Airbnb's Marketing Strategy Analysis

Brand background:

Founded in Airbnb in 2008 is a travel house rental platform. Different from similar products, every property on Airbnb comes from individuals who have available rooms for rent. The brand completes C2C-type docking services one after another. In just a few years, airbnb's users (including tenants and landlords) have spread to nearly 34,000 cities in 190 countries around the world. airbnb is called "EBay in Housing" by Time magazine.

Airbnb has many things to talk about in the use of social media. For example, it breaks the concerns between strange tenants and landlords through the mechanism of social media, and helps them build a sense of trust; gains a group of influential brand advocates to help it jointly expand its brand influence; and creates content spread on social media with users and makes users happy to share. Data from Alexa also shows that airbnb's conversion through social media is much higher than similar websites. The brand itself is also trying to use social media platforms to build a global community that belongs to travelers. In China, airbnb Weibo related topics (#Airbnb# #Airbnb New Things# #Airbnb Expert#) have read more than 27 million; the "Airbnb Travel Guide" on Qiyou.com has downloaded more than 20,000 times.

Research Methods:

This report is for Airbnb Social Marketing Institute’s strategic research covers the performance of brands in major social media platforms and vertical communities abroad and in China from 2010 to 2014. According to the social marketing strategy framework of SOCIAL ONE think tank, the research and analysis of the social marketing strategies of third parties was derived.

Key insights:

Open up new markets

• Pay attention to the social attributes of product details and start creating social attributes from the product side

• Seed User First Policy

• Influence a wider range of users through seed users

Expand new users

• Promote the first use of users in a way that provides value, which is the key point in converting users

• Use different types and small circles of influencers to expand new users

Utilize brand influencers

• Use social currency to create a group of influential brand advocates and use them to influence different users

• Different influencers need different incentive mechanisms

Improve brand favorability

• Encourage users to become creators and sharers of brand content, so that they have a deeper sense of brand belonging

2.0 Social Strategy

Whether for individual users or the entire market, Airbnb brings a new type of business model. Therefore, educating the market and conveying the brand image is the first step in the brand's business purpose. Through the education market, people can recognize and slowly accept this new short-term rental model, and attract the public's attention by conveying the charm of experiential travel brought by the brand to users. Then, further expand new users, allowing more people to register and make the first reservation, so as to form a market of a certain scale. Finally, the brand needs to maintain the relationship between airbnb and users by conveying the deep value of the brand, so as to consolidate its own market position.

To achieve the above business goals, the main strategy of brand social media marketing is to discover, build, and tell stories on social media. Deliver the brand concept of the charm and value of experiential travel and the sense of community belonging to travelers.

Strategy introduction

• Education Market: First, airbnb captures users' attention by displaying exquisite house pictures that can attract consumers' attention on different social media accounts of the brand; then, by telling stories on social media, people's uneasiness about strange landlords and at the same time increase the charm of the brand. The brand's exploration of stories includes landlords on the platform and real offline traveler experiences. In 2014, after the brand officially entered the Chinese market, in addition to using mainstream social media platforms to enhance brand awareness, it also chose the vertical community Qiyou.com, which focuses on overseas travel, as a strategic partner. The airbnb Qiyou tips jointly produced by both parties have become the pioneer of brand education in the Chinese market.

• Expand new users: Airbnb mainly uses two strategies when completing this business goal. One is to attract users to make their first attempt by placing coupons in the dissemination content; the other is to reach audiences in different circles through different types of influencers.

• Cultivate brand advocates with great influence: airbnb is breaking the boundaries between brand advocates and influencers, making their intersections grow bigger and bigger. On the one hand, airbnb helps brand supporters become influencers by providing brand resources, making brand supporters more influential; on the other hand, in terms of influencer selection, it also prefers individuals who have the potential to become brand users and supporters.

• Establish a sense of community belonging for users: The brand has introduced social network connection function on the website since 2011. Airbnb provides users with more than just a short residence, but also an emotional link between people. Brands will also encourage users to share and make good use of the mechanism of collective efforts to create and share brand concepts and products with users.

Overall, the brand's social media layout is comprehensive and has clear purpose ——That is, attract users through display and drainage platforms to guide them to jump to the booking channel. In addition, some brands also have platforms that focus on display purposes and share the brand's beauty and high-quality content. The content between each platform has both overlapping and different content styles. The cooperation between brands and vertical communities (Qiuyou.com) is one of the highlights of channel selection. Among the core booking platforms, the official website has a complete content, and the mobile app serves as an auxiliary to provide users with the simplest user experience.

