By Carsten Foertsch – Tuesday, 28 March 2023
Struggling to increase the revenue of your coworking space? In this article, our guest author shares five effective hacks to help maximize profits and keep your business running smoothly.
From optimizing the sales funnel and leveraging partnerships to utilizing digital marketing tools, in this guest post you’ll find the proven strategies needed to improve customer acquisition and retention while achieving revenue growth in no time.
The article was written by Helga Moreno, an experienced marketer, and flexible workstyle fan running Coworking Smarts blog and praising coworking software that makes both using and managing coworking spaces a breeze. You can follow her on LinkedIn to see if there’s an interest match.
1. Optimize Your Sales Funnel
A sales funnel is a journey that potential customers go through as they become aware of your coworking space, consider becoming members, and eventually sign up. Here are the commonly-accepted stages of a sales funnel:
- Awareness: Potential customers become aware of your coworking brand and its products. Activities in this stage include online advertising, content marketing, and search engine optimization (SEO).
“Approximately 96% of visitors that come to your website are not ready to buy—but they may be willing to provide contact information in exchange for valuable content.”—Website and SEO for Lead Generation eBook by Adobe
- Interest: Potential customers express interest in your brand and services by signing up for email newsletters or free trials and following you on social media. Activities in this stage include website design optimized for conversions, email campaigns, and customer referrals.
- Evaluation: Potential customers evaluate whether your hub is right for them by researching more about it. Activities in this stage include providing detailed product information and customer reviews and offering free demos or consultations.
- Purchase: If the potential customer decides your flex space meets their needs, they will make a purchase. Activities in this stage include secure payment options, discounts and promotions to increase conversion rate along with post-purchase follow-up emails.
By optimizing each phase of the sales funnel according to its purpose—from awareness to purchase—you can maximize revenue while keeping customer satisfaction high.
Pro tip: To tackle potential leakage in your funnel, identify and measure every stage carefully. Awareness can be measured through website visitors. Interest by the number of people signing up for email newsletters or filling any other of your lead capture forms. Click-through rate for emails to detect excessive leakage in consideration stages, and conversion by the number of people purchasing memberships.
Review these numbers with previous months for critical insights into any difficulties (seasonality, decreased traffic from channels, keyword ranking fluctuations). This way, you can detect and address issues quickly before they become a major problem in your funnel.
2. Offer a Variety of Membership Levels
If you offer several membership plans at your coworking space, you can use this as an opportunity to experiment and explore new options for your customers. Try offering different services in each of the tiers, as this will appeal to different people’s needs. For example, some clients may prefer unlimited coffee, while others might appreciate access to meeting rooms or unlimited printing.
Pro tip: By offering credit bundles sold inside your coworking app, you can easily upsell your members. When members run out of credits that are included in their monthly plan, they just purchase an extra package and continue to spend them on the additional products you offer, be these your branded mugs, office necessities or meeting rooms.
Collect feedback from your customers and potential members: ask them about the services they would like to be included in each tier, conduct surveys, and make notes of their needs. This way, you’ll be able to adjust the membership plans according to what people actually need and offer additional perks that they can choose and pay for separately.
3. Run Virtual and Offline Events
Boosting sales online or offline can be both successful, but there’s an even better way to do it. As a coworking space owner, the goal should be to ensure that people in the area are aware of what you offer and how they can take advantage of it. There may be people in the vicinity who still need to consider changing up their favorite sofa for a flex workspace, but you have all the chances to sway their decision and convince them to give it a go.
“When we were just brand new and just starting to fill up, our events attracted a thousand people to LAMB in six months.”—says Lindsay Hedenskog, CEO and COO of LAMB—“The thing about the events is that it is such a powerful way for us to send our message without saying it out. Our event schedule says so much about who we are and what we do.”
Hosting networking events for existing and potential members is one great way to foster collaborations as well as get your workspace more recognition and love. You can also organize non-profit nights with charities, workshops featuring industry leaders such as CMOs and CROs, or local influencers.
Additionally, cooperating with local businesses can be beneficial too. Permit them to showcase their products and services like coffee, pastries, and snacks for participants during your events. By doing this, your coworking space has the chance of becoming a community hub and further establishing its presence.
4. Leverage Partnerships with Local Celebs
Looking for local celebrities to join your coworking space for free is a great way to boost sales and gain visibility. Invite them with a sweet letter and let them host their meetings in your space. They’ll get access to a great space and you will receive traffic, helping your business grow!
If you can find a big influencer that wants to organize an event with media coverage and other famous guests, you will be full of bookings over a night. This strategy is the perfect way to increase popularity while giving people the opportunity to experience your workspace firsthand and rate it properly.
5. Utilize Digital Marketing Tools
For coworking space owners looking to monetize their business, digital marketing tools provide a great way to reach prospective members. To make sure that customers are aware of your flexible workspace, use a mix of marketing techniques, such as SEO, social media, paid ad retargeting, and more.
- For local visibility, create and keep current your Google My Business listing with information about your workspace services and location. Also, consider listing your space on one or more global coworking space directory sites such as Coworker, Nomad List, and more.
“More initiatives such as Connected Hubs, which is a one-stop-shop for hubs throughout Ireland, will appear in 2023. These resources will provide a vehicle for individual hubs to come together under a shared identity to maximize the economic opportunity for remote working, entrepreneurs, local businesses, and the community the hub serves. A key goal of this network is to facilitate more people working closer to their communities.” — Stephen Carolan, Connected Hubs
- Develop an email list for sending out regular value-added content to both prospective and current members. Part of this should include automation for responding quickly to initial inquiries.
- If you have an existing website that isn’t doing everything you need it to do, focus on developing high-quality content and attractive design elements like virtual property tours or online schedulers.
- Social media gives you the opportunity to engage with potential customers through value-added and exciting content, especially videos!
- Pay-per-click platforms can be used for those searching in your local market, helping them discover where you are based more easily.
- Finally, proper SEO optimization (using optimization tools such as Frase or Clearscope) will help you rank better in searches than larger competitors who may have a better online presence than yours. This, combined with creating a well-designed blog full of relevant content, will help draw attention to your coworking space.
Wind up
Coworking spaces are quickly becoming the go-to for many entrepreneurs and freelancers. With the right hacks, any coworking space can boost its revenue by getting more customers and increasing engagement from existing ones. From signing deals with partners to leveraging networking events, these top five hacks will help get you on your way to higher revenue.
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Guest posts represent the views of their authors.
