Article
CoSqrd has been around for 4 years (almost). It is always tricky to be a marketplace platform. On one side you need to keep your partners happy. On the other hand you need to keep your customers happy. The customer gets the best experience only when your partner delivers the goods. We have learnt a lot of things along the way, especially on how to brand yourself, how to give the right service to your customers and how to learn what your customers want. These learnings did not come easy. Some of them came from very costly mistakes.
When we approach a space partner for partnership, the first thing they ask me is how much business I can get from you. This is a good question but a very hard one to answer. We don't have a magic wand, but we do have some ideas of how to improve your chances of making more revenue. Many space partners listen to our advice but some don't and hence don't get the results that they desire. In the initial days of CoSqrd, it was more of a hunch but now we have data backing up our recommendations. We analyzed the piles of our booking data, ratings and feedback given by our customers to come up with the following recommendations on how you can get more business for your coworking space.
Photography photography photography 📸
Coming and working in a coworking space or conducting a meeting is all about getting the right experience for the money you pay. When you have to make a decision on which meeting room to choose or which office space to choose, we have seen that high quality photographs (and quantity) help in the decision making process.
With COVID, people also don't want to visit a lot of places before making a decision and hence use photographs to take their call.
We have seen that 3 or more high quality photographs of your space on an aggregator site increases your chances by 50% to land a booking or an enquiry compared to another similarly priced space that does not have quality photographs.
💡 Tip 1 : Don't forgot to include the photo of the face of your building. Many people want to know what to expect when they visit your place. Many times the facade of the building also helps them locate your space quickly.
💡 Tip 2 : You can get freelance photographers or hobbyists or even student photographers much less cost to take some really nice photographs. Remember this is an one-time investment.
Describe your space really well 📝
Work with your aggregator partner to best describe your space. Don't be too stingy with words. Take that effort to craft the best possible description of your space that makes your potential customer understand what value they would get from you. Your aggregator partners also get most of their leads from Google Searches. If your description is good then there are high chances that your space comes on search results.
Take a look at the search results on the left. The CoSqrd page for meeting spaces in Perungudi (one of the localities in Chennai) comes on the top. Following that is the listing page that CoSqrd has for a meeting room by Oyo.
Infact Oyo's own website comes below that only (and Oyo sure does have a much bigger marketing team than ours)!! This is because the Oyo team gave us nice photographs and description of their meeting room.
💡 Tip 1 : This is an one time effort to come up with the best description of your coworking space and the spaces within. Hire a content writer freelancer from sites like Upwork for Rs 350 a hour and get this done for less than Rs 1500. Each space description should be no less than 400 characters.
💡 Tip 2 : More and more percentages of the searches are local in nature when it comes to coworking spaces. People search for "coworking space in HSR Layout" or "coworking space near metro station". Hence use the locality name and take references to prominent landmarks nearby in your description.
Customer ratings ⭐️
Running a coworking space is no less than running a hospitality business.
Customer experience is prime. With dime a dozen choices for coworking space available in every city, why should the customer come to your place and keep coming back? You want to provide that warmth and the comfort that they deserve.
Good customer experience directly translates into better customer reviews and ratings. Customer reviews and ratings directly correlate to more business. Every aggregator platform asks the customer to rate the experience of their booking. So do we. This rating is another factor that customers use to decide between the choices they have.
Many aggregator platforms let you filter and / or sort the spaces based on the rating. Some of them (and very soon CoSqrd too) will by default show the spaces with higher ratings on the top. So ensure that you give a great experience to your customers. Don't forget to ask them to rate you on the app through which they booked your place.
💡 Tip : Google My Business (GMB) is getting more and more important as time passes. Google is using the photographs, description and the ratings from GMB to decide the search rankings. Ensure that you get your customers also to rate and write a review on GMB.
Fast fast fast ⚡️
Finally, we have also seen that being responsive to a lead or a booking drastically increases the chances of conversion. There are at least 10 popular aggregator sites in India and plenty of coworking spaces around that are competing for the share of the pie. The winning formula to beat competition be it the online world or the offline world is being responsive.
30 mins seems to be the magic number. If you can respond to a lead or a booking within 30 mins the chances of conversion are 80% higher than if you respond within 1 hour. This means that you and your space manager should be wired in from your laptop and your mobile to quickly attend to a customer.
Coworking industry is having a recovery post-COVID. If you have survived through the two waves then kudos to your resolve. You have already done much of the hard work. Now is the time to focus on the things that increase the discoverability of your business through your own website, Google Maps and through aggregator platforms. The bigger players in the industry are already starting to pump in a lot of money in ads. Your best chance of making the best of it and even beating the competition is to take care of the points mentioned above and ensure that your presence on all aggregator platforms is nothing short of best.
