Airbnb’s Paul Jeszenszky talks digital success

Yesterday team ntegrity (including our newly appointed Strategy Director Tony Lee!) attended a breakfast event with Airbnb’s Director of Online Marketing & Media Buying, Paul Jeszenszky.

He had some amazing insights into why the notorious International disruptors Airbnb have been so phenomenally successful, and we wanted to share them with you.

In Part 1, we’ll fill you in on all of Paul’s tips for effective online marketing. Next week in Part 2, we’ll share his advice on building a growth marketing team culture that drives success.

Part 1: Effective Online Marketing

Ultimately, online marketing is really a case of the right message delivered to the right person at the right time.

Sounds easy, right? But any digital professional will know there are hundreds of nuanced and variable challenges when trying to get your message heard.

Here are Paul’s 10 tips to improve your digital marketing activities:

1. People are constantly providing explicit and implicit information online in the conversations they are having and the communities they are participating in. As a marketer, you need to be listening to gain context.
2. This will help you stay relevant, ensuring that you’re delivering what your audiences wants to hear when they want to hear it. There’s no use talking about things that happened yesterday if your audience is listening for things happening today.
3. Think holistically about all of your online marketing activities. Whether it’s on social media, email, SMS, push notifications, or remarketing, all of your behaviour needs to be aligned by a comprehensive strategy.
4. Have an authentic voice. Always speak clearly and honestly to your community, as this will grow trust-based relationships.
5. Personalise. Use everything you know about a user to target them with personalised and relevant messaging which will resonate with them and give them something valuable.
6. Be timely. This will determine how many people you delight versus how many people you annoy. There’s a tendency to over-communicate to people who visit your site all of the time, whilst ignoring those who don’t. So test, test, and test again to get your timeliness on track.
7. Think about deliverability. Make your content easy to read, easy to share, and easy to unsubscribe/opt-out.
8. Remain responsive.  Remember that your users will vote with their actions. Every reaction is a message for you, so pay attention.
9. You need to have a data collection system in place, and it needs to capture meaningful data. Use this information to improve your marketing activities, and commit to delivering data driven outcomes.
10. Create ‘hero’ customers. It sounds harsh, but it’s better to initially build a small number of users who love you, than a large amount who kind of like you.

In Paul’s eyes, the ultimate key to digital marketing success is to champion diversity by building a team of strong thinkers from different backgrounds, and managing them appropriately. The team you grow will be the ones who help you challenge norms and constantly improve, but you can read more about this in Part 2! Keep your eyes peeled next week.