Airbnb will continue to use its marketing campaigns to get its “unique” inventory under customer noses, the accommodation platform has said.
Its recent partnership with toy maker Mattel saw the Barbie Malibu DreamHouse become the platform's most popular listing ever, driving 13,000 press hits and in excess of 250 million social media impressions.
While marketing spend for the accommodation platform increased to $486 million in the second quarter of 2023, up from $379 million year over year, Airbnb stressed “90% of our traffic remains direct or unpaid.”
Campaigns such as the Barbie one are an “important part of our playbook going forward,” the company said.
Chief financial officer Dave Stephenson said: “And then when we do things like the Barbie DreamHouse and other big events like that, we're able to kind of drive more awareness about Airbnb [and] about the uniqueness of our offerings. And this is a powerful strategy for our marketing.”
Airbnb also said it is seeing positive results from brand marketing across all key markets and continuous improvement in performance marketing.
It is that sort of organic marketing that online rivals are steadily striving toward through investment in direct channels and loyalty programs.
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Expedia Group also upped sales and marketing expenses in Q2 to $1.77 billion. Direct sales and marketing expenses came in at $1.6 billion, representing a 2% increase year-over-year driven by an increase in B2B commission payments.
The increase was mostly offset by marketing efficiencies in the B2C business, according to the company.
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Expedia Group CFO Julie Whalen said: “These B2C marketing efficiencies resulted from the benefits we are seeing from our continued investments in loyalty and app members, as well as our decision to move some of our planned spend from the second quarter to the third quarter to tie it more closely with the One Key launch and to support our accelerated growth in the back half.”
Longer term, the company continues to reduce its reliance on Google. President and CEO Peter Kern said the company is trying to find “better opportunities, higher long-term return opportunities to invest our advertising dollars, be it in app downloads or other kinds of environments.”
Expedia reported a 15% increase in active loyalty members in Q2 versus the same period in 2022 and an increase of booking via its apps of 300 basis points compared to Q1 of 2023.
Booking Holdings is also pushing direct bookings to interact with customers directly and drive loyalty with the likely added bonus of reducing spend on paid channels over time.
While the company’s marketing expenses increased 4% to $1.8 billion in Q2, 48% of its room nights came via its app, up six percentage points year over year.
Booking Holdings CFO David Goulden highlighted a higher return on investment in paid channels alongside the increase in direct business, which led to lower marketing expenses as a percentage of gross bookings.
He attributed the higher ROIs in performance channels to “efforts to improve the efficiency of our marketing spend” with the company looking at ways to optimize marketing spend.
“We're looking at channels for incrementality or return to direct, things like that, and consistently testing across a very large marketing spend. You see that during the quarter we spent about $1.8 billion on marketing. So it's a large amount of money that we're spending across that spectrum. We are always looking at ways to kind of optimize different spend, different channels and different approaches.”