With Airbnb content marketing is not something they do, they live it.
DIGITAL CONTENT MARKETING #2
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6 MAY
08:30 – 11:30AM
Content equals proposition
Airbnb’s latest advertising strapline ‘don’t go there, live there’ also sums up their entire approach to content marketing. For Airbnb content is not an addition to their business, but a way for customers to discover their core proposal: the content shows you the places to go and stay. It is an absolutely necessary part of what has made the service so successful.
Authenticity rules
If you look up Airbnb’s content policy you’ll read the following sentence:
“We expect Hosts to create listings that are honest, clear, and helpful to potential guests.”
Honest, clear and helpful translates into ‘authentic’. Finding a place to stay through Airbnb should lead you to an authentic experience, as the advertising says: you’re not supposed to go there, but to live there, to live like locals, like you would do at home – authentically.
So Airbnb’s internal content policy probably reads: Keep it real.
The iPhone Instagram aesthetic
Keeping it real in Airbnb’s marketplace and segment means that the company understands and employs the dynamics of what we could call the iPhone Instagram aesthetic. An aesthetic that relies on:
- A basic tendency to make things look tidy but gorgeous
- The application of sepia/chrome-toned filters for a historical-authentic look
- Obsessive attention to beautiful everyday details
- Lucky camera accidents like flare, blur, shake, which all translate into ‘life’
- Close-ups, over-someone’s-shoulder shots, tight crops, high contrast
- Selfies and the celebration of moments together
Elements which all come together in a web and app design that emphasises wide-screen photography and video and the feeling of ‘being there’, seeing it like it really is – living there.
Three layers of aspiration
Airbnb’s content marketing ‘lives’ in three layers:
- The top layer is commissioned, directed and authored by Airbnb itself (advertising, site design and photo/video)
- The second consists of content uploaded by Hosts (images of places, descriptions)
- The third is made up of user reviews (text)
You could argue that the top layer works as an aspirational horizon for the rest of the content that Hosts and users add. By applying a certain type of aesthetic (as outlined above) Airbnb provides a (not so) subtle directive for users to follow and be consciously or unconsciously inspired by.
Let’s put it this way: your apartment wouldn’t look very appealing to a potential guest if it didn’t somehow look on a par with the aesthetics of the user-journey thus far. There is an incentive for Hosts to conform to the look and feel of the top-most layer of the site.
From the inside out
As an effect of ‘living’ content marketing, Airbnb’s content marketing actually seems to be non-existent. It’s just there as part of the DNA of the service itself. Fading in and out of focus, as and when it is needed.
More traditional, non-web-native, companies struggle to achieve this blending of content marketing and proposition because they have never learned to see them as one thing, they were never forced to pre-internet.
The real challenge both for B2C and B2B marketers, working for larger, older companies, is to help redefine these companies’ propositions for the internet and app age. They need to help them see that core services cannot live separately from the way you talk about and sell them.
Business leaders and marketers need to come together and ‘live in the same place’.
Want to find out more about content marketing from Airbnb, Brilliant Noise and Duel? Make sure you sign up to the DSMLF meeting tomorrow, 6th May and join your peers for a lively debate on the matter.