238. How One Coworking Brand 12x’d Their Inbound Marketing Leads in 2021 - A Coworking/Hubspot Case Study

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238. How One Coworking Brand 12x’d Their Inbound Marketing Leads in 2021 - A Coworking/Hubspot Case Study

00:00:00 Welcome. Thank you for joining us today. I have two guests with me today. They are dialing in from Richmond, Virginia, where one might think it's warm, but it's about 32 degrees outside. I have Rick Whittington who is president of Whittington Consulting and Caroline Prettyman, who is the senior account strategist at Whittington Consulting. And they're on the show today because they are going to share with us a case study from a project they worked on with a Coworking brand that is located in Virginia and Rick,

00:00:32 if you're joining us on video, you can see that Rick is sitting in his office in the coworking space. You can tell it's beautifully designed and he's got some great natural light and Caroline is exercising her choice about where to work and she is at home today. And thank you both for joining me. It's great to have you. I'm excited to dive into some insights from your case study.

00:00:54 It's Great to be here, Jamie. Thank you. Yes. Thanks for having us. Yeah. So before we kinda dive in, share a little bit about what your company does, who you typically serve, what type of projects you work on, and then we can get into this specific case study. Yeah. So Wilmington consulting is a digital marketing agency.

00:01:17 We really focus on digital. We were founded about 15 years ago, so we've got a lot of great history and now I've been through two different downturns and it's really interesting to see how businesses have survived and fought through that period of time. We do digital marketing and we do it with HubSpot. So HubSpot is our tool of choice when it comes to marketing.

00:01:38 And our point of view is really that we believe that companies should set their websites up as sales engines. So the website shouldn't just be a brochure that someone comes to a, it should really be something that generates leads for the business. And Jamie, as you mentioned, we're based in a coworking space. We have been for about three years here at Gather.

00:01:56 We love it here. We love the community. It's just a shame that we can't be here every day because of the pandemic. Yes. I could speak to that. Cause I'm home today. I have two small children, three and under, so as I would love to get to the coworking space as much as possible and look forward to the day can be more there than home Where someone else is making the coffee and yes,

00:02:22 no risk of interruptions. Yes. Rick, I'm curious, did you used to have an office for your team that was kind of, you know, your own office with your own long-term leases? Yeah, we did. We were in a 3000 square feet, downtown Richmond prior to this and we just, it was, it was too much space and it was getting really expensive to be downtown.

00:02:45 So we looked for a space that we could go to short term while we were negotiating another lease. And as it worked out that we fell through that we were negotiating, we needed somewhere to be, and this was back, I guess in 2018 and 29, we landed here and Coworking, we had private office space. We met in the conference rooms here and we're based here at Gather enrichment.

00:03:08 And so it's been, it's been a great space just to create some community and some friendships with others in business who are going through a lot of the same things that we are. So it's just good to have that community. Good. I love it. Our audience will, will appreciate your empathy for the coworking environment, so, okay. So you ended up doing a project with Gather.

00:03:31 Can you guys kind of frame up, how did that come about what were kind of the big picture sort of challenges or questions that you were approaching and trying to figure out and solve for? And then you can share a little bit about what the project looked like and some of the insights that might help the audience before you do that. I want to mention really quickly HubSpot is I think one of the most common CRM that are used by coworking space owners,

00:04:01 but I suspect that in some cases it's probably a little under utilized. It's one of those like lots of bells and whistles, and maybe this will, will inspire some folks to dive into it, but it is a fairly common CRM that's used and I have never used it. So if there are any sort of like one-on-one questions about anything, you talk about all interrupt,

00:04:20 but yeah. Start big picture and tell us the story. Well, big picture is that we were working here at Gather and the owners are pretty involved in the space. So they're here very, very often. And so I was in a conversation with someone one day and they overheard and were interested and they were going through a little bit of growing pains with a I'll call it a rudimentary CRM that they were using.

00:04:47 And if anyone's unfamiliar with CRM, that's customer relationship management software, that allows you to basically just keep tabs of who is coming into your sales process, who is, you know, signing up for memberships, who taking tours, all of that good stuff. It lets you report on a lot of the things that you're seeing. And so we really just started with the business analysis.

00:05:09 That's how we start everything. So, you know, we hear from businesses, you know, we're not using HubSpot like we should, or to its fullest extent, or we hear things like, you know, my social media is bad. I need to change that. Or my SEO is not great or my website's not great. I need to change that.

