Jabes Twitter Musings - April 14th
Throw It Down Big Man, Throw It Down!
One of the most common types of Tweets other than “time for a thread 🧵👇👇" (shoutout Reilly Boo) are Quote-Tweet Dunks. This is likely a result of the character count limit. 280 characters doesn’t allow for a lot of nuance if were being honest.
Considering I'm a decent internet citizen, I refrained from dunking on the 9-foot Twitter hoops. Instead I brought Kieran's Tweet to my lowered rim newsletter so I could windmill dunk here.
Full disclosure, I agree with the general premise of the statement, but that's not how you juice open rates.
Let’s dissect it word-by-word and I'll commentate why I think it is just a dumb tweet.
“Airbnb turned off their paid marketing...”
First off, what’s included in paid marketing? Is it Brand Marketing or Direct Response marketing? The two often have different P&L owners within a company.
Within his replies he corrected his statement to be "performance marketing" which typically falls under direct response. Performance marketing is still an extremely broad statement.
In fact, Airbnb turning off performance marketing could have just meant turning off their branded search terms since no one was googling Airbnb while in lockdown. This brings us to the next part of the statement.
“...in 2020 and didn't notice a massive impact”
HELLO! Did you know COVID19 was raging during 2020 and uhhh no one was traveling because there was a travel ban!?
I think it's pretty apparent that search demand was at all time lows. This means there were no keywords to bid on...a trusty reply guy pointed out the obvious:
Maybe Airbnb also stopped running programmatic and Instagram ads which are a heavy part of performance marketing budgets, but let's be real, who in their right mind was clicking on one of those ads anyway while in a freaking pandemic!
Shall we continue?
“...because 90% of their traffic is direct & organic.”
This is something that Airbnb deserves major kudos for. Their predecessors like TripAdvisor and Booking built massive businesses on the back of Google, only to later realize that they didn’t truly own the end user relationship. Google did.
That means when Google Ads started to get squeezed they built more vertically integrated search results for travel which was in direct competition with some of the biggest AdWords spenders, the travel companies.
Airbnb learned from this and realized that direct traffic and organic SEO was the best way to skirt the Google search tax.
But knowing this is only one piece of the puzzle. Airbnb relied heavily on product led growth which doesn’t get mentioned in this tweet. Airbnb focused on building multiple acquisition loops such as:
Give/Get Invite Viral Loop
Host Landing Pages UGC Loop
Trip Invite Viral Loop
Only after these core loops were spinning did they layer on another loop, Paid Marketing.
And while I’ll gloss over the above list of loops, let’s dive into the Paid Marketing Loop with a handy illustration.
IF NEW GUESTS NO LONGER BOOK NIGHTS THEN YOU DON’T HAVE MORE MONEY FOR ADS SO YOU CAN’T RUN A PAID MARKETING LOOP!
Jabe 3. Kieran 0.
“They now see the top of their funnel as PR (telling stories).”
This is great in theory but whoever runs this playbook is going to wake up one day and realize PR is a linear channel that doesn’t compound. You can’t control who and how often the media writes about you.
It may help provide an acquisition boost here and there, but it will never lead to exponential growth.
If there is one thing Reforge has taught me it is “loops not funnels.” Compounding growth is the 8th wonder of the world.
“Search + Storytelling is how you build real demand.”
This part wouldn’t bother me as much if he had just put Storytelling first. Sequencing matters. Search captures intent but it doesn’t create it. Storytelling does. So it should be Storytelling + Search. Storytelling to get more people to search, and then bomb SEO to capture that search.
Closing Thoughts
Another important part that this oh-so-misleading tweet missed: did Airbnb stop paid marketing for guests or hosts?
I would bet that Airbnb has a constant need for more hosts and that they will never, ever, stop spending to acquire more hosts. In fact, if you watch their latest TV ads, it's a major nod to hosts. The tagline is "Made Possible by Hosts" !!
Now, the interesting part will be looking at how Airbnb rebounds with paid marketing spend in 2021. Count me in for devouring Airbnb’s 2021Q4 report since they are a public company. One which I am indeed bullish on.
And one final point. Kieran works at HubSpot. HubSpot is dependent on Content Loops as their primary way to grow so of course he is biased towards storytelling + search. In fact, his twitter handle is @searchbrat :)
Hope you enjoyed the dunk show.
-Jabe