DIGITAL

Brand Strategy
Development

MARKETING
PROJECT

Submitted to:
Prof. Sandeep
Sharma
Table of Contents

Brand Analysis................................................................................................................ 2
Introduction................................................................................................................ 2
Digital Target Market..................................................................................................... 3
Smart Objectives.......................................................................................................... 4
Strategic Consideration..................................................................................................... 5
Competitors Analysis.................................................................................................... 5
Role of Data................................................................................................................ 7
Tactical plan................................................................................................................... 8
Tactic 1...................................................................................................................... 8
Tactic 2...................................................................................................................... 8
Tactic 3...................................................................................................................... 9
Tactic 4.................................................................................................................... 10
References................................................................................................................... 11

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Brand Analysis
Introduction

Brand Name: Airbnb.com

Headquarters: San Francisco, California, United States
Founded: August 2008, San Francisco, California, United States

PLATFORMS WEBSITE FANS/FOLLOWERS

Facebook https://www.facebook.com/AirbnbIndia/?fref=ts 4.3 M
Twitter https://twitter.com/airbnb 535 K
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/airbnb/ 1.4 M
LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/airbnb 306 K
Google+ https://plus.google.com/+airbnb 3.1 M
YouTube https://www.youtube.com/user/Airbnb 58,398

Product and Service offerings: providing luxurious accommodation facilities and a full travel
service, a peer-to-peer online marketplace and homestay network that enables people to list or
rent short-term lodging in residential properties with over 2,000,000 listings in 34,000 cities and
191 countries.

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Unique selling point: Airbnb has been able to create a niche market by being available only in
online channels. Marketplace model, where any individual can list their property makes Airbnb
unique. Airbnb also sends its professional photographers to verify and click pictures for posting.

Brand Tone and Persona: Airbnb has a good package to offer for the very specific generation
of epicurean people, round the earth travelers, social media enthusiasts. Airbnb has tried to
improvise that image, showcasing itself as more of a hospitality brand since the change of its
logo, offering a premium service to guests, and bestow its clients with a home-dining
experience.

Airbnbs effort to revamp its brand image and implant it in the people rather than in the
technology like it used to do before. Airbnb is more of a lifestyle brand than technological brand
now and this has the potential to really take the company forward to the next level of its growth
stage.

Brand Communication Style: Airbnb uses an intriguing service called Crystal that allows users
to search for people and then scans public content data and runs an analysis on the text to match
with one of 64 different personality types within a few seconds. Once this analysis has been done
Crystal suggests the ideal communication style based on the customers data.

Timely responses via prompt emails for the newsletter and other email promotions.

Upload high-quality photos with captions and write a detailed description about the
space.

Promotion through non-promotional email campaigns, where they created a tool for
subscribers to send greetings to hosts they stayed with or guests they had accommodated.

Digital Target Market

Travelers: This market segment involves mostly people who are much incumbent on
tourism.

Hosts: These include owners or renters who are willing to rent out their places to tourists.

Platforms:

Vine, a brand crowd-sourced site, share videos by letting consumers post about their
stories through first hand experiences.
Airbnb keeps itself updated in the two social media giants Google and Craigslist (letting
people to post videos on their website) that helps it to gain more popularity and fetch
more viewers to its website.
Airbnb captures social login data from sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram,
Pinterest, and Google Plus that helps them with uniform demographic information from
the users social networking service. This enables Airbnb to track the users online

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 behavior and provide personalized marketing activities such as suggesting trips, cities to
visit, and attractive deals.
On social media they promote pictures of the neighborhood, holiday suggestions, houses
to rent, and the travel experience as a whole.
Airbnb has formed a marketplace model for its business, in which it connects hosts and
travelers to enable transactions. Airbnbs share is 3% of the transaction from the hosts
and 6% to 12% from the traveler, depending on the property price.

Revenue Model

Airbnb follows a marketplace model for its business, where it connects hosts and travelers to
enable transactions. Airbnb takes 3% of the transaction from the hosts and 6% to 12% from the
traveler, depending on the property price.

Smart Objectives
SMART Tactic(s) KPIs Tracking Tools
Objective

Increase traveler Email Marketing, Email open & mail chimp for email
reviews and lessor travelers credit forwarding rates; marketing, interactive
listing by 15% in for each review number of reviews questionnaires. Tools like
6 months and each hosting per 1000 bookings. Mix panel, google
and CRM CPC/CPA/CPM of AdWords, google display
ads; SEM, Social advertising.
media marketing

Increase social Social Media number of views Facebook Insights; Twitter

media engagement Marketing with on videos, no. of Analytics; URL softeners
by 20% Facebook pages & likes and retweets, such as bitly or ow.ly; Tools
Twitter, Content no. of shares, like keyhole, AgoraPulse,
Marketing number of positive Hootsuite, Google Analytics
comments, number
of link clicks

Increase revenue Email marketing, number of new URL tracking through

solely through the and successive signups using Hubspot URL builder,
Airbnb referral incremental referral codes and UTM parameters,
program** incentives for each links, number of embedded scripts in emails.
referral redemption of
referral codes.

