Posted: March 23rd, 2023

Digital Brand Planning

Airbnb (Focus on “Unique Stays” on Airbnb)

Narrative Description

The audience for the social media content plan is local customers who will benefit from short staycations. Airbnb seeks to improve its sales revenue during the current COVID-19 pandemic when international travels are limited to reduce the highly contagious virus rate (Huang et al. 2020, 1-2). The marketing plan targets Instagram and Facebook due to their growing popularity and increasing usage during the current crisis as people stay home to avoid contracting or spreading the virus (Wiederhold 2020, 197-198). While the performance monitoring will include the number of views, following, likes, and shares, which will show the traffic around the social media campaign, success will be based on audience interaction with the social media platforms containing information about the marketing campaign.

Data Insights/Issues/Opportunities

Airbnb experiences unique challenges, just like other companies in the travel and hospitality industry due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the firm can use social media to promote its staycation options to encourage people to use the services in their home country. Facebook will connect the company to users to market the services for the next three months. People use social media to understand what is going on around the world. With about 2.701 billion users, the platform will be an effective tool for the company to send the message (Hetsroni and Guldin 2017, 987-997.). Apart from Facebook, Instagram will play a key role in marketing the new focus for Airbnb. Instagram’s capacity to share photos and videos will help the company to provide a graphic image of the campaign (Musonera 2018, 1-9.). The platform has 1 billion monthly active users, creating a significant potential for Airbnb.

Relevance to the Audience

The audience for the campaign is local consumers. The focus is to encourage them to use the company’s local services, considering that it is difficult to travel due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Social media is relevant to the campaign due to the growing number of people using the platform to communicate and connect with others (Boulianne 2015, 524-538). Based on the government policies, including staying home to prevent the spreading of the infection, more people are using social media to pass the time and seek entertainment (Abouk and Heydari 2021, 245-252; Goel and Gupta 2020, 1-3). The company will take advantage of the development to communicate to the local audience, most likely social media users. Facebook and Instagram are among the most popular social media platforms that will be useful in sending the message about using Airbnb at home. Thus, the choice of the social media tools is relevant to the campaign and the audience.