Airbnb-Friendly Apartments Attract New Renter Demand

The Situation

Equity Residential partnered with Airbnb to allow residents to host their apartments part-time through the Airbnb-friendly program. This gave Equity’s residents the opportunity to earn extra money from their space, creating a unique value-add for Equity’s communities.

To promote this new offering, Airbnb tested several marketing strategies. At the start of the partnership, they marketed to Equity prospects and residents through Airbnb-driven email campaigns and other partner marketing efforts.

The Airbnb team decided to expand this strategy and test out digital advertising as a channel to increase awareness of the program among consumers and attract new residents interested and likely to become a host on Airbnb.

To do this, they partnered with Conversion Logix, digital advertising experts in the multifamily industry, to develop and manage a unique multichannel advertising campaign for 24 properties in the Airbnb/Equity portfolio.

The Solution

The Conversion Logix team targeted local apartment seekers with Display, Facebook, and Instagram advertising campaigns for each of the 24 properties. For a select group of six properties in the Denver and San Francisco markets, we tested Instagram Stories and YouTube video ads to bolster marketing efforts in two of this portfolio’s focus markets.

The Conversion Logix team targeted local apartment seekers with Display, Facebook, and Instagram advertising campaigns for each of the 24 properties. For a select group of six properties in the Denver and San Francisco markets, we tested Instagram Stories and YouTube video ads to bolster marketing efforts in two of this portfolio’s focus markets.

The Strategy

We tested multiple media mixes, ad creatives, targeting strategies, and budgets to determine the optimal advertising strategy for this unique campaign.

The Media Mix Strategy

By diversifying each property’s budget across multiple high-impact platforms, we were able to deliver multiple impressions per prospect, helping the community stay top-of-mind throughout a prospect’s leasing journey.

We launched Display, Facebook and Instagram ad campaigns with a $834 monthly budget per community from November to June. These ads generated 13.64M ad impressions across the 24 properties.

In June, Airbnb and Equity sought out additional advertising strategies they could test for six target communities in focus markets (Denver and San Francisco).

Our digital marketing experts selected these strategies because they excel at delivering scale, enable us to leverage both location targeting and intent-to-rent signals to refine audience targeting, and provide highly visual formats for displaying image and video creative. These characteristics made these strategies ideal for building crosschannel top-of-the-funnel awareness of a new market offering.

The Creative Strategy

At the core of every ad in the campaign, we focused on the property’s unique selling point of being able to host on Airbnb while you are away. Each ad also featured the location and brand name of the unique properties to ensure increased relevance and brand recall among renters. We also featured a curated set of property visuals based on amenities and features valued by renters in each of the key markets in the campaign.

The Targeting Strategy

Our targeting strategy focused on prospects located within a 15+ mile radius around each community. After over a decade of experience running ads in the multifamily housing market, we’ve found that for most properties, targeting local renters within an EHOfriendly radius of the property yields the most engaged traffic per ad dollar spent when marketing across Display, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.

We leverage audience signals that reflect intent to rent (ex: recent apartment search activity) to ensure the prospects located within this radius are in-market for an apartment.

Landing Page Strategy

In addition to our campaigns, Airbnb provided propertyspecific landing pages with CTAs on each of Equity’s property sites, which played a key role in generating high-intent leads and increasing renters’ intent to host on Airbnb.