and they can attract huge attention from consumers.

2. Taking advantage of social hot spots

This is what we commonly call riding on the trend, and Durex is recognized as an expert in this area. However, hot events are sudden and uncertain. If they are not combined well, they can easily lead to brand failure.

During the sleepless night of 419, Heytea was led into trouble by the old driver Durex. The two parties released a joint poster linking cheese milk cap and semen together, and most netizens said they were "disgusted."

In marketing activities that leverage hot spots, planners should consider three points:

1. Whether the hot spot is consistent with the brand tone

2. Hot spots are fleeting, so speed is more important than quality.

3. Brand placement should be simple and natural

3. Sense of scale - New World Marketing Method

The first time I heard the concept of sense of scale was in a marketing class that was all over the screen at Xin Shi Xiang. I have also summarized my own activity routines before, for example:

Combine online and offline, attract traffic online and participate offline;

KOL takes the lead in initiating, and all people participate together;

Combine event marketing with big promotions to achieve brand sales.

However, when I heard the class on sense of scale by Xin Shi Xiang, I realized that they have elevated the routine of activities to the level of methodology. A sense of scale is an important guarantee for an event to be successful. Combining its own planned cases, Xin Shi Xiang proposed four methods to create a sense of scale.

1. Sense of spatial scale

The sense of spatial scale is first reflected online and offline. If an activity is only conducted online, we will feel that the activity is too light; if it is only conducted offline, there will be a lack of dissemination and traffic. Therefore, the first thing to do to achieve a sense of spatial scale is to combine online and offline.

The activity of redoing the college entrance examination questions planned by Xin Shixiang not only includes online answering activities, but also truly restores the scene of the college entrance examination that year offline, and prepares the college entrance examination papers and invigilators of that year.

The second manifestation of the sense of spatial scale is that the coverage of the activity must be large enough.

For the "Escape from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou" campaign, Xin Shixiang initially planned to only carry out the campaign at Beijing Airport, but later thought that this was not enough to involve all the people in first-tier cities, and it also radiated to second- and third-tier cities, and finally decided to carry out the campaign at the airports in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou at the same time. The plan for the Throw Out Operation was initially to take place in the Beijing subway, and later Shanghai and Guangzhou were added. The subway alone was not enough, so the space was expanded from the subway to airplanes and cars.

2. Digital Sense of Scale

During the early planning, Xin Shixiang often considers one thing: Is the core number we provide big enough? Will your users be shocked when they see this number for the first time?

For example, the title of the first season of Escape from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou was "I bought 30 plane tickets, waited for you at the airport, and escaped from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou in four hours." The title of the second season became "I prepared one hundred free plane tickets and 100,000 escapes, and escaped from Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou again in four hours." Look at the title of the "Throw Out Campaign" again, "I prepared 10,000 books and threw them in the subways in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and places you pass by! 》…These titles have one thing in common, which is a core number that is large enough.

The core numbers are big enough, how important is this matter? Take the book-throwing campaign as an example. The idea comes from the book-throwing incident on the subway in the UK. In fact, many individuals and organizations in China have already done it in a similar way. However, the numerical scale of these events was not large enough. When Xin Shixiang launched the throwing campaign on the first day, 10,000 books were thrown into the subways of Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou at the same time, and another 10,000 books were added on the second day. This is the core numerical scale that was created, and this sense of scale makes everyone feel that there is a possibility of encountering it.

3. Sense of scale of brand potential

When planning an event, you must pay attention to who the partners are, how many partners there are, and what their identities are? What do they do with you? Simply put, it means you have someone who endorses you or you endorse each other.

Zhang Wei specifically reminded: Always believe that endorsement is important, seek mutual endorsement from high-value partners, and try to find endorsers of sufficient weight for your activities. In order to achieve these things, you have to spend a lot of energy to communicate, to find common ground between the two parties, and to make this happen.

4. Sense of scale of cold start quantity

Any communication event is spread from one group of people to other people, and finally spreads to the entire platform and the entire population. The purpose of cold start is to find this initial batch of traffic for yourself. Even if your idea is good enough, if the activation volume is not enough, the idea may be stifled before it spreads.

