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title: "How to do Organic Discovery like Airbnb"
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published_at: "2021-04-22T19:57:54+00:00"
modified_at: "2025-05-30T16:23:47+00:00"
url: "https://buyapowa.positivedesign.dev/blog/how-to-do-organic-discovery-like-airbnb/"
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excerpt: "If you’ve been following our blog, hopefully, you didn’t miss our call to action to brands to stop forever paying the GAFA Tax and look to the example of: Airbnb style Organic Discovery. This was inspired by the momentous news..."
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  - "airbnb"
  - "Best Practice"
  - "organic discovery"
  - "Referral Program"
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# How to do Organic Discovery like Airbnb

Last Modified: 30/05/2025  
**21 min read**

[https://buyapowa.positivedesign.dev/blog/author/peter-cunningham/](https://buyapowa.positivedesign.dev/blog/author/peter-cunningham/)

**Author:**  
[Peter Cunningham](https://buyapowa.positivedesign.dev/blog/author/peter-cunningham/)
- Marketing Director of Buyapowa

If you’ve been following our blog, hopefully, you didn’t miss our call to action to brands to stop forever paying the GAFA Tax and look to the example of: [Airbnb style Organic Discovery](https://buyapowa.positivedesign.dev/blog/stop-paying-the-google-and-facebook-tax/)
.

This was inspired by the momentous news that Airbnb released in the run-up to its successful IPO in December 2020, which raised US$3.5bn and [valued it at US$86bn](https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/10/airbnb-ipo-abnb-starts-trading-on-the-nasdaq.html)
 (almost equal to the combined valuations of Marriott, Hilton and Expedia). But if you didn’t hear, **Airbnb announced that it got fully 91% of all of its web traffic without paying a single penny to Google, Amazon, Facebook or Apple (‘GAFA’)**. And even today this remains the case as Airbnb’s co-founder and CEO, Brian Chesky recently revealed that the brand [still gets “the majority, 90% of our traffic is coming to us through direct or unpaid traffic](https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2024/05/08/airbnb-abnb-q1-2024-earnings-call-transcript/)
.”

How it achieved this was through what it termed as **Organic Discovery**, in other words by using organic channels, such as word-of-mouth and strong brand recognition, to be less reliant on performance marketing like paid search, paid social or affiliate marketing.

Our challenge to our readers is: **if Airbnb can do this, why can’t you?**

Now, when faced with this challenge, you would be forgiven for thinking that this is just another buzzword or fad that will pass. That somehow it doesn’t apply to you and that there was something so specific or unusual about Airbnb that you couldn’t possibly apply it to your business. Or maybe you think that this would be nice, but the devil is in the detail and it would be impossibly hard to do. Or maybe you feel it’s too late and that you’ve missed that boat, and if only you had started out on this journey five years ago, and so on.

But instead of accepting these excuses, we have decided to dispel these doubts and write a guide on how you can develop and implement an Organic Discovery model for your business.

# Part 1:

## **The basic elements of Organic Discovery**

As part of the Organic Discovery implementation plan, we will consider each of:

- Search Engine Optimization
- User-Generated Content
- Ratings and Reviews
- Social Media Outreach
- Influencer Marketing
- Referral Marketing
- Enlisting employees, partners and other influencers
- How to put it all together

Now, at first, you might think that there is little new with some or all of these elements. But that would be to miss the point of how Airbnb got Organic Discovery to work so well for them and lead to hundreds of thousands of more listings and bookings on their platform. It was not just by carefully implementing each of these elements, but by getting them to work together and reinforce each other that they achieved this.

## **Before we start**

This may seem obvious, but the first part of Organic Discovery is down to you and your team to do what Airbnb did, and deliver a world-class and unique customer experience that’s worth sharing. One that merits five-star reviews, provides great photo and video opportunities, and that your brand advocates will happily recommend and refer. Because if your product or service isn’t great, if your deliveries are late, your terms and conditions unfair, and your customer service unhelpful, then Organic Discovery won’t help you, but will more likely hinder your business. Instead, people will give one-star reviews, post comments, pictures and videos of how bad their experience was, bad mouth you on social media and refuse to recommend or refer you to friends and family.

**Hear from Michael Goodbody, former VP, Head of Marketing & Comms at Robinhood, why having a great product your customers actually want to talk about is key to success with word of mouth marketing:**

Why you need a great product | Robinhood"The way that you think ab...

