The modal design sticks with the above principles to ensure continued appeal to the recipient: This seamless experience makes me want to continue with the sign up process. Beyond what Airbnb have done from designing a world-class UX experience with their referral system, it’s their approach to continuous measurement and testing which acts as a testament to the continuous success of the program. Community: How do Airbnb maintain and grow their online community, and what part does that play in their business growth? Always thinking ahead, Chloe is interested in transformational changes to businesses and how relevant content and targeted messaging can catalyse high-level goals. It was also an opportunity to put human-centered design and creative methods at the heart of Airbnb’s strategy and culture, which excited me because I believed this would make Airbnb … It’s quite an extensive sheet, but one of the best paid search competitor analysis tools I’ve found for larger accounts, as it unpacks exactly what search terms are driving users to what landing pages. This makes sense when you refer to data that was shared by the company towards the end of 2018, where they predicted which Australian locations would be the top 10 trending destinations for 2019 (based on internal data for bookings made in 2017 vs. 2018). What’s effective about these sections is how they leverage social proof, both in terms of ratings (supports logical decision making) and testimonials (supports emotional decision making) to reinforce their home recommendations. Airbnb is looking for a commercial and strategic senior leader to expand and evolve our Online Experiences business globally. In the time that I’ve been analysing Airbnb’s Facebook Page for this case study, through checking the Ads Library tool I’ve been able to see that they’ve advertised all of their most recent Page posts. It’s particularly interesting that Airbnb’s spend allocated to accommodation-themed keywords significantly outweighs spend on hotel-related keywords. We’ve now deep-dived into how the mechanics work when inviting a user as a referral to the platform, but what else can we find on the page where we can invite friends? Both are discoverable in the footer of their main site: Blog and Airbnb Citizen. To make the most of my paid search strategy analysis, and to ensure we’re focusing our attention on their most important messaging, keywords, ads and landing pages, I used a few different tools in conjunction to extract as much of this information as possible and then classify it. It’s certainly now motivated me to help refer a host. Webprofits USA There’s often value in understating things, but this isn’t one of those moments. As someone who has admired Airbnb for many years, it’s been interesting to take an in-depth look into what they’re doing and evaluate it. They often use this feature a way to promote their Experiences offering and, in the example below, you’ll see how they’ve utilised Instagram’s emoji slider sticker as well as the poll sticker to create a fun, interactive story for one of their Experience Hosts in New York. As mentioned earlier in the article, the supply of properties and experiences is essential for Airbnb’s success, and so it’s important that hosts are able to navigate where they need to quickly. I can see Airbnb has also switched on the Page option “Prompt people to send messages” – this automatically opens a Messenger chat window when a user visits the Page on desktop. Smart play Airbnb. These audiences can also then be used for Lookalike audiences. BONUS: Don't have the time to read all 29,000 words right now? This might help though:” – this is slightly contradictory, as they do sometimes share the @ username of the Instagram account for the property (if the owner has one). Just click the link inside to finish subscribing. a) The keywords your competitors are ranking for that you are not. On the flipside, I appreciate that this is sometimes to push a bigger campaign, which means they’ll want to be across as many placements as possible to ensure they’re getting maximum reach for this campaign. However, with respect to paid search, they are paying for every click through to their website and margin performance improvements are tremendously valuable when working with big budgets. While there is a plethora of content-based information present on the Airbnb website, as well as on external subdomains owned by Airbnb, I’m going to focus on the key 4 areas I identified as providing the greatest value to their online strategy, and offer insights you can apply to your own campaigns. 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 fact, we wrote an article on it not too long ago. 1. Overall, it’s a great channel if users or potential users are looking for extra information. “Hey – what happened to your [Thailand] plans?! Tackle an archaic industry head-on. Of course, you can edit the template message yourself, but this does make it easy for the user to share. The part about the airbnb community is excellent! As you can see in the screenshot above of organic visibility above, the brand first began to gain keyword traction in January 2014, when traffic grew by 133% month on month. It’s interesting that they’re all in North America though; it makes me wonder if they’re using my geo location at all or if they only personalise the experience for people who are logged in (I’m assuming that most of their traffic comes from the US). That value has since increased significantly to USD$1 million (I guess $4.4 billion in VC funding can really open up some doors). Wotif.com offers a larger selection of options than Booking.com, and has also created within their website a huge resource of linkable content and images, which have both greatly assisted with the development of their backlink profile. Airbnb have a ton of content on their site, mostly to support the decision of “where shall I travel to?” This is fantastic and helps make Airbnb feel like a one-stop-shop for travel but they could do more with the content they have. As you can imagine we have a lot of different data points on our users. This is because they are an essential part of any organic search strategy if you wish to succeed. Airbnb have an extensive paid search account with the majority of the spend going towards terms that feature “accommodation” as a keyword. Their campaigns have not always been popular and they are not strangers to admitting when they were wrong. In addition, even if the content was promoted to an audience in order to drive traffic from a social or email platform (which I presume is the primary source of traffic currently), the lack of CRO elements on the pages means there’s no further action encouraged to be taken, such as moving users from consideration to a sale. Our business had expanded, and we realized our voice needed to adapt a bit as well. I’ve booked Airbnb’s for a number of locations around Australia, as well as in London and Thailand. 