Online marketing strategies of Airbnb and HomeAway
Introduction
Hospitality, like any other field in the business market has thrived over time. As the market disruptors reach their critical mass and technological evolution is peaking speed, changes, and transformation are inevitable in the field of hospitality (Gumerov, 2019). The consumer patterns and behaviors are also shifting, the modern type of guests expect an exceptional experience when looking for venue of hospitality. Currently customers prefer having an early or prior knowledge of their preferred destination in terms of; facilities available, location, customer reviews, services delivery, convenience and more. At the same era, there are different avenues available to facilitate marketing most of it being online on social sites which include; Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube.
Airbnb since its inception in 2008, has been an avid adopter of dynamic ads and ad sponsorship for travel that matches people wants with relevant accommodation in areas of travel on Facebook. How does the dynamic ads work? Some may ask. Dynamic ads is used in both Facebook and Instagram which are sister social applications. In dynamic ads a discovery is made on untapped predictions by making a combination of people’s browsing activity, travels history and interests to determine intent of travel (Airbnb). Once Facebook have identified a travel intent and destinations, the person is automatically served with relevant information on the properties, location and prices. Airbnb uploads its catalog on dynamic Facebook retargeting campaign, making dynamic ads on easier to use on customers instantly. Airbnb and Facebook Marketing Partner Smartly collaborated to expand the market base for Airbnb, in their specific partnership Facebook was to custom the target customers who receives the ads. The presentation of the ads took Carousel format where professional accommodation pictures and prices were displayed. The partnership Saw Airbnb escalate to popularity and marketability.
HomeAway Company have a page on Facebook where posts are made on the destination that it offers accommodations are displayed, this include professional pictures and video of the destinations. The pages have invite links where customers and referrals are made through to the official website. Another means of marketing is on ad sponsorship, where a sponsored page is displayed to Facebook users on their timeline accompanied by pictures, videos and the company’s link to it. HomeAway uses Unmetric Analyze on Facebook to help them in discovering, new market trends, creation of better strategies and a better understanding of how their product resonates with the people (Unmetric, 2019). HomeAway started using Unmetric in 2014 to help in expansion of its reach and brand building on social media platform. The system automatically generates reports on a regular basis that are easily accessed for evaluation, and it also makes the brand visible on these platform. On competitive benchmarking Unmetric analytics is used by HomeAway to have a full picture of how their contents are faring on in the market in terms of quality reach (Unmetric, 2019). This information is used in direct contract of the competitors’ products within the hospitality sector.
One Facebook the Airbnb strategy seem to beat those of HomeAway considering the surging number of following and referrals that it receives.
YouTube
The impact of display media is very massive in marketing. Many corporates understand this and have continually relied on it over time. This medium of an advertisement has been of relevance since time as it gives costumer’s a gist of real experience hence the reason for the large traffic. Airbnb has partnered with YouTube in the aim of boosting its market base through ad sequencing on their site. YouTube being a video display site, randomly displays this ads randomly on their site, once a viewer login to the site. Airbnb has also encouraged most of its customers to subscribe to its channel for updates on new products they are launching, the broadcasts also have description with links that lead the viewer to the Airbnb official site. Many visitors to the site are always fed with the report about Airbnb’s economy and their offers through several YouTube views. They do this through storytelling and films where the product get marketing, recently Airbnb managed to address over 350,000 viewers through there channel on YouTube (Qasem, et.,al 2020).
HomeAway are not left out in this platform they upload videos regularly to keep their customer updated. As a result, subscribers and viewers can access information about vacation homes at an affordable cost. Besides the convenience, customers are entertained by their stories and testimonies. The strategies employed here are almost similar, in getting more ads on display frequently, the ads are always sponsored to target particular groups of people, demographics or even a precise age.
The display strategy is working better for Airbnb as they get high numbers of content viewership which can be easily be converted to bookings.
A recent research revealed that more than 300 million people use Twitter every month, this is potentially viable for marketing. Airbnb has been able to immerse a following of up to 573,000, which is quite a large number (Wright, 2017). The main concern is how to turn the following in to bookings. Twitter has a strong user interaction which Airbnb relies on to get feedback and reviews. Airbnb shares its video cards which is limited to 8 posts or activities on twitter to attract people’s interest at the same time convert them into potential and long-term customers. Airbnb gets up to 2100 unique visits on its twitter page monthly so it continually posts links and stories that lead people to its website which expands its outreach (Wright, 2017). Airbnb also promotes organic tweets which have the highest share rate, a weekly number of two. They also use twitter to increase the number of their bookings by creating automatic alerts and in competition monitoring.
HomeAway has a massive following on twitter compared to Airbnb, which gives it a front position in marketing or generating traffic to its site. It has maximized on the sharing feature on twitter where a large number of people can see the information shared without following you unlike Facebook. HomeAway takes clearly shot pictures and post them its timeline on twitter, tweets, retweets and engages followers hence promoting its brand. HomeAway frequently posts with at least one image of a destination daily on its timeline.
Here HomeAway is doing better than Airbnb as the number of following are more than those of Airbnb. The only missing point is in the branded content which tells a story and connects to consumers.
Conclusion
The marketing strategies of Airbnb are more robust, engaging and quite relatable to consumers which gives then the popularity over HomeAway. Consumers are very rational and will only pick what resonates well with them, though quality remains a standard factor.
References
Airbnb. (n.d.). Reaching travelers with Facebook and Instagram dynamic ads for travel for abroad audiences. https://www.facebook.com/business/success/2-airbnb
Gumerov, R. (2019, July 12). 4 Key Digital Transformation Trends in Hospitality: By Rustam Gumerov.https://www.hospitalitynet.org/opinion/4094180.html
Qasem, Z., Algharabat, R., & Alalwan, A. A. (2020). Materialism Effect on Apparel Collaborative Consumption Platform Usage: A Research Proposal. In Digital and Social Media Marketing (pp. 95-105). Springer, Cham.
Unmetric. (2019, April 11). HomeAway Social Media Case Study. Retrieved from https://unmetric.com/resources/homeaway-social-media-case-study &.https://go.unmetric.com/wp-content/uploads/homeaway-casestudy.pdf
Wright, A (February 19, 2017) Airbnb social media strategy. https://www.slideshare.net/AndrewWright130/airbnb-social-media-strategy-72338972