3.0 Strategy Practices

3.1 Education the market by mining real stories and spreading them on social media to eliminate barriers to user use

3.11 In the era of reading pictures, grasping the visual communication attributes on social media

In the era of reading pictures, brands need to ensure that the content produced in any social media platform I involve is consistent with my brand image. At the same time, exquisite pictures are also the best weapon, which can attract consumers' attention as soon as possible and stimulate certain secondary transmission.

airbnb has done a very good job of content output: the brand will hire professional photographers to take rental houses, which ensures that consumers can obtain a clear and consistent image of the brand positioning from any platform.

Case 1

by Airbnb's instagram official account as an example. The brand's account has more than 250,000 followers. The brand shows the beauty and concept of the brand through comfortable pictures such as scenery, food, and a corner of home. It is worth mentioning that most of the photos in the channel come from instagram users, not the brand itself, reflecting the characteristics of content created by brands and users. The average number of likes for pictures is 5k-6k.

In contrast, the brand The presentation on pinterest is more like a magazine's exquisite album. According to the theme, each picture of the house can be directly linked to the official website for reservation.

3.12 On social media, touch people's hearts and shape brands with real stories-telling

Unlike traditional hotels, Airbnb The two parties to the short-term rental platform are peer-to-peer individuals. Whether it is allowing tenants to move into strangers' homes, or the landlord rents out the idle rooms they are living in to strangers for a short time, it is difficult to accept quickly.

Taking relevant research on the Chinese market as an example: In 2013, the "Research on Chinese Social Mindset in 2012-2013" released by the Institute of Sociology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences pointed out that "the overall trust in Chinese society has further declined, and more than 70% of people cannot believe strangers, and less than half of the respondents believe that most people in society are trustworthy."

Therefore, for For airbnb, the first step for a brand to expand its business is to help users—whether tenants or homeowners—to establish a mutual trust relationship: airbnb chooses to eliminate people's uneasiness with strange landlords by telling stories on social media, and at the same time increase the charm of the brand. In addition, the brand's exploration of stories includes the landlords on the platform and the real offline traveler experience.

Case 2

exist In early 2014, airbnb further allowed tenants to eliminate their concerns about living in strangers' homes by presenting the landlord's personal life stories on the brand's official website.

Airbnb's community story module displays seventeen stories from landlords from all over the world. Through text, pictures and videos, users can feel the different charm of each landlord and others.

This is also airbnb One of the differentiated contents that the short-term rental platform wants to create is that the tenant not only rents a house, but more importantly, the owner of the house - a person who can communicate with him and share the local culture. The tenant can integrate into the local area and home everywhere. The feature of this section is that story-based content will arouse users' good interest in reading, and the average number of landlord stories on the website is about 20,000 times. These homeowners stories with certain communication ultimately dispel consumers' concerns for the brand, and instead they are favorable and curious about the landlord. In this way, in addition to short-term rental houses, the charm of airbnb has added another one - landlord.

Case 3

In terms of creating user stories, airbnb also extends the protagonist from the landlord to the tenant. In November 2014, the 25th anniversary of the overthrow of the Berlin Wall was launched, using the brand to launch an animated ad called "Wall and Chain" to tell consumers a story of belonging with real user stories. The video has been viewed by an astonishing 5.79 million times on Youtube.

In the Chinese market, airbnb also continues the story-telling communication strategy. In addition to translating the landlord stories discovered by the official channels into Chinese versions and displaying them on the official website for a long time, the brand's Weibo platform is also the main base for its story dissemination: the official Weibo has accumulated 800,000 active fans in more than a year, and one of the important frequently opened content is about Meiwu topics. The number of readings currently exceeds 100 million. This topic is mainly used to introduce housing sources, but in many cases, it also combines the landlord's background and stories to promote the travel method of "living into the lives of locals". Through such scene-based texts, landlord stories and beautiful pictures, airbnb's official Weibo attracted hundreds of people to consult through the platform every day, which improved the brand's commercial transformation.

In addition, brands will also search for high-quality products across the entire network UGC content, share the real airbnb short-term rental experience of grassroots travelers through the Weibo platform. In addition to the short and scattered information like users, the brand also uses the power of influencers to expand its stories: Taking QQ Travel expert Maoli as an example, the brand released a travel notes titled "The Story of Maoli [Global Travel, Hometown]" on its QQ Travel homepage. It was written by Airbnb after sending Maoli abroad to experience its products and interviews with her. The article uses a large amount of space to describe the landlords with different characteristics that Maoli encountered and the travel stories that happened between them. The article reads 3,564 times. In addition to text and pictures, there are also Tencent’s external link videos. In the more than 4-minute video, Maoli also showed that during the trip, he became more colorful because he met different airbnb landlords. The video’s views reached 112,000.

