Remarkable Content with Ian Faison Vrbo: How to Position Your Brand To Advertise What Your Competitors Can't
If you feel like you’re struggling to differentiate your company from a sea saturated with similar brands, this is the episode for you.
You want to market your brand to make it pop, yet it can feel overwhelming trying to nail down a winning idea for your next campaign. That’s because out of 100 factors, you might have 99 in common with your competitors. But that one factor that your competitors don't have, THAT is the one you market.
On this episode of Remarkable, we’re relaxing to the soft, soothing music of the Vrbo ad campaign, “Only Your People.” We’re chatting about how the campaign helped Vrbo, a brand that’s been around for nearly three decades, to grab audience attention as a major competitor to Airbnb.
Vrbo repositioned itself through a single message: only your people will be at the rental. It’s responding to a pain point specific to Airbnb customers who don’t want to share a space with the host or other guests. And the campaign is getting talked about in marketing circles everywhere. So follow along as we talk about how you, too, can position your brand as a major name in your industry.
About Corporate Bro
Vrbo is a vacation rental company similar to Airbnb. So homeowners list their properties directly on the Vrbo site; beach houses, mountain cabins, treehouses, villas, boats, and more.
It started in 1995 as an independent company acquired by HomeAway in 2006, and then again in 2015 by Expedia Group.
The name V-R-B-O is an acronym for Vacation Rentals by Owner.
VRBO is Airbnb's biggest competitor with over 2 million listings and vacation rentals in more than 190 countries. Their website sees over 15.9 million unique visitors per month, and listings are posted on the Expedia site, which sees 730 million unique visitors per month.
The big difference between Vrbo and Airbnb is that Vrbo only offers entire properties for rent. So renters have the whole place to themselves, whereas on Airbnb, renters have the option of house shares. This means they may be renting a room within a house and the owner is there at the same time. Because of this, Vrbo tends to attract larger, higher-end property rentals and cater to groups of people, whether whole families or friends, or simply folks with higher budgets.
What B2B Companies Can Learn From Vrbo:
- Study your buyers to find their pain points and create messaging for each of them. This shows your audience that you’re listening to them and that their opinions matter. And it helps build trust! An example of this is Wix, whose ad, “The Power of Wix Infrastructure,” reassures users their websites are backed by four data centers and tens of thousands of servers. In other words, there’s basically no way their site could go down. This is different from other hosting providers, where a site might run on one dedicated server, increasing the risk of the site crashing. They also have an ad called “Security’s On Us,” highlighting how they offer enterprise-grade security that’s fully managed for users. It has lots of bells and whistles to prevent hackers and bugs from gaining access to the site. So users won’t have to worry about either hackers or their site crashing, which may happen with other hosting sites.
- Identify what your differentiating feature is from your competitors and create a campaign around it. Run it as a single-feature ad on a key position. The simple, straight-forward messaging and clear benefit of your brand over others will resonate with your target audience. Ian says, “the point of positioning is to focus on the one thing that your competitor can't. A great positioning campaign like this allows there to be no wiggle room at all. You cannot get around this. If [customers] believe that this one feature is so important, then you're guaranteed to earn their business.” CRM Platform Monday.com ran a campaign that’s a great example of this. They have an ad that shows up in Google search results that says, “CRM Without the Frustration - No-Code CRM Software.” The ad acknowledges and validates a pain point of other CRM platforms - that they are hard to learn how to use - and offers a solution.
Quotes
*”Vrbo is just an overall, generally more predictable experience. You know what you're going to get. You don't know what you're going to get with Airbnb. And for some people, that is the delight of going to Airbnb, it’s like there is a little bit of serendipity there. Whereas for Vrbo, nope, you're not paying for serendipity.” - Ian Faison
*“It's really understanding the pain points as well. You really have to study the buyer’s thought process to understand the super common pain points.” - Colin Stamps
*”[Monday.com] took all the pain points and they were like, ‘Let's create messaging for each of these to stand out from the other search results that are currently showing up for our competitors.’” - Anagha Das
Time Stamps
[1:29] Tell me more about Vrbo
[3:51] About the "Only Your People" ad campaign
[6:33] How Vrbo differentiates itself from Airbnb with new ad campaign
[11:48] The importance of messaging to make your brand stand out from competitors
[14:42] How to identify customer pinpoints to market to
[15:00] How to choose a single feature to market
[21:54] B2B examples of single feature ads that recognize customer pain points
Links
Read April Dunford’s book on product positioning, Obviously Awesome
Check out Monday.com and their positioning against other CRMs
About Remarkable!
Remarkable! is created by the team at Caspian Studios, the premier B2B Podcast-as-a-Service company. Caspian creates both non-fiction and fiction series for B2B companies. If you want a fiction series check out our new offering - The Business Thriller - Hollywood style storytelling for B2B. Learn more at CaspianStudios.com.
In today’s episode, you heard from Ian Faison (CEO of Caspian Studios), Dane Eckerle (Head of Development), Colin Stamps (Podcast Launch Manager), Anagha Das (B2B Content Marketing Manager), and Meredith O’Neil (Senior Producer). Remarkable was produced this week by Meredith O’Neil, mixed by Scott Goodrich, and our theme song is “Solomon” by FALAK.
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