Spacefully delivers coworking leads everyday

Coworking space owners and operators wear a ridiculous number of hats. At any one time, they could be:

• Onboarding new members
• Ordering more supplies
• Meeting with local businesses
• Facilitating networking events
• Monitoring CDC protocols

You know what’s also on that list? Digital marketing and SEO. That isn’t often among the highest and best use of a coworking space operator’s time, but it’s something that still needs doing. It might get pushed onto other team members or someone’s niece who knows HTML and is really good with Instagram.

Enter Spacefully. The Vancouver-based web design company has worked with a variety of businesses over the last decade and a half, but narrowed their focus to coworking spaces in the last few years. And they’ve watched their coworking clients breathe a sigh of relief once they start streamlining digital marketing and optimizing web sites.

“We really responded to the spirit of entrepreneurship behind these coworking businesses,” shared Spacefully President Reuben Lau. “It’s a fun industry. And these folks know the importance of digital marketing to help their business grow, but often don’t have the time or knowledge to execute it well.”

Lau and the Spacefully team start by helping coworking spaces with the ultimate goal: attract more members. 

“It doesn’t matter how great your web site is if people can’t find you,” he said. “So we start with data, and collect every source we can for a full picture of the user journey. We want you to be able to identify where your best leads come from and repeat that again and again. Everything should be measured and tracked.” 

More often than not, that means using Google Analytics. “We see a lot of mistakes made over and over,” Lau shared. Those include:

1. Events not configured. Events can be triggered to help record various interactions with your website. For example, an event would measure how many people click on your member portal, download a PDF, or use your search bar.
2. Goals not configured. Goals indicate actions or events which are tied to the goals of your organization. Attributing goals back to the source of traffic helps you to understand what marketing efforts are fruitful. For example, you may learn that the majority of your Tour Booking Forms are generated from your organic search rankings. Measuring where success comes from makes it easier to replicate and/or amplify.
3. Connection to Google Search Console not configured. This often gets overlooked as it's a bit buried within Analytics, but by enabling this, you'll be able to see what search terms users use on Google to find your space.

When kicking off a new project, the Spacefully team starts with their Blueprint Strategy.

“This is a paid engagement in order to dive deep and get a thorough understanding of the space, as well as the organizational goals to map out specific strategies as well as areas of  improvement,” Lau explained.

Here are some website technical areas of improvement which they often find:

1. Page speeds are slow. 

“While not a new topic, this is one that is constantly changing in terms of best practices.  It's a good idea to keep an eye on this metric, not only for the homepage, but also key interior pages to ensure a user-friendly experience. A common culprit to this is the overuse of WordPress plugins.”
  

1. Heading structure (H1, H2, H3, etc...) are misapplied.

“We commonly find that headings are used throughout webpages as a styling tool, rather than to emphasize certain keywords or phrases. This can miscommunicate to Google what the page is actually about, and de-emphasize actual page content.”

1. Sitemap content needs culling.

“Sitemaps are a great way to communicate the number of pages and hierarchy of content on your website. We find that, especially with pre-made WordPress Themes, that there is a lot of default content that comes with the theme and is full of filler content.  These need to be removed, and deindexed, so that Google does not interpret them as a part of your website.”  

If you need to fill your sales pipeline and drive new members quickly, Lau had this to share: “One of our quickest and most popular strategies is to create Search Engine Marketing Funnels.  Not only does this get you to the top of Google quickly, but more importantly we customize our sales funnels which are proven to deliver leads to fill your sales pipeline.“

Want to see some of Spacefully’s work in the wild? Check out Studio Workspace, HAYVN, and Vida Coworking.