3.13 Education Market - Select a vertical community that matches users and tone to obtain the first batch of seed users

for For Airbnb, the Chinese market is still in the seedling stage and brands need to accumulate and cultivate users. The first batch of users the brand wants to capture in the Chinese market is not local homeowners, but those travelers who travel abroad.

According to data released by Qiongyou.com, most of its users have high education, overseas and first-tier cities. Typical users have the following types of users

Strong ability and Characteristics such as "pursuing tourism quality" - this type of outbound travel tourists are the most important potential customers in Airbnb's Chinese market strategy.

For this target seed user population, Airbnb cooperated with Qyotes.com when choosing to enter China. The core users of Qiyu.com are the outbound travel group, and some of these users are already using airbnb and will post on Qiyu.com to tell other Qiyu users how to use it.

Case 4

The first step in cooperation with Qiyou.com is to launch airbnb travel tips.

The qualifying guide is a travel guide developed by the qualifying website. Most of the qualifying websites rely on the users of the qualifying website to share overseas. The journey experience is made. And this time airbnb's qualifying tips are the product of the cooperation between QYU.com and Airbnb. The purpose of the two parties to jointly create tips is to enhance QYU users' awareness of airbnb. This airbnb travel tips introduce in detail how to book and rent a room, how to become a better tenant or landlord, and various tips for making the Airbnb website.

Up to now, the download volume of this tip has reached 24955 times. The launch of the QQT tip is also the first step for the brand to seize QQT users.

It is worth mentioning that the success of cooperation with Qiyou.com has also prompted airbnb and Qiongyou.com have carried out further in-depth cooperation. In November 2014, airbnb has achieved property access in 20 popular cities around the world in the destination section of Qiyu.com. Users can enter the Airbnb website and complete the reservation through Qiyu's online airbnb property display.

3.2 Reach new users through influencer communication and trial offers and enable first attempts

For brands, it is very important to encourage users to take the first step in using the product. The strategy adopted by airbnb is direct but effective, i.e., place coupons in the content that is spread.

Case 5

Launched airbnb When the fukuyou tip, in order to encourage fukuyou users to use airbnb, the brand attached a first booking coupon worth RMB 350 at the end of the tip. Users only need to download the tip to get the coupon and deduct an equal amount of fees when booking. This measure also encourages fumblers to use airbnb to a certain extent.

Another way to place coupons on the QYU platform is to link the booking addresses of different houses where the experts live in the QYU travel notes on the brand homepage, and a 300-yuan booking discount code is attached above the booking address.

During this year's Spring Festival, the brand also used it on the WeChat platform The H5 page sends red envelopes of varying amounts to encourage users to use (see "Airbnb to enter WeChat, send New Year's travel red envelopes to promote follow-up official accounts" for details). This down-to-earth approach reflects the brand's strategic thinking of adapting to local conditions.

In addition, the way brands issue coupons include: giving to newly registered members Coupons of US$25, some properties with discount bookings, or cooperate with brands such as China UnionPay to jointly launch discounts. Information will also be posted by the brand on the Weibo platform for amplification and dissemination, so as to achieve and attract more consumers.

By using appropriate methods to issue coupons in different channels, airbnb has also successfully attracted a group of new users.

3.3 By cultivating brand advocates with greater influence, bringing authentic, highly infectious and influential word-of-mouth transmission

3.31 Expand new users - Use different influencers to reach potential audiences in different small circles

In the early stages of brand communication, different types of influencers are used to contact potential audiences in different small circles and gather a certain number of society Media fans / Users are very important to brands.

airbnb's official Weibo uses two types of influencers: brand/institutional official Weibo and personal account. Brand/Institution official accounts include "What's the UK", "Qiuyou.com", "Wanda instagram", "Cicada Travel Notes", etc., which greatly improves the brand exposure of airbnb on Weibo.

In terms of personal account recommendations, the brand’s forwarding covers writers, cartoonists, influential masters, Sina famous blogs, photographers, and illustrators In various industries, these influencers themselves are airbnb users. In addition to extending the breadth of the industry, judging from the results of brand selection for influencers, influencers’ influence and content output capabilities are within the consideration of airbnb. Most influencers in brand selection have high influence or can produce valuable content.

