But their strategies dont just relate to customer acquisition. By reaching out beyond the LGBTQI+ community, Airbnb helped to create a dialogue that showed that Australians supported marriage equality by a wide margin. Then you suddenly see a McDonald's and it becomes your choice of food because it is a safe bet an. They are known for creating great online user experiences, but they also excel in experiential and live-event marketing. So, based on the same principles as inviting guests, what does the recipient receive this time if theyre invited to become a host? Why go through such trouble if not for SEO? I visited Japan last year, a place where Airbnbs are quite hard to come by. It is clear that Airbnb is becoming one of the most popular online-booking.. Beyond that, I would go as far to say that Airbnb want to enable their customer base to more easily be able to live it, as opposed to just seeing it, reinforcing one of their key brand messages. Build something of value for your customers that isnt easy to replicate Jason Fried, Founder of 37 Signals. Its effortless. Initial reading is to get a rough idea of what information is provided for the analyses. I wouldnt say Airbnb have exhausted their growth when it comes to accommodation rental, but most travellers are aware of who they are and what they offer. 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. Airbnbs instagram page is highly visual (as it should be) and showcases the vast array of beautiful properties they have on their platform to inspire wanderlust in potential travellers, but engagement is relatively low. Share a link to your friends to a custom landing page or via email. Its revenues can grow to $8.5 Billions an year by 2020. was a discussion of the generic and intensive strategies used by Air BnB to build a competitive advantage and grow its market share. 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! In the next section, Suggested for You, this is content that specifically addresses the needs of hosts. For example, the search term canberra accommodation has an average 40,500 searches per month, with the rankings as: Airbnb seems to be cognisant of their low organic positioning for generic [location] accommodation terms, and so acts to ensure they are in position 1 of ad placements for high volume targets. Ideally, each of these three elements should be optimized for differentiation. This is positive and shows that they are invested in making sure their content gets an initial boost when it goes live. This further increases the scope of potential links they could be achieving.For example, Booking.com has 7 backlinks from the Referring Domain , Taps into the aspirational elements of travel through engaging imagery to encourage bookings, Encourages property owners to become an Airbnb host. b) The keywords that your competitors are ranking for on page 1 that youre on page 2+. For certain links that they share, I think this strategy works quite well. Focused low-cost - competing not only through price but by also selecting a small portion of the market to focus on. I particularly like how the where field in the hero form is pre-populated with the destination based on the users initial search query. More social proof again (impressive numbers, right?). 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). Thanks for this! Design thinking and design research inform strategic decision-making on many levels. As widespread COVID-19 vaccinations make a return to travel more likely, here are three use cases where travelers may choose Airbnb over hotels. The three generic business strategies suggested by Michael Porter are : Cost Leadership strategy ( lower costs/broad target market), Differentiation strategy (product differentiation/broad target market) and Focus business strategies (lower cost or differentiation/narrow target market ). They charge for that service now that its been proven to work (and they have enough properties that look good so they dont need to worry about the ones that dont), but you can see why they suggest it when photos are front and centre on the property pages. In particular, note the header and sub header. For Airbnb, its been about continuous discovery, testing and optimising of what is known as one of the worlds famous & very effective referral engines. Airbnb has created the perfect solution for renters and providers worldwide. 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. Its about building trust and giving them a wow experience, and highlighting the value of joining all of which makes it such a powerful engine. The fact that Airbnb have this content at all is a testament to their commitment of giving their users the feeling of living somewhere rather than visiting it. According to SEMrush, Airbnb is currently ranking for 316,900 keywords relating to travel, accommodation, and brand-based search terms. Differentiation. Its less commitment, often more cost-effective for the customer, and theyre fortunate with such a huge and diverse country like Australia that there are so many amazing listings they can continue to share. One of the crucial components of Airbnbs email marketing strategy is their browser abandonment sequence. There are few industries bigger than travel, and its hard to find other industries that provide such a huge opportunity in relation to organic search. This type of messaging perfectly ties back to their brand ethos of belonging and community we dont need to know who Patrick & Elizabeth are, we just need to know were invited to stay at their home. When sharing image posts, Facebook does not allow you to create an audience of everyone who engaged with that specific image post, so if you wanted to remarket to these people