00:05:26 And I guess usually my question is why, why, why do you think that's the case? And so the only real way to know what's broken and what needs to be improved, at least I think so is a business analysis. And that's where we look at numbers. So if you think about it with Coworking, you know, the end goal is getting a member,

00:05:44 right? So a member in possibly a private office or a Coworking membership. So to get a member, you have to have a certain number of tours and to get a certain number of tours, you have to get a certain number of leads. And those leads could be website leads. They could be walk-ins, they could be phone calls, they could be referrals from other people,

00:06:04 other sources, but you have to have those leads. And to have those leads, you also have to have website visitors, right? So we can look at all of those numbers based on the current situation and where a company wants to be. So if coworking spaces, you know what we, you know, we have, you know, a hundred members today,

00:06:22 but we want 150 members by the end of the year, we can work backwards and figure out how many tours do you need to have in order to get those 150 members, how many leads do you need and how many website visitors do you need to do that? So we went through that process with gathering. They have, they had at the time a pretty aggressive growth goal.

00:06:41 So they wanted to open new locations. They were doing that already, but they needed to fill those locations and, and make a good use of that space. So we went through the business analysis process and we really identified that really everything needed to grow, right? So they were in really aggressive growth mode. I think the biggest challenge that they had at the time,

00:07:03 other than needing to fill that sales pipeline and push us, push as many prospects as possible into that sales pipeline is just to be able to manage their leads. So lead management, lead capture and things like that. So we really started that, that after that business analysis process was over, we said, let's go ahead and get a CRM in place so that your community managers,

00:07:25 as people walk in the door, as they call you, and as they fill out forms on the website, you can track those people through the progress of prospect to member. Then you have, you know, a full membership list inside of that CRM. And you can also start to report on some of those activities. So for example, if you,

00:07:46 if you have a multi location company, then you could say, you know, which, which location is getting the most leads, tours and members, and are there are other entities that are falling behind and how do we fix those things? So, so that's really the first step was that business analysis and understanding what needed to be done there before we looked at anything tactical before we looked at any kind of marketing or paid search or SEO or anything like that,

00:08:11 it's really just understanding where the problems exist and then getting a foundation in place so that when they start filling the pipeline with those visitors, those leads and those prospects, that they're able to track those through the process and not give up on them too early. Right. So I think we all know that with any business and we work with a lot of businesses and every business I've worked with,

00:08:34 you know, there's always sales opportunities through that process to be able to refine that process, to make sure you're following up with the people in an appropriate way, in a timely way so that you're not letting opportunities fall through the cracks. So from that point, we really started more of the marketing execution piece. And that's where Caroline comes in and can talk about some of the things that we did there too,

00:08:55 to not only drive traffic, but to help them to win tours and ultimately members. Yeah. And Rick, before Caroline jumps in, if she's next, I think you sort of pointed out an important aspect, which is like the marketing function has to work as an ecosystem, right? It's like if the leads come in, but your team doesn't have the processes or the tools to follow up with them and you have a leaky funnel,

00:09:25 then you've just wasted a lot of money getting those leads. Right. And so to look at the whole system, to your point, like, well, what are the goals? And then where are the holes is super important and Gather has seven locations now, is that right? That's right. Yeah. So they'll have some central resources probably that need to be able to jump in and you don't have to have seven locations to,

00:09:50 to require this, but to your point, like the transparency and the visibility. Cause I see some people like managing CRM, you know, with post-it notes, like, okay, I had a lead come in post-it note and you know, move them over. And you know, we're more simple tools, but the transparency and just like the rigor in that process because Caroline,

00:10:10 I don't, I don't want to jump the gun if this is part of your, but you mentioned a stat in our pre-chat about how long it can take to close a tour that comes in, which might be surprising. And it might lead you to sort of think like, well, I don't have a leaky funnel. It's just, people are gone,

00:10:27 they've disappeared. You know, so I don't need to follow up on them. That's kinda overdoing it, but Caroline, can you share your stat? Yeah. So the statistic that was really insightful to us is once you have these, you know, you do the business analysis, you invest in getting these foundational elements in place to be able to effectively track marketing that turns into sales and how folks perform and behaviors during the sales process.