Why you need a great product | Robinhood

"The way that you think about referrals, for the most part, if you want it to be affordable and economical, and a good part of your marketing mix, is you have to have an incredible product that people want to talk about. And then you're just giving them a little bit more of an incentive to tell their friends and family about it.

Actually before I joined Wise, I used to use Wise. I lived in Hong Kong and was moving backwards and forwards between Hong Kong and Switzerland, I used it a lot and I would tell people about it

Because it was a really useful product that I was using. It's a way of being like "Hey I like this product, I want to tell my friends, there's a bunch of people I know that that could benefit from the product, and if I do it now I'll benefit."

At the end of the day referrals only work [if you're] making sure that you understand that your product, in and of itself, is something that people want to recommend.

I think that's a really important part of it because if you don't have that, the cost of getting somebody to make the recommendation goes exponentially higher.

It just becomes a financial transaction."

  
 So the first stop on your Organic Discovery strategy is to audit every element of your customer user journey. You should talk to customers, from the first touchpoint, through renewals and even churn. Use point of sale and mobile surveys, in-store interviews, NPS surveys, focus groups, secret shopper journeys, monitor social media comments and any other technique to get feedback. And then relentlessly seek to improve your offering and measure how your customers perceive that change by getting more feedback.

> “If you want [word of mouth] to be affordable and economical… you have to have an incredible product that people want to talk about. And then you’re just giving them a little bit more of an incentive to tell their friends and family about it….because if you don’t have that…the cost of getting somebody to make the recommendation goes exponentially higher. [And] it just becomes a financial transaction.
>  **Michael Goodbody, former VP, Head of Marketing & Comms – Robinhood**

Only once you’ve delivered on your customer promise will Organic Discovery work to deliver a large volume of high-value free web traffic to your website or app.

## **Understand what you want to achieve**

So assuming you’ve now verified that your customers do believe you have a great product or service, now you need to determine what your goal is before you start putting the pieces together.

In Airbnb’s case, they wanted more listings from homeowners and more bookings from guests, which meant that they combined host and guest profiles with two-way reviews and background checks, invested in professional quality imagery for listings, and set up a referral program for both hosts and guests, paying cash to hosts and travel credits to guests for successful referrals. All of these elements reinforced each other and improved the overall experience for both hosts and guests.

So in the context of your own business, and whether you want to drive sales, signups, listings or subscriptions, you need to think about how each element of your Organic Discovery strategy will lead towards your desired outcomes. How do they help people find you, understand the value you offer, trust you, have a great experience and not only want to come back again but want to add value to the ecosystem by adding content, leaving reviews and referring you to friends and colleagues?

And finally, you’ll want to measure this to see where your most valuable traffic came from and how each of these elements helped achieve your goals.

So let’s get started.

## **Search engine optimization (SEO)**

In some ways, SEO might not seem anything new to you, but it’s a crucial part of your Organic Discovery strategy. Because, quite simply, you can have a great product or service with great reviews, lots of user-generated content and testimonials, but if no-one can find it or link it back to your business, then you are unlikely to benefit from it. So ensuring that you have optimized your website for search engines and mobile search underlies all the other parts of an Organic Discovery strategy.

Remember that [68% of all online experiences](https://blucactus.blue/seo-stats/)
 begin with a search engine and a whopping [81% of consumers search the internet](https://junto.digital/blog/seo-stats/)
 before making a large purchase. So you will want to make sure that when potential customers search, they find your content or content about you, both on and off your site. That means, making sure your site and content are indexed by all relevant search engines, and not just Google and Bing but local search engines like Yandex, Baidu and Naver (if relevant) and relevant [vertical search engines](https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2020/11/13/the-rise-of-vertical-search-engines/)
, as well as image and video search engines.

The basics include submitting sitemaps to search engines and creating listings, and ensuring that your content is properly described and intelligible to search engines with optimized page titles and headings, alt-tags and metadata. You also need to ensure that your content loads quickly, is optimized for mobile, and it’s not blocked by robots.txt files or hidden behind password-protected areas.

Once you ensure your website is indexed and there are no barriers to it being listed and shared, you then need to create great content that answers the web searchers’ questions and anticipates and overcomes their objections and doubts about doing business with you. To do this well, you will need to really understand your customers’ needs, your customer personas and their user journeys, something that your research into ensuring that your product or service experience is truly great will have equipped you for. Then think about how you make that content available across different media such as website text, images, videos, and so forth.

