A mentor once told me, “Earn people’s respect with your fundamentals, then put them in awe with your flash.”
The advice is solid and it applies to a lot of things in life and business, including marketing a coworking space.
It’s better to have a strong marketing foundation to work from—to be consistent and steady—than to rely on the occasional flash-in-the-pan success.
Marketing Fundamentals for Coworking Spaces
So what are the marketing fundamentals and why do they matter?
Marketing fundamentals matter because throwing random marketing collateral onto your blog, social media, video, podcast, is a waste of your time.
Random marketing also tends to land flat with people.
If you don’t know why you’re posting something, why should anyone else care?
Here are four marketing fundamentals to strengthen your content, increase your engagement, and clarify your strategy.
1. Know Your Goal
What do you want a piece of marketing collateral, content or campaign to accomplish?
What is your goal?
Perhaps you’re focused on booking meeting rooms, or scheduling tours, or growing your virtual membership, or raising brand awareness in your market.
Clarify this before you begin thinking about your next post, livestream, social media graphic or ad.
2. Know Your Audience
Who is your target audience?
Do you have a member persona? Are you working to attract new markets? Is this piece of marketing aligned with the audience you’d like to engage?
Remember: We don’t market to everyone.
Clarify who you want to reach and create content specifically for them.
3. Understand Your Audience
It’s one thing to define your audience as freelancers, remote workers, or small teams.
It’s another to deeply understand their needs, challenges, frustrations, vision and day-to-day reality.
Take the time to learn about the people you’d like to reach.
Go beyond demographic data and get to know them.
Remember, marketing is not about you, your fabulous amenities, your super-fast wifi, or even your COVID-conscious workspace. It’s about how you help and serve your members.
4. Call it Out
What’s your call to action (CTA)?
What do you want people to do once they’ve engaged with your post, video, podcast episode, Instagram Story or Reel, newsletter?
Clarify your CTA in the planning stages of each piece of marketing.
You have people’s attention, they’re picking up what you’re laying down, how can you bring them further into your brand community?
Sometimes the CTA is something simple, such as asking people to tag a friend in a post; sometimes it’s a bigger ask, such as asking them to book a tour or call you to learn more about an available office.
Sometimes you won’t have a CTA. But make sure that’s a conscious decision—not the default mode because you just want to hit publish, check that item off your to-do list, and get on with your day.
Fundamentals, executed strategically and consistently, will bring you more sustained success than a random flash of marketing glory.
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