How the engagement funnel drives our content strategy
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.
In the last few weeks, our team has focused on user engagement and content strategy. Our user interviews and market research have shown us that Chicago Airbnb hosts are motivated primarily by a desire to optimize their businesses; they trust advice from other hosts over other sources; they are short on time and not on money; they don’t view other hosts as competitors and are generally supportive of the host community.
With this understanding, we build our content strategy around the engagement funnel — a framework for mapping out the customer journey. By following these chains of relevance, we see our work from the audience’s point of view and improve as needed.
What is the engagement funnel?
The engagement funnel maps out the cognitive and behavioral process that our users, or Airbnb hosts, go through when searching for a service to fulfill their needs. We follow the Awareness, Consideration, Conversion and Retention model to form our product from hosts’ point of view, build our content strategy by stepping into hosts’ shoes, and eventually turn leads into loyal users.
How the funnel works
Awareness identifies the uppermost stage when potential users become aware of our existence. To introduce our media platform to potential users, we use social media such as Facebook groups and our page to advertise our content and build publicity. In addition to market research and actively reaching potential users through social media campaigns, we also use search engine optimization (SEO) tricks so users can discover us more easily on their own.
Once we have users’ attention, we want to build interest. During the consideration stage, users tend to develop increasingly favorable views toward one brand over another. To boost our reader base, we continue to identify hosts’ needs so we can address the most frequently asked questions and provide answers around their concerns.
Based on our user interviews, we developed an initial round of story ideas. Knowing that some hosts have had unpleasant encounters with guests, we provided hosts with simple tips to minimize conflicts. As the Shared Housing Ordinance left many hosts in confusion, we walked them through Chicago’s vacation-rental history and registration process. We also offered our audience — who are not necessarily hosts — practical advice such as how entrepreneurs get creative with goods and services to capitalize on the short-term vacation rental ecosystem, and how photographers or designers use Airbnb to find new business opportunities.
As our content becomes more targeted to represent what our service stands for, we enter the next stage — conversion. This stage continues with our user research and interviews. We want to provide our users with tailored content and information they need — we aim for content that is broadly educational but digestible. We provide our hosts with both “vegetables” and “candy” — longer stories that are thorough and in-depth as well as quick reads that are creative yet informative.
To hear what users say about us, we encourage host feedback and conduct surveys. All our stories end with an open-ended question to boost user engagement, while we also doled out $20 gift cards for hosts who participated in our telephone surveys. Our email newsletter is another relationship-building tool.
Moving forward, we have brainstormed story ideas in various formats for user retention. We plan on doing a Q&A on new aldermen’s stance on Airbnb, a deep dive into Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s short-term rental policies, and an analytic piece to gauge the economic impact of Airbnb — just to name a few.
What we keep in mind
With the vast reach of communications today, our goal is not to get everyone down the funnel, but the right people. Each stage is like a layer of filters — some users will not move beyond certain stages. In the modern marketing journey, assume if 100% of visitors become aware of the brand, only 50% will stay to learn and assess. If 10% stay, only 5% will become the core user base.
With that in mind, we aim to create a platform to build a relationship with our audience and maximize satisfaction for loyal users. Ultimately, we hope our audience will consider The Host HQ as a media outlet that provides reliable, accessible and useful information for optimizing their Airbnb business.