You also need to use carefully targeted keywords associated with that content that reflects the way your customers think about these questions and how they would type their queries into a search engine. Ideally, you would create an asset for each unique search query. But while you will want to target niche keyphrases and localized versions (like ‘apartment near Broadway, Manhattan’) as well as the most searched phrases, you need to consider that search engines like Google are very good at stemming or understanding that [words like ‘buys’, ‘buying’ and ‘bought’ are variations of the word ‘buy’](https://yoast.com/what-is-keyword-stemming/)
. So you don’t need to create lots of similar versions of that content with minor text differences and you should be aware of the fact that duplicate content can actually harm your performance in search engine results pages (SERPS).

Crucial to an Organic Discovery strategy is to ensure that the content that is created about you is found on your website or links to your website. Ideally, the SEO benefit of *reviews on your website* will accrue to your website and not the review consolidator. Also any images related to your business on Instagram or Pinterest or videos on Youtube or DailyMotion should refer to your brand and, if possible, link back to your website or social pages. In particular, where you have implemented a referral program, that should be easy to find in a web search for ‘[brand] refer’ and easy to find on your website, ideally prominently positioned in your website navigation.

SEO is a wide and constantly evolving field, and you may be well advised to hire a specialist or an agency. But if you do, make sure that SEO is considered all throughout your Organic Discovery Strategy.

# Part 2

## **User-generated content**

Unless you want to turn yourself into a publisher and hire hundreds (if not thousands) of content creators, and a quick look at the financial pages would suggest that might not be a great business to get into at the moment, there will be a limit to the amount of content you can create yourself. That is one of the reasons why User Generated Content, or UGC, is a fundamental part of an Organic Discovery Strategy. Quite simply, your customers can create much more content than you ever can, whether in online blogs, as social media content, videos, images, and customer reviews and they can distribute across many more venues than you can ever reach.

The importance of UGC is underlined by research that shows that [79% of consumers](https://ugc101.com/blog/the-impact-of-user-generated-content-on-the-modern-market/)
 regard user-generated content as highly influential in making purchase decisions, [95% of customers will read reviews](https://learn.g2.com/customer-reviews-statistics)
 before buying and that user-generated content garners [73% more positive comments](https://www.iab.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/IAB-UGC-for-Marketing-and-Advertising-FINAL-May-2019-1.pdf)
 across social platforms than traditional ads.

While the quality of UGC can vary and, if we are truthful, much is poor quality, its strength lies in its credibility. Because these are real customers talking about real experiences they had with your product or service, and research shows that [consumers don’t trust ads or celebrity endorsements](https://buyapowa.positivedesign.dev/blog/88-of-consumers-trust-word-of-mouth/)
 as much as they trust consumer opinions. And perversely, the fact that the quality is not great may make the UGC even more credible, whereas an ultra-slick studio-quality production from a ‘customer’ might make you think you are being gamed by an advertising agency.

The persuasion power of UGC lies not just in the fact that the content has been created by people like you and me, but that the volume of content often means you can find content from someone that’s ‘just like you’ when you are not a typical customer. For example, if you are a single parent, dog owner with reduced mobility and a severe dust allergy, the reviews and photos of the average Airbnb guest might not resonate. But when you consider that as of 30 September 2020, Airbnb guests and hosts had written more than 430 million cumulative reviews, you can imagine that there will be someone that closely resembles your particular, unique situation.

Although much UGC may not be of great quality, undoubtedly some is. We all [carry a supercomputer in our pockets](https://www.visualcapitalist.com/the-supercomputer-in-your-pocket/)
 capable of capturing great photos and videos, and that is before we consider the effect of action cams like GoPro and the ubiquity of online editing software. And remember that amateur and professional design creatives all use your products and services too, so sometimes you might be surprised by the quality of what will be created by your customers. So you may even want to acquire the rights to use some of the content in your above-the-line marketing campaigns.

Another advantage of UGC is that with so many people creating content, they may be able to cover something you would never be able to capture. In the case of Airbnb, it might be someone who snapped the view at sunset from the jacuzzi on the balcony of the flat in Autumn. And with the wisdom of the crowd effect, it is possible that your customer can identify great reasons to use your product or service or alternative uses for it that you never thought of.

