As audience development strategies evolve, here’s how we’re staying ahead
A fundamental shift in information flow has led newsrooms to rethink how they interact with their audiences.
The Host HQ is a Chicago-based independent media outlet to help Airbnb hosts navigate rules and taxes, learn from each other, and optimize their business. Visit us at thehosthq.com and follow us on Medium to see what we’re doing behind the scenes.
The way people access, consume and share information in the digital age looks completely different than it did for print media. So does the way publishers grow and keep readers, listeners and viewers. That is why publishers have drastically overhauled their audience development and engagement strategies.
Publishers and advertisers can distribute content to audiences through more pathways than ever. More significantly, audiences can now send content back to them — or forward to others. This fundamental shift in the information flow has led newsrooms to rethink how they interact with their audiences.
At first, tools like Chartbeat offered a way to quantify everything. Then, as algorithms played a larger role in how content surfaced on Google, Facebook and Twitter, publishers attempted to game these systems, whether by investing in SEO expertise or “pivoting to video.” But publishers are starting to realize that likes and clicks can oversimplify engagement and basing audience development strategy on Facebook’s algorithm is risky at best.
We launched The Host HQ with these new realities in mind, and we see both challenges and opportunities in contributing our own innovations around audience development and engagement.
Talking with our audience, not to them
By focusing on addressing the information needs of Airbnb hosts in Chicago, we already had a specific audience in mind. But one unique feature of The Host HQ is that design thinking is baked into our entire process, from product design to content strategy.
That approach has provided a number of benefits as we’ve worked to reach and engage with our audience as well. Specifically, it allowed us to:
- Conduct dozens of extensive interviews with hosts to learn more about what motivates them and how they interact with their communities.
- Continually collect feedback on our content and product to prove — and at times, disprove — our assumptions about what hosts find most valuable.
- Facilitate a two-way flow of information and create buy-in for both sides — hosts become more invested in The Host HQ because they see an alignment between their success and ours. Likewise, success in our minds means helping hosts optimize and grow their Airbnb businesses.
Innovation in practice
While there’s no silver bullet to our engagement strategy, here are a few things that have worked well so far.
Partnering with influential community members
The Chicago Airbnb host community is already well established, and hosts repeatedly pointed us to particularly invested members. We connected with folks like Shorge Sato at Keep Chicago Livable, who has helped hosts navigate Chicago’s complex legal landscape, and Dave Hart of STR Smart Host, who arranges referral discounts for hosts who send guests to local businesses. That helped us better understand the community and build our brand — once Shorge and Dave attested to our credibility, other hosts began to work with us as well.
Combining Airbnb and Facebook data to improve content quality and delivery
Facebook has powerful targeting tools, which every publisher can access. We also had a unique advantage with our data. Since most of our core readers use both Facebook and Airbnb, we combined and compared data from the two platforms. For example, from Airbnb we learned how many Chicago hosts are brand new versus veterans and where they live or have listings. This helped inform our Facebook ad strategy, allowing us to target locations where we know those audience segments existed in high numbers.
Future experiments
As is the case with most startups, where time and resources are limited but creative thinking is not, we have plenty of ideas we have not yet been able to try out. Our project is drawing to a close, but here are a few ideas we believe would help us establish even stronger audience relationships, and with which we would experiment if we continued The Host HQ.
Leveraging events for more than self-promotion
We’ve learned how much local communities matter to hosts. We want to attend neighborhood street festivals to connect with these communities. But we also know hosts are bombarded with people peddling their own wares. Rather than simply promoting our own brand, we want to show hosts how we can provide value for them. This might involve “pop-up” marketing services like shooting professional headshots and video ads or connecting them with local businesses that provide deals for Airbnb guests.
Keeping the focus on hosts
Above all, our research has taught us that hosts deeply trust one another when it comes to advice on things like optimizing operations and dealing with guests. In future newsletters, we would mention both new subscribers and particularly successful hosts (who elect to be featured). We hope this will not only build community but also give hosts more sources to turn to for advice.