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**When a friend travels on Airbnb, you both get 1,000 in travel credit. When they welcome
their first guest, you get 3,000 in travel credit.

Objective 1- Traveler review improves credibility of the host and his property. Thus for higher
revenues, it is imperative to have large number of user rating and reviews/feedback. In order to
increase the traveler feedback personal engagement and belongingness should be brought in by
feedback emails and option of viewers posing questions to travelers. Similarly, number of
listings can be promoted through AdWords, Google display advertisement and social media
marketing.

Objective 2- Up till now Airbnb has been solely dependent on digital marketing and it has been
hugely successful. This shows the strength of digital marketing and it complements. Social
medias outreach has been phenomenal and has becoming a platform for targeting marketing.
Airbnb can further strengthen its social media network by increasing user engagement, assisting
user with co-creating, and providing better ads using analytics.

Objective 3- Like the popular cloud software company Dropbox, referral program of Airbnb has
been a hit. It offers 1000 travel credit when a friend uses Airbnb and also 3000 when a friend
welcomes their first guest. These are great incentives but need to be strengthened further. It is
wise to analyze consumer behavioral patterns while designing referral programs. Thus browsing
patterns, email responsiveness patterns etc. need to be analyzed before make some conclusive
decisions.

Strategic Consideration
Competitors Analysis

Competitor Name: TripAdvisor.com

PLATFORMS WEBSITE FANS/FOLLOWERS

Facebook https://www.facebook.com/TripAdvisor 3.8 M
Twitter https://twitter.com/tripadvisor 3.33 M
LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/tripadvis 140,113
or
Google+ https://plus.google.com/+TripAdvisor 5.4 M
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/tripadvisor/ 652 K
YouTube https://www.youtube.com/user/TripAdvisor 8059

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Empowering Digital Marketing Strategy employed by TripAdvisor:

A simple search on Google, stay in Dubai clearly has TripAdvisor featured as the top
most page from SEO perspective. Ads by TripAdvisor also feature at the top of Google
search results, demonstrating their SEM implementation.

TripAdvisors landing page content clearly depicts that call to action in a clear, concise
and visually tantalizing way.

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 TripAdvisor has its name enrolled in many other travel media brands such as
AirfareWatchdog, BookingBuddy, CruiseCritic, EveryTrail, Family Vacation Critic,
FlipKey, The Fork (including lafourchette, eltenedor, IENS, BestTables and Dimmi),
GateGuru, Holiday Lettings, Holiday Watchdog, Independent Traveler, Jetsetter, Niumba,
Onetime, Oyster, SeatGuru, SmarterTravel, Tingo, Travel Pod, Tripbod,
VacationHomeRentals, Viator, VirtualTourist, Kuxun.

The TripAdvisor site is an epitome of opportunities that digital marketing can create and it has a
clear implication of the platform for E-WOM (Electronic Word of Mouth).

Role of Data
Every strategy needs historical data to show that it is the best method to give better results and
every strategy needs to have data collected daily post implementation to prove that the strategy is
working according to plan. Thus data needs to be collected on a daily basis without fail not only
to see whether the strategy is going according to plan but also to check whether are there any
sudden drop in the results of implementing the plan and if so when do they occur and how to
avoid them. In the digital world, the type of tactic is immaterial whether it is video marketing by
creating a YouTube channel or mobile marketing, data analytics tools like Google Analytics
continuously gather the data on a second by second basis on the number of unique visitors to
your website or App, the time spent by each visitor on the website etc. Also some website
developer platforms like WordPress have their own inbuilt statistics calculator that does the same
work as Google Analytics. These data are predominantly for website and mobile app visitors.

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Similarly, YouTube analytics is present for all YouTube channel owners who can monitor the
traffic to and from their channel. Post data collection, statistic tools like R or Informatica can be
used to clean the data and interpret them. Post interpretation meaningful reports can be generated
using software such as Business Objects for a strategist in the company to understand and make
decisions accordingly.