So how do you get your customers to create and share UGC?

Well, for a start, you could ask them for it across all consumer touchpoints, such as in post-purchase thank you emails or newsletters. You can make it clear that UGC would be welcomed. Perhaps you would be willing to give a prize for the best content submitted or the most liked content. The reality is, whether you know it or not, your customers are probably already creating UGC about you. So you should try and get them to share it with you or tag or link to you when they share on third-party platforms. Alternatively, you could link to platforms where such content is already being created and shared, comment on posts, thank posters etc.

If you want your customers to post their UGC on your properties, whether your website or social media pages, you need to think about what incentive you could offer them. Could it be access to professional editing tools, could it be an audience for their content, a badge as an expert, or some other benefit that’s valuable to them?

And so whether you decide to do this yourself or work with companies that specialize in UGC, like Olapic, Bazaarvoice, Curalate or Feefo, you need to think about how that content can help you achieve your goals.

## **Reviews and Testimonials**

A specific category of UGC that merits its own section is ratings, reviews and testimonials. Whereas UGC can be anything, such as a photo or video without any particular comment, customer reviews are where you invite your customers to share their honest feedback on what it’s like to be your customer, and to rate their experience with your brand.

In the case of Airbnb, two-way verified customer reviews played a key role in allowing millions of strangers to trust one another. That trust allowed people to accept staying in the home of a complete stranger, sometimes with that stranger being present at the time, or letting a complete stranger stay in their own home, despite the risks of theft, damage or other anti-social behavior.

Today, consumers have come to expect reviews, with [nine in ten consumers reporting that they read reviews before purchasing](https://business.trustpilot.com/guides-reports/build-trusted-brand/the-critical-role-of-reviews-in-internet-trust#downloadreport)
, and [3 in 4 consumers saying that they trust the reviews that they read online](https://www.oberlo.com/blog/online-review-statistics)
. As well as being able to see the overall ratings, and often detailed ratings on different elements of the product or service and individual comments, the number of reviews serves the purpose of letting us know that many people have used this service. As a result, ratings and reviews help affirm a potential customer’s decision to buy or not to buy by acting as social proof, particularly where those ratings and reviews can be surfaced at key moments in the buying journey.

As well as generating trust ratings and reviews, they can also drive traffic to your business, either from a third-party site that hosts the review or, provided your review solution allows you to benefit from the SEO, direct to your site. Again, where the reviews are not on your site, you would perhaps want to make sure that there is a link to your website.

As with other types of UGC, if you don’t actively involve yourself with reviews, it is likely that reviews will start accumulating somewhere without your consent, like on Google Reviews. You can choose to work with a leading reviews provider like Bazaarvoice, PowerReviews, TrustPilot or Feefo, or simply claim your profile on Google Reviews or Yelp. While some brands might fear that ratings and reviews will open them to attacks from disgruntled customers, as pointed out in [Part One](https://buyapowa.positivedesign.dev/blog/how-to-do-organic-discovery-like-airbnb-part-1/)
, if you have a unique and first-class customer experience, then your task is simply to get enough of your happy customers to leave reviews. When you consider that Airbnb gathered over 430 million cumulative reviews, and they had an excellent service, you can understand how negative voices were drowned by the waves of positivity.

Negative reviews also serve two or three useful purposes. Firstly, research shows that customers don’t trust reviews that [looked manicured](https://www.netimperative.com/2020/07/23/building-consumer-trust-relies-on-transparent-open-reviews/)
, so the presence of some negative reviews makes the positive reviews look more credible. It also allows you the ability to show empathy with someone that had a bad experience, by responding and trying to solve the issue. Not only will solving the problem help convince others that you care about your customers but you could even turn a detractor into a [brand advocate](https://buyapowa.positivedesign.dev/blog/how-to-turn-customers-into-brand-advocates/)
. And finally, this is a great channel to learn about problems customers might have, so you can investigate and fix them.

As with other UGC, you should ask for reviews and make customers feel that their reviews will be welcomed, whether positive or negative. You can use tactics like triggered messages that prompt customers or users to leave a review at the most opportune time, like after purchase, use, renewal or referral. A key aspect that Airbnb understood well was how reviews added value to the whole community and the value of reviews convinced guests who benefited from reviews to add value back into the ecosystem by reviewing themselves. Hosts who saw the value of reviews tried harder to offer outstanding value and to ask for reviews and so on. If you can create a positive cycle like this, then you are on the right track.

