Home-sharing firm AirBnb has said that a renewed focus on brand marketing at the expense of search engine optimisation has helped it register its most profitable quarter to date.
Praising its pre-pandemic decision to shift its marketing emphasis away from search advertising, the San Francisco-based company has now managed to reduced its marketing overheads to such an extent that it doesn’t anticipate any further cuts, even in the event of a sudden economic downturn.
These results stem from Airbnb’s decision in 2019 to dramatically cut advertising spend in a bid to lessen its reliance on search, instead prioritising more general marketing campaigns and PR in order to build its brand.
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“Our brand marketing results are delivering excellent results overall with a strong rate of return, and it’s been so successful that we’re actually expanding to more countries,” Airbnb CFO, Dave Stephenson said.
“We’ve already kind of hit this new kind of lower overall rate. Certainly, we can moderate that over time, but we’re already so low that I wouldn’t anticipate us dropping it dramatically in the face of substantial headwinds with overall growth.”
The current positive trend didn’t emerge without significant sacrifices however, as the firm cut its marketing expenses by 28% year-on-year in Q1 2021, prioritising strategies that directly generate consumer action.
