Challenge
When Tom Krones, founder of Host Tools, first launched the tool, he was a traveler and a short-term rental host looking for ways to save time in his business. Host Tools has been around since 2016, but it was only in 2020 that Tom decided to outsource marketing and intentionally grow his inbound channels which, until then, had only been word-of-mouth. That's how we started working together. Tom is a developer and never was interested in being someone's employee. So he designed his own life. His tool came initially as a response to his own needs as a host (as it turns out, so do a lot of vacation rental host tools). He uploaded to Github as an open-source tool for other hosts to use and contribute as they needed. Originally it was just an automated Airbnb messaging tool, but now it's that and a pricing tool and a channel manager. After a while and not much in terms of contributions, Tom decided to take the tool, brand and monetize it, and turn it into an additional source of income.
Solution
Content strategy step 1: Deep customer research We always start our content marketing strategies with deep customer research. It doesn't matter what keywords have high volume in your niche if they aren't relevant to the people using your tool. We knew they were small-scale hosts, but we wanted to understand: What their day-to-day looked like before they started using the tool What kind of hosts they were (How many listings? Were they full-time hosts or did they have other employment? Did they want to scale or just keep regular income coming in?) Where online they searched for other solutions What their short-, mid- and long-term goals were in their business How they use the tool and what their favorite features were We did a few phone interviews with available customers and sent an email survey to the rest. Based on that information, we understood what their challenges were and what kind of content could help them. Step 2: Mapping out the content strategy Now that we knew what kind of content would be most helpful to his users, we needed to map out how we can find the sweet spot between building trust and growing his business (getting more paid users). We build out our first topic cluster and pillar page which was about Automating your Airbnb rental. Each section would have its own dedicated sub-topic that would link back to this one. Thus, this began to build his website's topical authority around automation, which was both things his customers were asking about and what his tool provides. The strategy was fully SEO-focused, and the conversion was to start a free trial. Free trial users have the option to opt-in to the mailing list, from where we also email the blog posts. As we started emailing them out, his customers were very happy. One customer, who had been a free trial user and churned before converting to paid, said he enjoyed the blog posts so much that he decided to start using Host Tools again. Step 3: Creating graphics to get more image SERPs and improve UX We create graphics for most of our blog posts. There are a few reasons for this: It provides additional opportunities for ranking in the SERP image section It helps the user visually understand the lesson of the blog post It improves brand image and the overall reading experience. Almost all of Host Tool's blog posts includes some sort of graphic. Step 3: Increasing free trial to paid conversions Most automated tools take a bit of a learning curve, and even though Host Tools is easy to use, it still helps to walk people through it. When we started working together, Tom's initial email sequence just welcomed people to the tool and invited them to add their Airbnb account. We created an onboarding series with a guide (including screenshots) about how to use the tool and set themselves up for success. This helps people who are easily frustrated by new technologies take action and invest themselves in the tool. Since we created this onboarding sequence, free trial to paid users increased by 46%. Step 4: Link building and content promotion Search engine optimization success is a combination of well-written and well-researched content, on-page optimization, and off-page optimization. Since Host Tools currently has no social profiles, all of our off-page efforts are focused on link building. We believe the expert work should be left to the experts, so we work with a third-party link building provider if we aren't building links directly within our vacation rental network. We made sure the links came from relevant websites, no PBNs, and with a DA equal to or higher than Host Tools. We know that bad links can do more harm than good, so we vet each backlink to make sure it'll work toward the results we want, not against. With the combination of our weekly on-page blog posts and monthly guest blog posts elsewhere, we managed to double organic traffic.
Results
It now has thousands of users, mostly small-scale short-term rental hosts, who love to use it for its reliability and user-friendliness. Only a few months after we started working together, Host Tool's monthly traffic doubled, and conversions from free trial to paid increased by 46% compared to the last quarter.
Flying Cat Marketing
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