by Sergey Aliokhin, Marketing Manager at andcards
Nowadays any kind of online business experiences tough competition within the niche. And, if you have just picked out this path, you might be a bit confused and don’t know how to move your business forward.
Nevertheless, you will have to adapt to the game searching for ways to crush your competitors and dominate the niche.
The coworking business industry is not an exception as well. Moreover, since we can observe the rapid growth of coworking spaces around the globe, it becomes harder to fight for your place in the sun.
Likely, if you are armed with an actionable marketing funnel, your chances to conquer a market grow.
In this guide, you will find how to build a coworking marketing funnel and be ahead of your competitors.
- The Essence of a Marketing Funnel
Any kind of business is built through a certain scheme that is called a marketing funnel. It has four basic stages that follow one another in a strict order. Visually, a sales funnel looks like this:
The funnel has this “stacked-down” shape for a good reason. During the first stage (“awareness”) people get familiar with the type of product or service you offer. Afterwards, the next three stages predetermine how many people will be interested in your business and how many will buy your product eventually.
Sounds pretty easy, right?
Unfortunately, even though the funnel looks simple, it is a complicated process that contains lots of pitfalls to accomplish a goal.
- Marketing Funnel Model for Coworking Business
Let’s start with an example.
You have launched a coworking space in New York. New York is a huge megapolis, where thousands of people work as freelancers and would be interested to work in your coworking space.
You need to promote your coworking space somehow. And the best way is to make people find your coworking space on Google.
You will have to build a website, optimize it and rank for specific keywords that would help you get customers. Just for the record, a query “coworking space new york” has 250 searches per month according to Ahrefs:
Imagine that you managed to rank in the top 10 on Google for the keyword I have just mentioned. Let it be that 200 out of 250 visitors come to your website. It means that you have 200 potential leads. Maybe 50 people will convert into members of your coworking space. And 40 will retain after one month of testing it. If you offer some discounts, you might increase the chance to save the number of new residents.
As you can see, people drop off at each stage of the funnel. Your aim is to make sure that there are no huge leaks during the first three stages.
- Coworking Space Brand Awareness
Awareness is the first stage of any marketing funnel. It is your chance to present your coworking space brand to your target audience.
There are different ways to spread a word or two about your coworking brand. You can visit niche-related conferences, participate in podcasts, etc. However, if you have a website, your arsenal for attracting new leads enlarges.
Keep in mind that your main idea should be to help your potential customers solve their problems. If your brand can help your target audience, this target audience will convert into your loyal customers.
And that is when marketing will help you out.
- Content marketing
Content is your tool that aims to help your target audience find the answers to the questions they have. You know for sure that the first place where people go to find the answer to the problem is Google.
Did you know that Google’s search engine market share is 92.96%? It is approximately 5.6 billion searches per day.
It won’t be hard to conclude that Google should be your top-priority platform for promoting your coworking space brand.
How to move your content marketing in the right direction:
- Start with a keyword research
Keyword research is the first step you must accomplish and find out those queries that your target audience uses to find your coworking space. Based on this research you should produce content. There are lots of tools that can help you with keyword research and one of the most powerful is Ahrefs Keywords Explorer.
- Prepare a content plan for your blog
You must create a proper content plan for each month that would let you publish posts regularly.
- Optimize your content
If you want to see your content rank well on Google, you must optimize it accordingly. Remember that search engine optimization helps your content drive more traffic to your website that would bring more potential leads. To get a better idea of how to optimize content, you can review useful SEO copywriting practices that will help you a lot.
- Guest posting
Don’t forget to contribute across other niche-related blogs. This strategy has many positive aspects like sharing useful information with the community, introducing your brand, and getting a backlink in return.
- Link building
Link building is another important strategy in terms of SEO that you must never forget about. You need to acquire more backlinks to your website because each link is a kind of a “vote” for your content, service or brand in general. The more “votes” you have, the more trust you will get from Google. And you will be rewarded with top positions in SERP eventually.
Link building is quite challenging to do. Hence, don’t hesitate to review a link building guide created specifically for the coworking niche.
- Social media activity
Social media channels are closely connected to the community within the niche. Since the coworking industry is all about providing people with the spaces for work, you must lead an active life across social channels. Engage with your community on Facebook, notify with the new updates on Twitter, build business connections on LinkedIn.
- Stir Up an Interest in Your Coworking Space
Let’s say some of your potential customers have heard about your coworking space. Now your vector is to hold those prospects that seem promising.
Try to think exactly how you would do if you were exploring a coworking space for yourself. If you stumble upon a coworking brand name, you will need to get more additional information about it. You go to Google and start typing related queries like “best coworking space in new york”, “top coworking spaces in new york”, etc.
You, as a coworking space owner, must be sure that your coworking space could be found with all these queries. That’s why you must promote your brand online and be a real coworking business expert.
To make these things happen, you should:
- Participate in podcasts and give interviews
If you are a business professional, you might notice that many entrepreneurs, business owners, and niche experts could be seen participating in different podcasts. Being a guest at some podcast gives you a great opportunity to share your expertise with the audience and present your brand in the best possible way. The same approach could be taken for giving an interview on various online sources. This strategy uplifts the interest in your brand drastically.
- YouTube
YouTube is the second largest search engine after Google. People spend hours watching videos there. You can benefit from this platform a lot. Create a channel where you could upload videos of your awesome coworking space demonstrating its unique amenities. Remember that a picture is worth a thousand words.
- Create an Engagement Applying Useful Services
The marketing funnel forces you to have an ace up your sleeve. When your potential customer considers the next step whether to choose your coworking space or not, you must demonstrate some extra-benefits that you could offer.
It is up to you what additional services your coworking space offers but make sure they fit your residents perfectly.
Obviously, you must take care of implementing coworking software that would make the process of managing a coworking space easier. Don’t forget about the security of your coworking. Hence, using a smart lock system is a must thing.
Plus, your residents might need relaxed printing. And you, as a coworking space operator, must manage user access to printing. To combine both aspects you can use a cloud printing solution.
The list of possible “perks” can be filled with whatever you want. But you must think first if these services would be useful for your customers.
- Don’t Forget about Call-to-Action
The final stage of any marketing funnel is conversion. Yes, you should persuade your hot lead to pay for your service. It doesn’t mean that you must literally ask for money. You must give bullet-proof arguments to choose your service.
It leads you to direct communication with the customers. This communication must follow in both passive and active ways.
The passive way includes a standard email newsletter where you notify about content updates on your blog, events at your coworking space, and other news.
The active way includes personal outreach where you reach out to a person and try to build a conversation that would be focused on a win-win basis. This type of outreach allows you to understand your customer’s personal needs and try to meet them. It is highly appreciated by everyone.
To sum up, don’t miss the chance to get your job done and you will see that the funnel works.
Summary
You have just got familiar with building a marketing funnel for your coworking business. It is not an easy task. It requires an in-depth understanding of each step involved and how to move through the process properly.
Don’t rush by adding some complicated strategies to your funnel right from the beginning. Start small and move ahead step-by-step.
When your marketing funnel starts to show good results, you can of course diversify your strategies.
I hope you find this helpful and if you too have some useful pieces of advice, please, do let me know. You can find me on Twitter @sergey_aliokhin or Linkedin linkedin.com/in/sergey-aliokhin-660b7312a