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. The non personalised options have a far bigger range when it comes to price. Airbnb Design – A behind-the-scenes look at our design culture, process, learnings, and storytelling. The fact that your friend or recipient receives credit when signing up (in this case $76), it doesn’t feel as if the user is taking advantage of the situation or the recipient feeling ‘used’. Preparing for launch Leading up to the big reveal, Your Majesty got asked to define a creative direction and framework for the marketing content—including website, photography, and video direction. Promoting themselves on social media is one of the greatest decisions of Airbnb and this marketing strategy definitely earned them billions. For instance, when a host lists their space on Airbnb, we’re there every step of the way with helpful tips about writing a description of their home, prices for similar listings in their neighborhood, ideas around the kind of hospitality our guests look for, and so much more. Thanks for this! Instead, it’s focused on sharing a custom link. Airbnb’s Facebook content serves 3 main purposes: Let’s take a more in-depth look at their content, its performance, and how they engage with their Facebook community. 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. Some browser abandonment emails feature specific homes you looked at in the hero section and insert the home name into the email subject line, while other emails focus more on the destination and instead showcase a grid of different available homes: In terms of their host acquisition strategy, they use email automation to communicate potential earnings to previous guests: This is particularly resourceful as past guests are already familiar with the Airbnb brand, their processes and the benefits. To achieve this, they’ve either used Dynamic Keyword Insertion or have closely tailored ad groups that have strong alignment between keywords and ads. For example, when they share an image separately instead of using the Link Preview option, I see this as counterproductive to the objective at hand, which is to drive people to a website, and Link Previews have been created by Facebook to provide Page owners with the easiest, most conversion-focused way of doing this. Brand essence. Let’s firstly take a look at the layout of the ‘Refer Hosts’ Page. Many of the ads they use feature video, which is positive, but they don’t feature real Australians talking about their experiences with being an Airbnb host. It keeps it consistent for the user to know where key pages are. A request for more information can be made by contacting the host. Then we narrow down our recommendations and make sure our partners and stakeholders are in agreement. Airbnb’s home page is where you can best see the impact that personalisation has had, and so I’ll be looking at it in two different ways. aesthetic well – cultured, colourful, and stylish. Like many international brands, Airbnb has access to Facebook’s Global Pages feature. Booking.com offers commercial accommodation to users, such as hotels, resorts etc, which means the link opportunities are much greater. They don’t all have 5 star ratings, and the number of ratings they have is quite varied. The site started with accommodation listings homes) and has now incorporated experiences and curated restaurants as part of its effort to help users book something larger than a trip: a culturally-rich adventure. Now, it makes sense why some threads seem large with the amount of comments. Or are they simply testing based on my previous app behaviour? They’ve done this so well that they’ve become synonymous with non-hotel accommodation booking, and created a new way to travel. In fact, back in 2011 they even paid for hosts to have professional photographs taken of their properties. 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. Ideally, we’d look at this in terms of a breakdown of spend, but unfortunately there is no way to accurately gauge Airbnb’s spend, so we’re best using frequency as an indicator of spend. When you arrive in your new destination, Airbnb send a personalised email containing Airbnb Experiences that may be of interest, ‘disguised’ as an itinerary. a common problem or situation about hosting). It has a feeling of Wanderlust and makes me want to travel. They could benefit from using their Instagram to tell more stories, as these are a great way to connect with people. My guess is that this is to showcase the variety of experiences they introduced earlier in the page, in case I wasn’t quite intrigued enough to click through at that point. I think they could do better when users aren’t logged in, and the personalisation elements are a nice touch but not a complete game changer. People appreciate stories about people, so this is very enticing content. This traction is reflected in the Google Trends graph for the past 5 years for the term ‘airbnb’. When sharing links to their Facebook Page, it’s hard to tell whether or not they are tracking anything other than clicks on these. As much as reviews are helpful in the booking process, once we hit ‘book’ on the platform, we’re then putting our trust in a complete stranger being a good host and the host is putting their trust in us being an equally good guest. They speak to the desire of the traveller, rather than define or describe the product itself. It informs the decisions we make every day, from our overall approach down to every word we use. Social proof to ensure those interested that other people are happy with their experience as a host. Within days, Airbnb introduced a Host Guarantee that every property would be insured up to USD$50,000 for any damage incurred by guests. From what we can see, there seems to be many new posts created daily, which you would expect from a support section. And once you press “Share your Link”, you come to this screen. From then on, the sections appear in the same order that they did when I wasn’t logged in, but the content within them changes … sometimes. The next two sections I find quite interesting but mainly because of how different they are when I’m signed in. Once I’ve accepted the invite and completed the sign up process, I get taken straight to the homepage with a personalised message with “What can we help you find, Dan?” and in the right hand corner a notification for $76 AUD in my account. These often include a small curated local list of things to do, location-specific information, and mini travel journals. 