## **Social Media**

With close to [3 billion monthly users on Facebook](https://backlinko.com/facebook-users)
, [over 2.4 billion monthly users on Instagram](https://www.statista.com/statistics/325587/instagram-global-age-group/)
, [540 million monthly users on X (formerly Twitter)](https://famewall.io/statistics/twitter-stats/)
, and [over 1.35 billion monthly users on WeChat](https://www.statista.com/statistics/255778/number-of-active-wechat-messenger-accounts/)
, social media should be an important part of your Organic Discovery plan. Particularly, as [more than half of social media users use social media platforms to research products and services](https://www.oberlo.ca/blog/social-media-marketing-statistics)
.

As with ratings and reviews, the opportunity lies not just in promoting your content and UGC on social media, but also in taking part in and listening to the conversations about your brand and customers’ experiences with you. Listening affords you a great opportunity to take the pulse of your customer base, and learn if you need to make any changes to improve things. You can also use surveys and polls, and analyze sentiment and engagement metrics and even send direct messages (DMs) to people participating in social media exchanges to gather information.

Obviously social media can greatly extend the reach of your content or UGC. You can influence how much of this content is shared by adding prominent sharing buttons on all content on your site, particularly for visual content like photos and videos. Where customers have shared UGC about your business and made a nice comment, you can show appreciation, and troubleshoot problems with those who are unhappy. Using hashtags can also ensure that your brand is associated with content that goes viral, and making use of relevant and trending hashtags can boost the reach of content, although you should make sure you use hashtags that fit with your brand and goals.

Of course, you can and should also promote your referral and review programs on social media.

# Part 3

So now we come to the last part of this article on how to create and implement [an Organic Discovery strategy like Airbnb](https://buyapowa.positivedesign.dev/blog/stop-paying-the-google-and-facebook-tax/)
. In Part One, we talked about how to start with the basics by ensuring your customer experience really is first-class and is something that people would want to talk about, and making sure your SEO is in order. In Part Two, we discussed getting your customers to create content and leave reviews and share those on social. Now we discuss [Influencers](https://buyapowa.positivedesign.dev/solutions/influencer-ambassador-marketing/)
**,**[Referral Programs](https://buyapowa.positivedesign.dev/solutions/referral-programs/)
**and**[Employees and Partners](https://buyapowa.positivedesign.dev/solutions/partnership-marketing/)
, and how to tie all these elements together.

## **Influencers**

Now unfortunately influencer marketing isn’t typically considered to be an unpaid marketing strategy, but it is definitely a way to get your message out to a large audience of potential customers without paying anything to Google, Amazon, Facebook or Apple (GAFA). So while it can be an effective way to get content created by or co-created with an influencer in front of a large, attentive and targeted audience, it often isn’t a strategy for those of us with limited marketing budgets. Particularly when you consider that a mega influence like [Kylie Jenner](https://www.foxbusiness.com/money/5-highest-paid-social-influencers)
 can charge upwards of $1m per post (yes you read that right: *per* post!).

But that notwithstanding, as we highlighted [in this post](https://buyapowa.positivedesign.dev/blog/army-of-lovers/)
 and illustrate below, influencers come in all shapes and sizes from the mega influencers like the Kardashians of the world, through to macro and micro-influencers, all the way down to nano influencers. In fact, everyone is probably an influencer for someone, even if only a close group of family and friends. And, of course, many influencers have been known to write the odd post or fire off the odd tweet about a product or service they really enjoyed, without any expectation of payment. After all, recommending something you actually do like and use every now and again is good for authenticity and credibility, even for macro-influencers!

So if you are already running an influencer marketing campaign, then you should coordinate that with your Organic Discovery strategy by making UGC available to influencers. But given that micro and nano influencers often have more influence given their proximity to, and authenticity and credibility with, their followers, why not engage with them to encourage them to help spread your content with trackable links allowing you to reward them for each action they drive.

**Hear from Buyapowa’s Referral Experts on how potential referrers or brand advocates often self identify, giving you the opportunity to reach out and ask for a referral:**

Referral marketing: How to identify potential referrers?Gideon Las...

Referral marketing: How to identify potential referrers?

Gideon Lask: "Gents, I have a question and I'm hoping you are just the two guys, coincidentally to answer it for me. I'm a brand, how do I identify the people who are going to refer?"

