2. Channels
AirBnB acquires its customers through several main channels: Online advertising, PR, and word-of-mouth. Let’s look at each of these separately.
a) Online advertising: AirBnB is very aggressive with its online marketing and its ads can be found through an extensive network of affiliate sites and as part of search results on major search engines. We would not be surprised if AirBnB is one of the top 5 paid advertisers in the world.
b) PR - perhaps one of AirBnB’s greatest competencies, especially when it was first starting out, is PR. Almost everyone knows the story of how the founders sold cereal during the US election to continue bootstrapping their young company. And the founders are terrific storytellers who have participated in a myriad of conferences and press events, and continue to be very visible in the media to this day.
c) Word-of-mouth – this is the other element that AirBnB put a lot of focus on and has done an exceptional job. The founders knew that if they provided their users with a great experience there would be a high probability that their users would spread the word. So the company has, since day one, put a lot of effort into providing their users with an absolute superb experience, both before and after booking. They’ve also given users plenty of social sharing tools to help spread the word. With high unemployment in many of its core markets like the US, the model has been shared via word-of-mouth extensively as a great way to make a 2nd income.
d) Why AirBnB never put much effort into SEO: As AirBnB wanted to scale very quickly they understood that organic traffic would have been quite slow and difficult to scale across the many geographies in which it operates. It also understood that sites like TripAdvisor, Virtualtourist and many others had lots of great user-generated content and had a decade-long head start – meaning it would have been very difficult to get to the top of popular search results quickly. Lastly, the team knew that optimizing for SEO typically means trading this off with great design and user experience. This is because traditionally SEO requires throwing lots of text optimized for SEO into the site, and since AirBnB put a lot of focus on design it is natural that they were hesitant to do this.
2. Channels
AirBnB acquires its customers through several main channels: Online advertising, PR, and word-of-mouth. Let’s look at each of these separately.
a) Online advertising: AirBnB is very aggressive with its online marketing and its ads can be found through an extensive network of affiliate sites and as part of search results on major search engines. We would not be surprised if AirBnB is one of the top 5 paid advertisers in the world.
b) PR - perhaps one of AirBnB’s greatest competencies, especially when it was first starting out, is PR. Almost everyone knows the story of how the founders sold cereal during the US election to continue bootstrapping their young company. And the founders are terrific storytellers who have participated in a myriad of conferences and press events, and continue to be very visible in the media to this day.
c) Word-of-mouth – this is the other element that AirBnB put a lot of focus on and has done an exceptional job. The founders knew that if they provided their users with a great experience there would be a high probability that their users would spread the word. So the company has, since day one, put a lot of effort into providing their users with an absolute superb experience, both before and after booking. They’ve also given users plenty of social sharing tools to help spread the word. With high unemployment in many of its core markets like the US, the model has been shared via word-of-mouth extensively as a great way to make a 2nd income.
d) Why AirBnB never put much effort into SEO: As AirBnB wanted to scale very quickly they understood that organic traffic would have been quite slow and difficult to scale across the many geographies in which it operates. It also understood that sites like TripAdvisor, Virtualtourist and many others had lots of great user-generated content and had a decade-long head start – meaning it would have been very difficult to get to the top of popular search results quickly. Lastly, the team knew that optimizing for SEO typically means trading this off with great design and user experience. This is because traditionally SEO requires throwing lots of text optimized for SEO into the site, and since AirBnB put a lot of focus on design it is natural that they were hesitant to do this.
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