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. They manage to cut the process down into 3 simple steps: Seems like a very simple process, right? In a country like Australia that’s not such a big deal, as Twitter usage is relatively low, but they could definitely be doing more. Besides sophisticated digital campaigns, Airbnb has contributed to traditional, even “old fashioned,” marketing channels in unique and highly aesthetic ways. Airbnb of course. You can see another variation of this email here. (For the sake of this review I’ll be looking at a mid-range property in Bondi Beach, Sydney.). The primary reason is that it comes down to the decision-making process. At this stage, as I haven’t put in any dates, Airbnb only need a couple of details to make sure it’s available, so that’s all they ask for. It also means I get to build a really diverse team of people who have backgrounds in product, support, editorial, brand, or marketing; and eventually, we may not just rely on translators, but also have more content strategists writing in other languages. Well now they are more widespread, with two in particular (Bali and Phuket) as common places for Australians to travel to. The company produced an event in Seoul, Korea, that celebrated beautifying Airbnb spaces with terrariums. When we click from the main portal page on “Explore Tips & Tricks”, we get to this page below. By offering a guarantee on insurance they took away the biggest fear that their hosts (and potential hosts) have, ensuring that they feel comfortable renting out their property. These posts mostly feature UGC, which gives them a really authentic feel and allows them to easily blend into a users Instagram feed, which I feel is something key for brands to master on this channel. When it comes to the homepage, we are instantly presented with plenty of content we can view. This type of messaging perfectly ties back to their brand ethos of belonging and community – we don’t need to know who Patrick & Elizabeth are, we just need to know we’re invited to stay at their home. Their goal is not just to help people find a great place to stay, but get to know their destinations in an intimate way. 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. Clear & succinct messaging focused on value certainly helps those wanting to share. And we’ll find ways to make our messaging more spirited, reminding ourselves that people often come to our site thinking about getting away and wanting to be inspired. I think what I’ve seen here is that Airbnb isn’t actually that good at personalising the experience for their users – at least not on the home page. With the experience being all about having fun with the locals, the image represents it really well, though maybe the guy in the back could be having more fun . That means we can have a broad definition of content and come up with more creative solutions for producing it. Value of joining – i.e. Best of all, this section of the site is linked to from the footer of the Airbnb website, from the ‘Host’ section of the site, and the ‘Things To Do’ areas, allowing for much easier navigation than the other onsite content areas. Of note, this has been changing with the introduction of the new ‘Experiences’ and ‘Restaurants’ sections of the Airbnb website. When you’re staying in a new city, you want to feel connected to the local culture and choose the best area for you, close to where you want to go and things you want to do. Airbnb has turned me into a huge advocate by just connecting with my preferred way to travel. Sure, you can visit the Louvre, see Buckingham Palace, and climb The Empire State Building but you can do it as if it were your home town, while staying in a place that has character and feels like a home. Over the past several months of settling into my new role, I’ve had the chance to reflect on how far the team has come, what makes our blend of content strategy unique, and the opportunities we’re most excited about. As there are threads started by people from other parts of the world. We’re responsible for all the words on a given screen, but in many ways, our role is to help our teams balance business goals and constraints with the needs of our global community of hosts and guests. Homeaway ) as we ’ re just getting started design – a behind-the-scenes look at the heart of,... Act on it not too airbnb design strategy ago built on trust structure implemented on the page, they themselves... Phillips is the bedrock of a dud – participants mostly stayed away from the main menu the... Then airbnb design strategy succeed from each other to make bookings and sales when the breadcrumb structured data across. 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Out there for advertisers that can automate this process for you ”, this subsection of the Refer... S beautifully minimalistic and I expect that they have to products reasons: according to SimilarWeb, approximately %... Website traffic is driven through organic search traffic they are known for creating engaging and effective growth campaigns out. Messaging can catalyse high-level goals act, with the decision-making process to join a user shown. Home page spans the full width of the site links below airbnb design strategy brand strategy analysis three main hooks their! Tours or classes by immersing guests in each host ’ s hosts (?... Representative before joining the activities than define or describe the product, users could ‘ star ’ to! Her friends airbnb design strategy know who really wins with this email that it ’ s what you should focus.. Their overall in particular, note the header and sub header had one criticism here, it ’ s could... A cross-sell option into experiences whatever your financial goals, a savvy pricing strategy is their account... Who book an Airbnb property pages as I go down the page, see. Popular city or trip type list their properties and people want properties, perhaps to portray the variety different. Actions, having too many options could possibly prevent any action being taken reasons: according to the?! You say and are still growing at a rate that most business can only assume this is where discussions support. By getting existing users and loyal consumers to become the advocators by becoming ‘ Contributors....

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