Looking at the way that big businesses perform their marketing can give us an insight into how best to recreate it or alter it to fit our small business models. When we observe the ideas of the big businesses, we can see ways in which a scaled-down version could work for us. Here is a quick view into the marketing styles of Apple, Google and Airbnb.
Apple Marketing
The marketing of Apple is simplistic. They offer advertisements and marketing strategies that breathe a refreshing simplicity into the market. Their logo is known in households across the globe. When you see it on a product, you instantly know who makes it and the name of the brand.
Apple relies on the product selling itself through brand recognition rather than using clever marketing tactics or complex advertisements. They don’t need to list the features or prices of products because they know people will buy them no matter what. Apple has become a status symbol for the wealthy. You can almost guarantee that every middle class and above household in the UK owns at least one Apple product. It might not even be value for money. But it doesn’t matter, there are avid Apple fans across the world that are always itching to get their hands on the latest Apple products.
Google Marketing
Google became the most used western search engine pretty quickly and monopolized the market by developing features for people to use that they couldn’t elsewhere. Now it is using its marketing to gain a huge business following. Google releases new features, updates and algorithms on an almost constant basis. This is why the SEO community uses it so much. Their marketing is done through being the search engine that a business has to use to get the most following. Google even has a feature called Google Marketing or Google Analytics that help businesses with this.
Therefore, the business appears on Google more than another search engine and customers are more likely to look for it first on Google before anywhere else. Think about how often you use Google Maps as a guide to get somewhere. Now consider how often you use it to find a business. Businesses sign up for this for free from Google to improve their visibility online. You also might order food or track a package. Apps utilize the Google Maps software for their own businesses so that they can be more valuable to their customers.
Airbnb Marketing
Airbnb are open and honest about their marketing, they even post blogs about it online for customers and interested parties to read. They want to teach people how to become hosts and focus more on brand marketing than spending their money on performance marketing. This shift is because they reported that they saw little change in the amount of traffic that was driven to their site when the pandemic hit and they had to dramatically reduce their performance marketing budget overnight to compensate from the lack of guests.
Airbnb wants to teach more people to be hosts and open up their homes to holidaymakers wanting short breaks. This is a good business move at this time as more people are spending money on holidaying back at home in the UK, rather than going abroad. Once great way to let people know about your Airbnb service is to have a custom-made business card available for all guests at all times.
The marketing of these three companies is very different. However, it all works. The reason for this is that they have each spent a long time building up their brands and becoming the best business that they can be.
Jeanette Newton, article author