Airbnb, Inc. is an accommodation marketplace enabling access to worldwide living places and local communities in over 190 countries.
Airbnb, Inc. is an accommodation marketplace enabling access to worldwide living places and local communities in over 190 countries. Airbnb and Social Touch started a strategic partnership in marketing in 2014. In August 2015, Airbnb officially entered the Chinese market
The Challenge
Due to the cultural differences, homestay travelling had low acceptance in China. To enter the Chinese market, Airbnb was facing three key challenges:
Lack of popularity of homestay travelling
Low brand awareness and word of mouth in China
Lack of follower interactions on social media
The insufficient conversion rate between followers and clients
The Solution
We helped Airbnb launch “welcome home” campaign during the Chinese Lunar New Year. The aim was to promote Airbnb’s brand position “travelling like a local” to China consumers. To prepare for the campaign, we leveraged Social Touch CIS system to analyze Airbnb’s followers’ data including concerned topics, interest and hobby, as well as consumer behaviour. Then we filtered over 30,000 user labels to precisely target consumer groups in the Chinese market.
Based on the research, we run the campaign successfully with perfect ad placement on social media, official website and other relevant media outlets. ROI tracking technology was also implemented to track the marketing effect to ensure that we optimize the campaign timely.
Meanwhile, big data technology allowed us to share boutique houses around the world to Airbnb fans, thus increased the effect of word-of-mouth. We also adopted money rewards strategy to motivate social sharing to achieve high brand awareness of Airbnb
We established a social media network for Airbnb and continuously optimized the content creation and social advertising placement based on big data analysis, aiming to target the right consumers with the right offers and to improve ROI
Through our creative social marketing campaigns, we helped Airbnb China increase brand awareness, drive traffic to its official website and improve the conversion rate
In addition to marketing strategy and contents, we also provided Airbnb with customer service optimization. We established a customer service communication mechanism to solve consumers’ problems during the use of Airbnb APP
The Achievements
Weibo: followers increased by 800,000 within one year; topic views exceeded 200 million
WeChat: followers increased by 140,000 within 30 days
Attracted over 200,000 consumers in the New Year Red Packet campaign, achieved a 3% conversion rate of red packets, which is 2 times higher than the industry average figure
Derived 40,000 of traffic volume to the official website / official APP downloads