Tactical plan
Tactic 1
Google Display advertising is one tool that can be used to attract our target audiences. Any
person who wishes to rent any apartment or flat will have to use Google to search for best deals,
hence there couldnt be a better channel than Google itself to market us. Google Display
Network could be used to reach websites outside Google as well. YouTube, Gmail and millions
of other websites are partnered along with Google that provide different types of ads like text,
image, rich media and many other formats. This can cater many of our needs

Reach many audiences at once

Target audiences on different platforms
Improve click numbers
Increase conversion rate

Using various digital marketing tools to display our ads to target audiences is important. Creating
a brand name synonymous to rentals is our ultimate motive and using Google for the same can
be advantageous in explicit ways. It is essential to attract not only the travelers but also those
who are willing to rent their apartments. Google Display advertising can be used to aim both
these customer groups. One important strategy in using Google Display Network is to choose the
type of sites that we need to advertise on as that will help us to reach out to those we actually
want to reach.

Tactic 2
Social Media marketing is an essential sector to tap on. We often see people sharing their travel
experiences on social media websites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and many more. A
judicious use of this sector can help us reach the fun loving audience that might consider a rental
website like Airbnb among others. Technologically savvy audience who would prefer Airbnbs
online platform could be easily targeted in the social media. Businessmen who travel for office
related matters could be reached by LinkedIn. In short, there is some social media platform to
leverage depending on the target audience. The possible target audience for the various social
media platforms could be as follows

Facebook Tier 1
Twitter Tier 2
LinkedIn Businessmen
Instagram Young people/enthusiasts

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Tumblr Passionate ones
As seen above, each social media platform is renowned in buying interest of a particular
audience. Certain steps could be used for social media

Endorse competitions to involve many people and to increase brand presence

Keep social media page as active as possible
Go crafting
Promote co-creation, for instance Tell us about your experience, launch fb app which
makes a collage of your vacation album and posts on your wall.
Use social media platform to reach out to customers as well than mere advertising

It is essential to identify limited social media platforms and manage them well. Being ubiquitous
and not effective can be a waste of time and money.

Tactic 3
Video marketing is a tool that can be used by Airbnb to reach the target audience. As Airbnb
users are only the people who use internet and almost all these users visit video sharing websites
like YouTube, it makes sense to have a presence in this. A short video of 3-5 minutes could be
shot which depicts a happy customer journey and the ease with which he booked an
accommodation in the website. There are two options for Airbnb to use videos. Either they can
host these videos in their website or provide link to YouTube where the video is uploaded. Video
is also important for improving the SEO rankings of the website as videos are an important factor
for a higher rank. The sales might also get boosted as videos trigger the emotional quotient of a
person and will increase the brand recall. Some of the challenges that might be incurred while
using video marketing is hosting the video in the website can lead to the slowness of the website
as it needs considerable amount of size. One way to solve this is having dedicated servers which
in turn can will improve the cost to the business. On the other hand, hosting the video in
YouTube and just giving a link to the website may not be as useful as far as SEO is concerned as
having a video in the website will generate a better SEO rank than with just a link.

Dont go there. Live there Airbnb introduces the

Belo

Wall and Chain

Existing rich

media campaigns run by Airbnb

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Tactic 4
Mobile marketing is another option that Airbnb can use to reach its target audience. As Airbnb is
a complete digital business and portability is one of the most important factor for its success,
mobile phones will play a major part in its success. According to a report by Ericsson, by 2020,
global smart phone population will double to 6.1 billion and roughly 70 percent of the population
will have a smartphone. On the other hand, people using laptops or computers will fall
drastically owing to the portability factor. Airbnb already has presence in iOS store and Google
play through its app. One way to attract the users is by giving additional discounts for using
mobile app. Another way is by giving discounts to people who recommend the app to his/her
friends. This will not only improve the sales due to more target acquisition, but also ensure
slowly more and more people use just the app for booking hotels. Thus the resources allocated
for the web portal can be significantly reduced thereby reducing costs even further. Some of the
challenges that might be incurred while implementing this tactic is that some people are still not
comfortable making payments online. There are still people who browse the websites in their
mobile and finally make the purchase in the mobile. Another challenge is that in countries like
India where 3G and 4G are still luxury services, it is difficult to market the service as people
prefer the lite version of the website without any ads to ensure there is a smooth browsing
experience.

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References
1. http://www.airbnb.com/
2. https://contently.com/strategist/2014/12/05/how-airbnb-is-using-content-marketing-to-stay-on-
top/
3. https://dsmlf.info/airbnb-a-content-marketing-case-study/
4. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20130409194656-2967511-how-airbnb-used-social-media-to-
dominate-the-travel-industry
5. https://www.searchenginejournal.com/4-digital-marketing-strategies-airbnb-case-study/95007/
6. http://www.digitalvidya.com/blog/airbnbs-phenomenal-growth-digital-marketing-innovation-
strategy/

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