If you’ve ever heard of popular worldwide accommodations broker Airbnb, it’s likely that you’re familiar with the company’s beautiful, sleek marketing materials.
Did you know, however, that Airbnb is currently standing out as one of the top content leaders in the industry?
In addition to writing a beautiful, image-dense blog, Airbnb also wows audiences with their commercials and involvement in today’s big, global issues.
Read on to learn more.
The 6 Pillars of Quality Content That Airbnb Relies On
In today’s content-saturated world, a company doesn’t stand a chance if it can’t produce content that stands out and provides real value to audiences. Although there are dozens of schools of thought on how to “win at content marketing“, it’s generally accepted that great content possesses the following 6 traits (each of which Airbnb incorporates into their marketing strategy, although we’ll talk about this in a moment):
1. Great Content is Engaging
Nobody is going to sit through an ad or read a blog post if it’s boring and uninspired. For this reason, great content also needs to be engaging content. Although it goes without saying that not every post needs to answer life’s persistent questions or delve into the biggest challenges the human species is currently facing, great content should, at the very least, be funny and interesting – both of which are traits that will promote more audience engagement and ensure that your customers don’t forget you as soon as the article or commercial ends.
2. Great Content is Valuable
Nobody wants to read or watch or otherwise engage with content that is surface-level and shallow. Because of this, content that is bound for success needs to be valuable to its readers. In order to provide value, great content should discuss things your readers find interesting or should help answer their questions and solve their problems. In order to create this content, marketers need to think about what matters to their customers and how, exactly, content can cater to that. In addition to being interesting right now, content like this is also typically evergreen, which means it will be valuable into the foreseeable future, as well.
3. Great Content Creates a Community
People got sick of hard-sell, product-focused content a very long time ago and, today, consumers want content that is valuable and engaging but that also caters to their unique belief systems and helps them feel like they are a part of a community. This is an incredibly deep marketing tactic that involves creating a company point of viewand considering client values and concerns as gleaned by research, surveys and analytics data. Essentially, however, it boils down to one simple concept: great content should make your customers feel like they’re a part of something. Or, better yet, it should make them feel like you’re leading something they want to be a part of.
4. Great Content Builds Authority
When it comes to great content, building authority doesn’t always mean flexing your intellectual muscles in order to make your competition cower and run (although it can certainly serve this purpose). Instead, building authority through great content means providing your readers with things that promote your brand as being well rounded, aware and intelligent. You should also seem like you know quite a bit about your specialty. For example, if you ran a company that produced cooking products, you would write content about everything from the best food destinations in Italy to the pros and cons of copper skillets. Authoritative content doesn’t mean narrowing yourself down to focus on only one aspect of your specialty but rather opening up and encompassing specific and related topics in an intelligent and thought-provoking way.
5. Great Content is Passionate
If you don’t care about what you’re writing about, you can bet that your readers won’t care about it either. Because of this, memorable content needs to be passionate. One of the best ways to create great content is to develop and display a genuine interest for the topic – this helps you get to the heart of the matter and makes your content more engaging and valuable for readers.
6. Great Content Strengthens Bonds
When you write great content, you produce bonds. You produce bonds between your customers and your brand as well as between your customers as individuals. The catch here, however, is that in order to be worthy of promoting bonds, content needs to address your subject in a real and compelling way. Nobody bonds with Geico’s “It’s What You Do” commercials quite so well as they do Subaru’s “Dream Weekend” commercial and this is specifically because one is more successful at promoting bonds than the other. We will see an example of how Airbnb does this in just a moment.
How Airbnb Consistently Creates Great Content
When you take into account that Airbnb is a global accommodations company, it’s obvious that the company needs to fully embrace the 6 pillars of great content in order to appeal to customers around the world (the company has an estimated 6 million users).
Not to fear, though, because Airbnb does this in spades. Let’s look at how.
3 Ways Airbnb is Delivering Great Content
1. The Power of Airbnb’s Blog
When you go to Airbnb’s blog, you’re immediately confronted by a truly beautiful interface.
Blog posts cover topics like “Airbnb’s Positive Impact in Chicago”, “Navigating Seasonal Demand: A Q&A” and “Living Amongst Legends: A Night at Fenway Park.”
At once, these topics embrace every single one of the 6 pillars of great content. They are beautiful, useful, engaging, passionate and dedicated to promoting and educating the entire Airbnb community of renters and rentees.
2. Airbnb’s Dedication to Human Issues
Recently, Airbnb made a big, bold move that won it favor with a huge host of customers. In advance of Caitlyn Jenner’s much-anticipated ESPY award speech, Airbnb took to its Twitter account to release a statement about its new commercial, which also premiered that night. The tweet read as follows:
“It takes courage to make a difference in the world, It also takes kindness. Tonight we honor both.”
What followed was a truly moving commercial that’s come to be known as Transkind. The response was overwhelming, and the company became known for it’s stance here.
3. Airbnb’s “Never a Stranger” Campaign
In the name of creating community, Airbnb has created a whole line of commercials called “Never a Stranger.” These commercials underscore the company’ s primary goal: to produce worldwide connections for people who utilize the service. These ads are effective because they, like everything Airbnb does, are beautiful, but also because they promote a sense of wonder, excitement and awe, all of which are things Airbnb’s customers care about and identify with.
The Verdict: Airbnb Provides a Great Example for Content Marketers Everywhere
When you look at the evidence we’ve cited in this article, it’s obvious that Airbnb is getting it right across the board.
In addition to creating beautiful, unique and inspiring content, Airbnb knows its customers so well that it is capable of reaching out to them exactly where they are and taking big stands that it knows they will identify with.
Because of this, Airbnb has become a huge company and much-loved company (it was named “Company of the Year” in 2014 by Inc.com) with positive economic impacts in cities around the globe. It’s clear that Airbnb is truly winning at their content game.