you would have to choose the option of People Who Engaged With Any Post or Ad and this includes all post engagement; whereas when posting videos, Facebook gives you the option to create audiences such as People who viewed at least ten seconds of your video or People who have watched at least 75% of your video. The majority of their image posts feature an Airbnb listing, utilising user-generated content (UGC) which gives the brand a very authentic and relatable feel. Hey what happened to your [Thailand] plans?! This is an example of one of Airbnbs Superhost-themed posts. Outside of their sponsored Page posts and Dynamic Ads, the rest of Airbnbs ads strategy currently focuses on one thing signing up hosts. Openness and belonging are at the heart of Airbnb its at the core of what we do every day. We helped one company grow from $25M to $190M revenue in 4 years, and we work with challenger brands that want to make a serious impact in their industry and have the resources (and the will) to make it happen. As a digital platform, Airbnb rely almost entirely on their website to make bookings and sales. They began offering their customers ways to specifically experience life as a local, as well as sleep like one. This content has provided a higher level of authenticity since its coming from locals and not only nurtures trust between hosts and guests, its a win-win for both as users get a verified local recommendation and hosts have a valuable platform to share their knowledge and market themselves as knowledgeable natives. They go beyond typical tours or classes by immersing guests in each hosts unique world. Although the last few years have ushered in shifts at the product and organizational levels, design principles still guide us everyday. This was really insightful. As we can see, there are community discussions categorised into Top, Recent & Unanswered. Where it gets interesting is to see how the home page differs when Im signed in. Its the chance to meet the locals, experience the markets, and find the non-touristy places. Email Marketing: How do Airbnb use email to communicate with prospective and existing customers to drive new and repeat usage of the platform? "Airbnb was designed for when we were much smaller," Chesky said. Unfortunately, I think it misses the mark, again. It was all about trusting people, not logos. Both personas have a very simplified UX for sharing via email or a custom link. This is high, and suggests that the term accommodation best reflects how users are searching and what resonates with their target audience, instead of language like home sharing or holiday home. The homes are well designed, well maintained, and well equipped. Focus on community and trust. Once you press the link, you get to this screen. Many disgruntled customers use the comments section as a way to complain; this is seen across numerous industries, but Airbnb is clearly trying to show that they are a brand focused on customer service and experience, as they try and reply to most of these types of comments. Moreover, the company aims to keep guests and hosts safe via a wide range of measures such as risk scoring, background checks, 24/7 global assistance, secure payments and account protection. They all look pretty cool in their own way, but I havent really got any context as to why these are here. Alongside their image-based content, Airbnb do share some video posts. So, what have Airbnb done to construct and generate one of the best communities in the world? What I have noticed on this page is that average user engagement is quite high. Also worth noting the low intent call-to-action. Apart from the images, the screen displays most of the top level information you would want to know about the property at a glance: The headline, the location, the price, and the number of bedrooms, bathrooms, and guests. Another clever part of having this separate is that once again it keeps from distracting the engagement in the Explore tips & tricks section. Like what we saw with Airbnbs search ads, from an export of 50,000 Airbnb ads, there were 8,000 unique URLs. Clever. Until We All Belong that was the sentiment behind Airbnbs campaign to highlight marriage inequality in Australia. Trap 6 - Equating Market-Creating Strategies with Differentiation. And once you press Share your Link, you come to this screen. The organic visibility of the Airbnb website can be attributed to both the growth in the number of keywords ranking to positions on page 1 of Google and the increased backlink profile of the site which assists with driving third party referral traffic to the website. While its important to speak from an authoritative angle through blog content, mixing it up with Q&A styled posts shows that community members are heavily involved in the conversation, illuminating Airbnbs core growth strategies around encouraging consumer advocacy. 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. This substantial difference in backlink profile will be largely contributing to the difference in non-branded keyword rankings, organic traffic, and also brand awareness. Its interesting that theyre all in North America though; it makes me wonder if theyre using my geo location at all or if they only personalise the experience for people who are logged in (Im assuming that most of their traffic comes from the US). However, this is not to say that their email strategy is leveraging all the data they have available, as its important they dont overshare: We make use of data in every email that we send. It took me a moment to realise it, but that structure isnt a watch tower (maybe Ive been watching too much Game of Thrones), its a home. 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