My favourite example is how they leveraged Craigslist to drive traffic and listings on their own site. Pick up a paintbrush and channel your inner Bob Ross, dance at a sunset silent disco in San Francisco, and discover Portos vibrant history as youre led through the tiled streets by a local. Airbnb have been running Dynamic Ads for reservations for a number of years now, with them even being featured in a Facebook case study on this back in 2017 where they reported a 3X increase in return on ad spend and 47% lower CPAs using the Dynamic Ads objective. Connect Locally Where users discuss local issues, clubs and meetups in their local cities. All of this is inspected by a real person so youre ensured of its accuracy. Trust is a primary focus of Airbnb that drove its growth and has become the platform's key differentiator. Using information from the reviews theyve generated from previous guests, they can inform future guests that the host does a great job of making them feel comfortable, and that others have said the place is clean two often important pieces of information. In fact, last year they turned over more than $1b in a single quarter and their most recent stock sale values them at USD $35 billion! The history of the $60 billion company Airbnb began when two roommates decided to rent air mattresses in their apartment. After stumbling into digital marketing through a whim internship application in 2013, Jacqueline discovered a passion for creating engaging and effective growth campaigns. . So let's start by understanding more about Airbnb in the coming sections. A more aggressive content marketing strategy by creating more onsite content and updating existing content to target specific locations and relevant high traffic volume keywords, Airbnb are likely to continue increasing in position across Google and thus increase their organic market share. Its between them, Netflix and Amazon really, isnt it? With the introduction of Stories, Neighbourhoods, and Guidebooks, we see how the brand is not only revolutionising the way travellers discover unusual rooms and memorable activities in every pocket of the world but encouraging users to stay on the platform to plan and book their trip. Weve seen numerous companies use community centres or portals quite effectively in their community marketing, as explained in our last growth study on Xero, where they are helping accountants and their partners. As Principal Consultant in the Search + Content Marketing team and a Growth Lead at Webprofits, theres nothing Jacqueline loves more than creating data-driven results and using investigative tools to develop a clients strategy. Theres still so many amazing locations to check out in [Bangkok]. Yes, there are some great little touches as we can see in the last section, but on the whole personalisation isnt that widespread on their site yet. Jason began his career at Webprofits as an intern and six years later he is now one of our leading social media specialists, managing a number of our long-standing Australian Fluid clients. Its important to do some of the work for them. Its amazing what theyve been able to achieve over the years since they first introduced referrals into their platform in 2011. They havent over-complicated things, which makes it more enticing for a user to share. Here are some more that you may want to consider. A Differentiation Strategy Requires Capital. This traction is reflected in the Google Trends graph for the past 5 years for the term airbnb. Even if this is not done on purpose, I think this is clever, as it allows the user to imagine themselves there. As to how people are arriving at this section of the site, this is likely through organic search, email traffic, and social promotion. These 300-400 word stories are poignant snapshots of how an Airbnb users life has been impacted by using Airbnb while travelling and immerses potential travellers in the spirit of adventure, curiosity and connection. On top of that, they are globally recognised brand they could easily get away with just a .com + language switch based on your IP. Overall, this report shows that there is still a significant amount of keyword improvements and consequent organic traffic to be gained by Airbnb, which would result in huge traffic increases similar to those seen in previous years by the brand. Ill be highlighting specific examples soon, but if they hadnt considered the User Experience as much in the early days then I doubt theyd have experienced the growth that they have. It keeps users engaged and, in many ways, motivated to invite more friends or follow those up who havent signed up. Its worth noting that trip information provided in the hero form is stored, such as travel duration or location, if the user bounces but returns to the homepage, their trip details are stored in their browser cookie: I would expect that the majority of users do not purchase in the same session, so prompting returning users to continue to browse available homes in their cities of interest is a nice touch. I think theres a lot of brands that could take a leaf out of Airbnbs book when it comes to community management. Outside of their sponsored Page posts and Dynamic Ads, the rest of Airbnbs ads strategy currently focuses on one thing signing up hosts. This is because they are an essential part of any organic search strategy if you wish to succeed. If theres one big takeaway to think more about, it has to be their simplified UX experience with keeping personalisation in mind. The clean and minimalistic design is certainly done on purpose. Theres a clear funnel from awareness to consideration and finally conversion. It keeps it consistent for the user to know where key pages are. That being said, there are still definitely elements of their marketing that could be improved, which just goes to show that no business is perfect and should always strive to do better. The full history has been well documented several times (like here or