4. Game Mechanics: The Secret of Addiction

Games and stories are a fundamental part of human civilization and the driving force behind our continued evolution. The real purpose of inventing games is to allow us to survive in this boring world. After all, reality is a poorly designed game.

Currently, 67.9% of underage Internet users in China play online games, and 70.9% of primary school students play online games. Since games are so fun, we started thinking: How can we make our event planning as interesting and addictive as games?

First of all, we need to understand why games are so interesting?

Psychologists explain that the reason why people become addicted to games is because they are immersed in the flow experience that the games create for them. This experience makes you lose your sense of self and the time around you, and focus only on moving towards the goal set by the game. The formation of this flow experience requires the combination of the following conditions:

Direct and timely information feedback

Balance between individual skills and challenges

· The individual has a clear sense of purpose

Based on these, the game has created a complete set of mechanisms that allow you to fully enjoy the sense of accomplishment after overcoming difficulties and challenges.

1. Goal

The specific results achieved by the player's efforts. It grabs players' attention and constantly adjusts their engagement. Goals provide players with a sense of purpose.

Rules: Restrictions on how players can achieve their goals. It eliminates or limits the most obvious ways to achieve goals, pushing players to constantly explore previously unknown spaces, providing them with a sense of freshness and accomplishment.

Instant Feedback: Tells players how close they are to their goal in real time. This is also the best thing about the game. It makes a promise to gamers: as long as you work hard, you will be rewarded; as long as you keep working hard, you will win. It gives players an incentive to keep playing.

That’s the power of games, the fun mechanics of game design. The reason I say reality is a poorly designed game is because we don't have such a clear and perceptible mechanism.

Most people are searching for why they live? How should I live? Life doesn’t have a set of rules and guidelines. You don’t know what to do, and in the end, you put in your efforts but you can’t see clear feedback immediately…

So, how do we design marketing campaigns?

That is to use the power of games in activities and introduce the mechanism of games.

2. Goal: Attractive

The most important goal is to be attractive and give users motivation to continue playing.

Many marketing activities deliberately lower participation thresholds and targets in order to attract more users. In fact, this may not be a good thing. Only when the difficulty of the game and the skills of the consumers reach a balance will they be attracted to continue to challenge themselves and gain a sense of accomplishment and fun from it.

Rules: Fun

We know that the opposite of gaming is not work and study, but boredom and depression. Event planners must learn to use rules to increase the fun of the event. Some marketing campaigns are quite boring, offering prizes to attract users to participate, which, like discount promotions, is not a good thing in the long run.

Feedback: Immediate

When designing marketing activities, it is important to provide immediate feedback on user behavior. For example, designing a leaderboard so that users can compete with their friends, or providing users with points and honor badges, these are typical game feedback elements.

Microsoft has always done an excellent job of turning marketing campaigns into games. The development of each version of Windows system often takes several years, involves tens of thousands of R&D personnel, and has to be launched in dozens of language versions in different countries and regions. This will inevitably lead to various bugs and language errors.

Quality checks on system languages ​​often require a large team to check every function, every line of text, and every dialog box in the system. Not only is it a huge workload, it's also boring.

So Microsoft developed a game to let Microsoft employees around the world "find faults" in the system and set up a bug ranking list for global employees. Simply discover, identify and submit bugs to earn points and compete with colleagues around the world.

Ultimately, 4,500 Microsoft employees participated in the game, using their lunch breaks and after-get off work time to review more than 500,000 Windows dialog boxes and report 6,700 system errors. I haven’t hired anyone and haven’t spent a penny.

Break the work into interesting tasks and constantly motivate employees to complete the tasks through leaderboards. Employees are working overtime without realizing it, and the key point is that they find it fun and fulfilling. This is the power of activity gamification.

Here’s my advice for event planning – insight into human nature, social effects, sense of scale, and game mechanics.

· Before planning an event, you must gain insights into your consumers.

· When selecting content, you should understand the social environment and learn to take advantage of it.

· Be sure to have a sense of scale when designing activity modules.

· The activity flow of each module should introduce game mechanics.

Author: Advertiser

Source: Advertising Craftsman