This is How Airbnb Raised Its Booking Rates by 14%

Picture yourself scrolling through the latest posts on your social media feed. Once in a while, you’d see a friend or two posting about their most recent vacation. It might be your dream honeymoon destination, or perhaps it could be just another short getaway that you start to find yourself itching to go for.

Whichever destination it is that has piqued your interest, you are dreaming about that holiday trip now.

That’s stage one. Most of us don’t get past that stage, but if we do, then it’s going for the next two phases - planning and booking.

As you might expect, the stage where we plan our next trip will always take the longest. We start researching about the best cuisines in that location, the must-visit areas, the travel reviews and many more. This process could span over weeks or months.

Here’s the million dollar question.

Can travel marketers utilise videos to help move these potential travellers down the purchase funnel?

Based on Airbnb’s latest branding campaign, the answer seems to lean towards a big yes!

irbnb has over 5 million home-sharing listings distributed over 81,000 cities globally. When this branding campaign was launched, these were its main challenges & goals:

• Increase customer consideration for their listings in Latin America where customers know about Airbnb, but are not sure about how it works.
• Effectively compete with traditional accommodation chains in Brazil.

Airbnb turned to YouTube - the second largest video platform in Brazil to encourage these target audiences to book their next trip.

They included a human touch into their video campaigns, showcasing the warmth and hospitality of the Brazilian culture into their videos. This consists of a showcase of Brazil’s lush greeneries, colour-popping oil paintings, and the videos also feature 6 Airbnb hosts in Brazil with a short and sweet welcoming message, “Pode entrar,” or in English, “You may come in.”

Sarah Galvao, senior brand marketing manager of Airbnb in Latin America, shared her reasons for the concept behind the branding videos by saying, “We wanted to highlight local stories so people can see themselves. The best way to talk about Airbnb is through the heart of the community: the hosts. Every video features real hosts, real homes, and real stories.”

The best part of their promotional videos that made it more than just a branding campaign? Airbnb made them actionable - users can take action after viewing the videos. Here’s how.

This accommodation company first tested its campaign on a smaller scale, running its test campaign during the offseason to test the efficacy of Google’s recent video ad offering - TrueView for Action.

Airbnb added the call-to-action (CTA) “Reservar” - reserve in English - to their videos, bringing interested video viewers to their website to search for accommodations with their preferred dates.

By testing their video ad campaign during the offseason, Airbnb was able to test their campaign and video strategies with a smaller budget and find out what works best before they launch their global campaigns.

Since Airbnb already has a good number of conversion data, Smart Bidding becomes a viable option for them, helping them to identify the most engaged audience through consumer patterns & search terms and target them for higher conversion rates and volumes.

Airbnb ran this campaign for two months. Throughout this duration, Dwight Pirtle, the programmatic and paid social lead at Airbnb agreed that it was tempting to change the campaign settings now and then, but also knew the importance of giving at least two weeks for their TrueView for Action campaigns.

Understandably, Airbnb’s marketing assets are usually focused on reaching the in-market audience for travelling. Machine learning and smart bidding strategies also further accentuate their marketing efforts to reach those most likely to convert.

However, Pirtle has also agreed that they still need to find new audiences with their digital assets. As such, their video assets for this campaign have one main message “Pode entrar” all while covering different interests, themes and passions in them, including surfing, gardening and painting.

Airbnb paired these video assets with different themes and passions with affinity audience targeting on their video campaigns. This means that viewers that are about to start watching a video related to traditional arts or painting would see the video ad featuring their Airbnb host with a passion for oil painting, as an example

Here’s a quote from Pirtle that we loved.

“The way to gain a competitive advantage is to build in micro-conversions to inspire people and move them further down the funnel,” he said.

Contrary to usual marketing tracking and reporting, this campaign saw to it that the Airbnb marketing team linked the results of their latest campaign from the initial branding phase right down to the end of the funnel when the video viewers convert to reserve accommodation through Airbnb.

The result of this video campaign with all 4 pointers for their TrueView for Action campaign?

Airbnb received a staggering 142% increase in their branded search terms and a 14% increase in booking, showing that branding campaigns can increase their sales with the right strategies. Airbnb has also informed that they will be analysing their data over 120 days instead of their typical 30-day duration since most individuals will need a long time to plan their trip.