here) so we wont be covering it here, but I think those early stages set the mindset of the business as one that would find a way to grow using whatever technology tricks that they could. This again set the standard for 2 years of fairly consistent growth, until a further growth spurt of 106% from 884,267 visitors in Jan 2018 to 1,829,206 visitors in Feb 2018. Book a real home in [Location] for less than a hotel room . The best way for Airbnb to improve their backlink profile ties into the recommendation given for keyword ranking improvements: develop a more aggressive content marketing strategy. Its a place where people looking for short term accommodation (usually for holidays) are able to find somewhere to lay their head down at night. The vision statement of a company goes hand in hand with the mission statement. Ultimately, the main takeaway I have in terms of how Airbnbs messaging compares to competitors like Stayz and HomeAway is that Airbnb appears to be placing moreemphasis on pricing as a point of difference and more focus on their USPs in ad headlines, like 24/7 Customer Service and Free Cancellation Up To 48 Hrs or more emotional messaging like Dont Go There. There's quite a bit of research and work that goes into creating a winning differentiation strategy. Its not a complex email. Another benefit is that there is no perceived substitute considering that the organisation focuses on the quality and nature of the service (Arens & Hamilton, 2018). The prime generic strategies applied by Airbnb is the mixture of differentiation and cost. To make a booking, you generally need to take the following steps: Open the Airbnb website. In an article in the Engineering & Data Science medium publication, Jason Bosinoff at Airbnb explained how they Kept Score for tracking the analytics of referrals. This was really insightful. Personally, I dont email my friends often, especially at scale, so having these two options makes it feel easy just to share via these channels where I talk to my friends all the time. Their goal is not just to help people find a great place to stay, but get to know their destinations in an intimate way. What is evident and which we havent seen many referral systems use is other social channels such as messenger & whatsapp. Its very short copy, and it gets straight to the point. People go onto Airbnb to look for cheap properties and luxurious properties, in busy cities and remote countrysides. By doing this, Airbnb are aligning their brand with a sense of travel, hoping that when people start thinking about their next travel destination, they will think of Airbnb. Of course, without insights from Airbnb I can only assume this is the case! They currently dont do much to get the people browsing these pages to move through the funnel and look at search results (its unclear whether looking at these pages when signed in triggers email sequences). At the time of writing, the Airbnb Fan base is sitting at 15.6 million. Do you remember these designs? The goal of this campaign was not necessarily to promote Airbnb, but to reflect the heart and soul of the destinations they serve, as well as inspire people to explore the individual cities further. Innovation is at the core of how we operate at Webprofits, always looking for a smarter + better way of helping our clients drive record-breaking growth through digital marketing. Great read! Next we get some useful details about the property. Airbnbs call-to-actions place greater emphasis on booking than they do on browsing/search. Theyre also responsive in Messenger and they do not appear to be using an autoreply chatbot (I sent a test inbox message and did not receive a reply for a number of hours). But I wont just look at the personalised elements, Ill also share insights on their messaging, imagery, layout, and more. 1. The campaign was subsequently rolled out in 80 countries, and managed to generate an incredible global impact. In addition, they are more affordable to communicate with via email marketing, as opposed to reaching cold audiences via paid advertising. Businesses under Airbnb follow different types of pricing strategies to attract their consumers. Its a great way to incentivise. You could argue as to why Airbnb havent made referring hosts even more prominent on the page due to the importance of making sure demand doesnt outweigh supply. The homes are well designed, well maintained, and well equipped. Offline: What activity do they do outside of digital to drive growth? Sure, they can nurture better and convert more customers, but they needed a way to keep growing their revenue that isnt reliant on just one product. This is why improving their generic [location] accommodation organic keyword rankings should be a focus for the Airbnb marketing team, with a recommendation being a more aggressive content marketing strategy. You want them to equally be motivated to take action by accepting the invitation by joining and have the same experience (thats the only way you get the money ;). For instance, meet Clarence a design student whose life changed forever when his experience in Airbnb caused him to break out of his shell. Airbnb Model can select one or more attributes that can uniquely . They manage to cut the process down into 3 simple steps: Seems like a very simple process, right? As a general rule of thumb, I think your imagery/posts should fit into at least one or more of these criteria: But how many of the above are Airbnb actually achieving with their current strategy? This in turn will have an overall positive effect on the website if the Experience pages continue to be optimised over time, particularly with the inclusion of internal linking to the relevant accommodation pages on the website. While booking monthly stays on Airbnb has been possible . Both could be applicable in the below scenario. But their strategies dont just relate to customer acquisition. Another potential reason for the spike in organic traffic could be the