How to measure the value of influencers? according to SOCIAL ONE brand research findings,

Leading brands do not use influencer fan size or reachability as the only measure, but instead measure it in a more comprehensive way, this package Including influence value, content output value, brand relevance value, and actual sales value. and When choosing influencers, airbnb, in addition to being in line with the target consumer group positioning, influence and content output value are important measures.

We found that the absolute influence of the four influencers who are focusing on cooperation with Qiyu.com is in a uniform distribution state of high, medium and low, but they all have good high-quality content output capabilities.

Note: In this study, the SOCIAL ONE think tank uses the sum of the original Weibo interaction (comments, forwarding, likes). On the one hand, this method avoids the risks of zombie fans, and on the other hand, it can better reflect the meaning of "influence" rather than simply "reach".

Take Anthony as an example:

Again airbnb wins media big V Zhou Si becomes an example:

Like this wins the media for airbnb has a positive and positive impact, that is, it hits the target group without arousing users' disgust. It is even said that such natural expression is more conducive to the dissemination of airbnb than paid promotion.

In addition, the brand uses the influencer's rhythm to be divided into three levels: only one or a short-term cooperation with the influencer in one or a battle-like manner; for example, with Anthony, it has both absolute influence and Airbnb landlord influencers have a long-term cooperation, but the cooperation channels are limited to Weibo platform. The brand will not only invite him to endorse the brand, but also invite him to participate in offline activities such as "One Leave a Stranger" and share and promote on Weibo; the third layer is influencers such as Maoli. The brand arranges for its free experience of airbnb's short-term rental services, and interviews and promotes her experience on various platforms. At the same time, the cooperation between the two parties is also reflected in the continuous interaction of the Weibo platform.

3.32 Cultivate a group of brand advocates with great influence and use their influence to expand more users

airbnb is not satisfied with finding users - "100 people love you, better than 1 million people who only like you." The founders of the brand have always adhered to this creed. In China, whether it is to establish a strategic alliance with travel vertical communities like QB, to dig and tell the story of travelers/landlords, or to operate their own media, airbnb is not just about letting people come here to rent a house.

She is conveying a value and a lifestyle, and using it to gather a group of supporters who agree with the brand philosophy. Not only that, airbnb is also breaking the boundaries between brand advocates and influencers, making their intersections grow bigger and bigger. On the one hand, airbnb helps brand supporters become influencers and makes brand supporters more influential; on the other hand, in terms of the choice of influencers, it also prefers individuals who have the potential to become brand users and supporters.

Strategic Practice:

With this time airbnb's choice strategy on qiuyou.com is an example. When a brand selects an influencer, it not only uses its number of fans as the criterion for judgment, but more judgment criteria are based on whether the content produced is relevant to the brand and whether it is consistent with the audience's interests. In addition, it must be determined based on the quality of the content produced by the influencer. Through the above judgment criteria, the brand finally chose four influencers, Maoli, Lulu, Maodouzi and Lumao, covering four fields: travel experts, photographers, American columnists, and freelance illustrators. They not only have a certain influence in their own small circles, but also have the ability to produce high-quality and brand-related content. While obtaining good content, the brand's own communication effect is also guaranteed.

Expert 1 Maoli: Influencers to brand advocates with greater influence

Expert 2 Loulu: From a brand advocate to an influential brand advocate

The problem that many brands often encounter when using influencers is: what to use to inspire influencers to share sincerely. From " The views of the many faces of influencer report show that brands’ incentive strategies should be inconsistent for different influencers. For the personal brand influencers used by airbnb, brands need to help them build their credibility and help them improve their personal brand—by strengthening their reach, increasing their exposure and optimizing their search engine results—to be their most solid partner.

Taking Maoli, Lulu, Maodouzi and Lumao as examples, the brand mainly promoted their travel notes and photos on the homepage of Qiongyou. Currently, the average number of visits to travel notes is 2805.5. The two sides also have long-term interactions on the Weibo side. The current number of fans of the airbnb official Weibo is 770,000, and platforms such as the brand's WeChat and Douban are also increasing the exposure of influencers. In addition, the offline traditional media resources owned by airbnb and Qiyu.com have also helped to enhance the influence of influencers.

3.4 By establishing a sense of community belonging to users, improve users' favorability and loyalty to their products and brands

As a promoter of emerging markets, airbnb is not just about breaking the barriers between strangers and providing a short stay for tourists traveling outside, but more importantly, establishing an emotional link between people.