Peter Cunningham: "Well for a start, a lot of those people self-identify. So people leave positive reviews on review sites, they like your social media, they stand up for you in social media. They repeat buy and they give you high NPS scores, so they're actually saying 'I do love you', so you should be reaching out to those people and saying 'you said you love us why don't you share that love with your friends?"

Robin Bresnark: "Yeah, that's my favorite thing about NPS. People spend a fortune on NPS, and you're literally asking people the question 'would you refer your friends?' And then they don't ask people with high NPS scores to actually do that. It's bonkers completely."

Gideon Lask: "Such a wasted opportunity. And we have lovely integrations with NPS programs now that do exactly that and lo and behold people that give eight nines and tens for NPS have a far higher propensity to refer. Who would have thought it? Thanks guys."

  
## **A Referral Program**

A key part of Airbnb’s marketing mix was a referral program, one for hosts and another for guests (although the guest referral program currently seems live only in mainland China, Germany, Japan, Italy, and Mexico). And that makes perfect sense, after all when you have created a unique and world-class customer experience, you have NPS surveys saying a high percentage of your customer base would recommend you to friends, you have lots of positive ratings and reviews, etc., then it only makes sense to give those customers an easy way to refer you to their friends.

In their pre-IPO prospectus, Airbnb talked about “putting in place the infrastructure” that supports unpaid channels and that is precisely what a referral program is. It is the element that turns all the other parts of the Organic Discovery strategy into sales. With [research](https://buyapowa.positivedesign.dev/blog/88-of-consumers-trust-word-of-mouth/)
 consistently showing that consumers trust ‘recommendations from people [they] know’ more than any other marketing message channel, referral leverages the authenticity of the recommendation of an actual customer combined with the relationship and trustworthiness of the referrer vis-a-vis a known friend.

[Research from the Keller Institute](https://buyapowa.positivedesign.dev/blog/this-is-how-you-maximize-the-benefits-of-your-referral-program/)
 explained that the effectiveness of referrals is partly down to better matching and partly due to social enrichment. Better matching is simply that a referred-in customer is much more likely to be a good fit for your brand than an average website visitor. This is due to the fact that friends of a good customer tend to share a similar customer persona and that customers tend to search among their network for people they know would appreciate the offer. Further, social enrichment comes from the fact that your customers know your products and services very well and can make precise recommendations.

And recent research from [Rachel Gershon of UC San Diego and Zhenling Jiang of the University of Pennsylvania](https://buyapowa.positivedesign.dev/blog/referral-contagion/)
 found that referred-in customers were 32% more valuable based on their increased spending alone. However, by failing to take into account that referred-in customers are themselves more likely to refer in new customers, we risk underestimating their value by a third. Buyapowa’s own research found that [eight out of ten customers expect to be able to refer their favorite brands](https://labs.buyapowa.com/referral-codebreakers-report)
 and [95% claim to have referred a friend in the past year](https://labs.buyapowa.com/reward-revolution-report)
.

> “People leave positive reviews on review sites. They like your social media. They stand up for you in social media. They repeat buy. And they give you high NPS scores…. So you should be reaching out.. saying: ‘why don’t you share that love with your friends’”
>  **Peter Cunningham,****Director of Marketing –****Buyapowa**

By offering [rewards](https://buyapowa.positivedesign.dev/blog/referral-rewards-and-incentives/)
 to referrers for successful referrals, brands can not only thank customers for their efforts in bringing a new customer but, according to research from [Yale and UC Berkeley](https://buyapowa.positivedesign.dev/blog/what-yale-university-and-uc-berkeley-can-teach-you-about-word-of-mouth-marketing/)
, overcome the psychological barriers to referring, namely the risk that the referral turns out to be a bad one. This is more powerful when the reward for the referral, as in the case of Airbnb, is linked to further use of the service, in this case with account credit. The incentive to refer can also be further increased if you add clever psychological tools like tiered rewards, gamification and triggers to get customers referring again and again.

Interestingly, Airbnb realized early on that the primary motivation of hosts for listing their properties was to earn money, and so they offered cash rewards to hosts instead of account credit. So your referral program should be capable of supporting a variety of different rewards. Finally, we should not neglect the importance of incentives for the referred-in friend, as highlighted by [research from Harvard](https://buyapowa.positivedesign.dev/blog/importance-of-friend-incentives-in-referrals/)
, as the power of a trusted recommendation is only magnified by an exclusive offer that you can access thanks to your friend’s recommendation.