other marketing efforts Airbnb were actioning toward the end of the 2017 for example, its common for organic search for a brand to increase following targeted online and offline campaigns, such as TV commercials, radio ads, and increased digital marketing budget. Although they are sharing some video content, Ive noticed that this is usually content which isnt localisedand, when switching regions on the Facebook Page, you can see that theyre sharing much of the same video content across different countries. Local customs dictated a more direct invite, with participants preferring a more personal overture from an official Airbnb representative before joining the activities. In comparison to static imagery, video is often more engaging and great for storytelling, which Airbnb have used to announce theyd hit half a billion check-ins in May 2019, as they celebrated this through video, rather than imagery. Airbnb, the lodging colossus, has been prudent from the financial point of view. Moreover, Airbnb is exploring machine learning algorithms and AI to build a deeper understanding of images, improve reviews using natural language processing (NLP) and support more advanced search using NLP. However, we do see the option of being given other ways to share once we press the Share button next to Copy. Key Differences. Traveling to [Location]? As weve spoken before about the layout of the page, lets explore the content and what we can learn from them. As these stats show, Twitter adoption in Australia has been slow and has not seen the same kind of growth that Facebook & Instagram has in recent years. Competitors such as Booking.com and Wotif.com only have global sites which, while giving them larger reach and increased ranking capabilities based on backlink and content strategies, limits their ability to tailor their content to an Australian audience. They also seem to have this automated, as they share many of the exact same photos and captions on Twitter posts as they do on Facebook. In a study conducted by KPMG, they found that alongside integrity from brands, personalisation is of key importance to Australian consumers when it comes to customer experience (CX). Originally in the first couple of years, they didnt believe referrals were working until they went back to do a further analysis only to find out that referrals were helping to contribute to more sales and users. Heres an example of an email I received after looking at some places in Santa Monica: Lets breakdown this email section by section, there is a lot of things Airbnb are doing well: The heading and email subject line is tailored to a city I browsed and the dates I searched for. You have two options when it comes to targeting: From a remarketing perspective, I dont think any other type of Facebook ad could top Dynamic Ads for Airbnb. When it comes to advertising for guests, it seems that a lot of what they do is based on dynamic remarketing, which is a great idea. The plan provides an analysis and evaluation of Airbnb by reviewing the company's strategic management, profitability and market competitiveness. If hosts are able to help each other out with a few quick posts, then it saves Airbnb having to get involved until its absolutely necessary. Word-of-Mouth recommendations convert 3-5x higher compared to other channels. Airbnb has a high rate of innovation which is the leading reason for how their services have adopted the differentiation strategy. Why? Users are now really motivated to send invites because they know the recipient gets amazing value. In fact, back in 2011 they even paid for hosts to have professional photographs taken of their properties. Looks pretty unique, wouldnt you say? In this section Ill be looking at how they use Facebook (both paid and non paid), Instagram, and Twitter to promote themselves, attract new guests and hosts, and keep existing users engaged. You often see this feature on many blogs around the web, but what many blogs dont get right is keeping a focus on tags and keeping the amount recent conversations limited. Airbnb take unorthodox approaches to get noticed in the offline world, and when they do, its not to promote themselves or their platform directly but to promote who they are. The key things they provide: These all help put a user at ease and reduce friction when booking. Someone without an account/not even a host can make a post. Airbnb are running a big operation on paid search. Both are discoverable in the footer of their main site: Blog and Airbnb Citizen. Airbnb. This type of strategy will always have an expiry date. Airbnb started out in 2008 when founders Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia realised they could make a quick buck by renting out an air mattress in their living room to people visiting San Francisco for a big conference. When you arrive in your new destination, Airbnb send a personalised email containing Airbnb Experiences that may be of interest, disguised as an itinerary. However, theres not much to be gleaned from it for most businesses to be able to action, so well leave the home page review there for now. Overall, its a great channel if users or potential users are looking for extra information. When aligned with a companys ideals, marketing can make a powerful statement, and in the best instances, be a force for change in the world. 2001: n. pag. As is the case with most two-sided marketplaces, without supply the entire thing falls apart. For example, if Airbnb shares a video which relates to Japan and this gets 50k views, creating an audience of viewers who watched 75% or 95% of this video would be great for their next Japanese-themed post, as they know these people are interested in video content to do with Japan. From 2014 Airbnb experienced a consistent growth trajectory until December 2015, when over a two month period (Dec 2015 Feb 2016) traffic grew by another 96% from 257,640 to 505,165 visits. 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