3.41 Connect to Facebook to build social relationships between users

exist In the summer of 2011, Airbnb opened the social network connection function - allowing users to access their Facebook account. When the social network connection function is enabled, people can see who the common friends with the homeowner are, or who have rented the room to increase the tenant's trust in the landlord, creating a good scene for communication between the two parties.

In addition, communication between the two parties can be more than just through Facebook, for example, when a tenant needs to book a house, it needs to introduce himself to the landlord so that the landlord can also better understand the upcoming tenant.

It can be foreseeable that before the two sides formally meet, they can build a sense of trust and friendship through different communication methods.

3.42 Let users participate in the creation and sharing process of brands, become part of brand assets, spread brand concepts and build a sense of belonging

airbnb will hold various activities to encourage users to create and share and build a sense of belonging to the brand. The ultimate goal is to make users truly part of their brand equity. Such activities include two types: normal opening and combat states.

Strategic Practice:

The creative activities in the normally open mode include airbnb wishlist, an event that encourages users to build their favorite destinations and share them with other users. User wishlists are displayed frequently on the official website.

And in the campaign mode, Airbnb launched a battle in mid-2013 is also evocative. The brand invites its users to use the Vine short video app to help the brand complete the video production activity: all users have to do is follow the airbnb account on Twitter, and then use Vine to shoot a video of a paper plane. Airbnb will select appropriate clips from it to form a movie and participate in the Sundance Film Festival, and users also have the opportunity to get airbnb coupons.

At the end of 2014, airbnb also launched a global campaign to "Leave a Stranger". The way of the campaign is very simple. airbnb will provide $10 in cash for every user participating in the event. Users can use this $10 to do something for the stranger they want to meet, and then express their stories in pictures, videos or texts, and share them by adding the tag #onelessstrenger#. Through this activity, airbnb has continued the solution to eliminate user concerns to the actual offline.

It is worth mentioning that When developing products, airbnb has incorporated factors that encourage users to create and share, and many templates of the brand will send sharing invitations to its users. For example, the content of the last part of the airbnb block section shown in the figure below is that the brand invites users to share their understanding of the local area.

During the entire product development process, airbnb maintains an open mind. The brand’s content is not only built on the brand itself, but more importantly, the participation and sharing of users. Only by co-constructing the two can the brand continue to enrich from content to concepts.

4.0 Summary & Experience Learning (Lesson Learned)

As a leading brand in emerging markets, Airbnb has achieved remarkable results on social media. The brand's social media operations always revolve around the main strategy of conveying the brand concept of experiential travel and the sense of belonging to the community through discovering, building, and telling stories on social media. This strategy achieves a series of goals of brand education market, acquiring users, expanding the market and conveying brand value. For brands, this main strategy is the soul and skeleton of overall platform operation.

Of course, no matter how big a creativity is, it cannot be separated from good execution. In the process of subdividing airbnb strategy into practice, SOCIAL ONE summarizes three contents worth learning from and learning from by brand owners:

• Impress users with real stories: In order to dispel users' concerns about strange landlords, the brand has explored two stories of the landlord's personal and real user experience. Story content itself has good communication and appeal on social media platforms. It can be said that it kills two birds with one stone, which not only captures users, but also amplifies the brand. Therefore, for brand owners, it is very important to learn to tell good stories in social media. It is worth mentioning that such stories must conform to the short and interesting communication characteristics.

• Cultivate a group of brand advocates with great influence and help them influence more consumers: Brands are breaking the boundaries between brand advocates and influencers, making the intersection between them bigger and bigger: on the one hand, airbnb helps brand advocates who can produce valuable content become influencers, making brand advocates more influential; on the other hand, in the choice of influencers, they also attach great importance to the relevance of influencers with brands and products, focusing on individuals who have the potential to become brand users and supporters. Such a group of brand advocates with great influence can be regarded as the most powerful active advertising for the brand, but it is worth noting that cultivating brand advocates with great influence is a long-term and requires detailed maintenance for every brand.

• Encourage users to become creators and sharers of brand content, so that they have a deeper sense of brand belonging: For any brand owner, it is very difficult to continuously maintain high-quality content on the platform, while airbnb has an open heart to users from the beginning of the product link and invites users to create together with the brand. In fact, brand owners do not need to take it personally in the production of content. Try to have an open mind. Users can become part of brand assets in the early product development or the final promotion.