## **Employees, Partners and other Influencers**

An often overlooked part of Organic Discovery is supercharging it by reaching out beyond your customers to use the same tactics and tools with your employees, your affiliates and your business partners.

Your employees are some of the most credible and motivated influencers you have at your disposal. Not only do they know your products or services in great detail, but by choosing to work with you they have already shown their dedication to your success. And their recommendation is going to be so much more convincing if they themselves are avid users of your product or service. But remember that not only can they advocate for you one to one with friends and family, with [the average Facebook user having 338 friends](https://www.brandwatch.com/blog/facebook-statistics/#:~:text=Worldwide%2C%2026.3%25%20of%20the%20online,live%20with%20someone%20who%20does.)
 and the [average Twitter user being reportedly followed by 707 others](https://www.brandwatch.com/blog/twitter-stats-and-statistics/)
 they can become an important part of your social outreach strategy.

While affiliates are not strictly part of an Organic Discovery strategy, as [affiliate marketing](https://buyapowa.positivedesign.dev/solutions/affiliate-programs/)
 is, by definition, performance marketing, to the extent that you are working with affiliates, you should coordinate with your Organic Discovery efforts. Affiliates can use UGC, such as images and reviews, to increase conversions and you can use your referral marketing software to extend the reach of affiliates and add gamified rewards for higher performance.

Your business partners are also another important audience that can be connected to your Organic Discovery strategy. They may already work with the kind of people who would be your ideal customers and can offer an ideal co-marketing opportunity, particularly if your product or service is complementary with theirs. Of course, if you really offer a great product or service at a competitive price, then your partners should have no problem recommending you to their own customer base even if you do not provide something complementary to their own offering. And you can [scale the reach of your partners’ audience](https://buyapowa.positivedesign.dev/solutions/partnership-marketing/)
 using referral marketing with smart psychological incentives.

## **Bringing it all together as a Unified Organic Discovery Strategy**

Up until now, we could forgive you if you said ‘tell me something new!” Each of the elements above are well-known elements of many good marketing strategies. However, that would be to miss the essential element of how you need to knit these together so that they are complementary and become self-reinforcing as part of an Organic Discovery ecosystem, including:

- Making sure that you have a great product or service is the basis for customers to have a great experience that they would want to share and become [brand advocates or brand ambassadors](https://buyapowa.positivedesign.dev/blog/how-to-turn-customers-into-brand-advocates/) for you. But also by having ratings and reviews, using surveys, and monitoring sentiment on social media and the percentage of customers that go on to refer you, you have a continuous feedback loop from customers and the inputs to further improve your product or service.
- By ensuring that your website and owned properties are optimized for web search via SEO, not only will more users see your content and UGC, they will also be more likely to find the links to leave a review, post content or refer a friend. And having great content and UGC that has longer dwell times and is shared and liked frequently will help convince Google, Bing and other search engines that your content is good quality that should be surfaced in search results.
- By having UGC content on and off your website you will not only increase brand awareness and traffic, but also provide social proof, thereby using positive word-of-mouth to increase conversion rates, and thus making all of your traffic more cost-effective.
- A user who posted images or videos should be a good candidate to give a review, and a customer who posted a glowing review or gave a high NPS score is signaling that they are a potential [brand advocate or brand ambassador](https://buyapowa.positivedesign.dev/blog/how-to-turn-customers-into-brand-advocates/) who can refer you to family and friends. Conversely, someone who refers a lot of new customers should be an ideal candidate to leave a review, etc. Thus, the elements can and should reinforce one another.
- The essential element that Airbnb managed to create was an ecosystem where both sides of the transaction, the host and the guests, clearly benefit from the reviews and UGC and see that by contributing themselves they not only improve the service for themselves but for everybody. If you can get to this stage then you have an Organic Discovery machine.
- Finally, the main takeaway from what Airbnb has done should be that all this won’t happen by chance and you need to have a coherent and well-executed strategy for Organic Discovery to be successful.

We appreciate that this has been a long and in-depth article and if you made it this far and would like to talk about Organic Discovery and how to put the elements together, we would [love to talk](https://buyapowa.positivedesign.dev/about-us/)
, even over a virtual coffee.

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