00:10:56 Then we were able to uncover that the sales process for Coworking looked a lot different than even folks that are there day to day thought the sales process was, they thought, you know, they call and schedule a tour and they come in that day or maybe the next day. And then they, you know, take a couple of days to think about it and then they're signing a contract and then they're a member,

00:11:16 but we uncovered, it's a lot longer of a sales process. People might, especially when COVID hit people might be scheduling days, weeks out when they have a window to come in and see a space based on their schedule. And then they come in and see that space. And then they took on average 30 to 60 days from the time they came in and toured to the time,

00:11:42 including when a contract was sent until they signed that contract or they moved into a category, we call it closed one or closed lost until they made that decision of I'm going to join. No, I'm not going to join. So, you know, I know as a parent, to me knowing what averages is helpful. So providing that benchmark to other people in the industry might be helpful to know,

00:12:05 you know, it's, it might take 30 to 60 days and having those expectations set to, once you get that leap, closing that sale and knowing the communication touch points that need to be in place and automation to have that communication or tasks for your Community Manager that can support people as they move through that sales process. Yeah. And just knowing that to give up on that lead and having all those pieces in place.

00:12:35 Yeah. So, sorry, I probably jumped us into a detail, so I'll let, I'll let you guys go sort of back to the flow of, okay. Took a look at yeah. What are the goals opening new locations? I just did an episode recently and it was just covered like the idea of having a scorecard and the importance of knowing these numbers.

00:12:54 Because if you're an open a new location, if you need an investor, if you need like Ricky, you made the perfect point at the beginning, but the whole game is to fill up right. To get to occupancy. And so you, you need to know how long that's going to take and be able to predict that and figure out what levers to pull.

00:13:14 So you kind of started big picture on like, what's the goal we need to fill up. We need to get people in these seats and yeah. How w what can we do to make that move more quickly? Yeah, that's a great point. I mean, I think that, you know, it's, it's, it also helps to understand, you know,

00:13:32 we might be able to drive 328 needs, but is that going to, you know, is that, is that going to overdo it? Right. So the important thing here is to run those numbers first, because you can then understand what's broken and what you need to fix based on that. And also you can figure out, you know, what's realistic,

00:13:51 you know, if you need 500 members to make your numbers, but you only have space for 250, well, then that's a problem, right? So it helps to run those numbers first, before you look at any kind of tactics, you know, another point just is that, you know, a lot of companies, Coworking companies and other companies too,

00:14:09 they think mostly about marketing. They think about social media and SEO and their website, but it's important to look at the sales process as well, because you made the point earlier that just because you have a lead doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to convert. They're not going to always become a member. So you have to have a good sales process with some technology behind it.

00:14:32 So if a lead takes 30 to 60 days to close, then you should have some automated tasks that go out to your Community Manager at, you know, during that 30 to 60 days, to be able to remind them to follow up or send some helpful information, or send an event calendar or something like that along to you prospect, to increase their chances of sign up.

00:14:54 And so that's why the technology is so important in that as well, because marketing can only do so much, right. Marketing can get the leads, get the tours, but once you have the tours, it's the sales process that makes the difference and carrying that through and actually actualizing the revenue. I love that. You need both. All right. I'll let you guys kind of flow into some of the details that you wanted to share about the project.

00:15:22 Okay. So, yeah. Did we, I know there was a lot that Gather was doing right, but maybe Rick could, Rick could share because he was part of that early process. Well, you know, Gather they are excellent at community and building community. They're very intentional about getting members together. And obviously, you know, before the pandemic that was very easy to do,

00:15:49 and you would see tens of people or, or a lot more than that, even at the front, you know, just talking and connecting and meeting. And, you know, we've seen referral networks formed. We've seen all kinds of things just come from great member experience. And so, you know, there are cookie hours at three o'clock on a Wednesday there's after hours after hours events that happened there,

00:16:14 their member experience is just awesome. It's a really well-designed space, too. I think it stands out. There are other Coworking locations in town that are not Gather based. They're not, you know, there are other companies and those spaces just aren't designed as well. They are not staffed as well. So we have two locations or two, I'm sorry,

00:16:35 two community managers at each location. And that really also helps too. So if one is busy, someone else can pitch in, if a printer is busted or, you know, something is down, network's down. The favorite role of the Community Manager is dealing with the Sure. But yeah, the quality of the space really stands out. You know,

00:16:55 it's, it's really beautifully designed. It's a really, it's a professional space. We see, you know, we meet people here that are in professional industries. There are lawyers here, there are real estate agents here. There are insurance people here. There are software as a service people here. I mean, it's just, it's really kind of, you know,

00:17:15 it's all over the board in terms of industries. It's a very professional environment, you know, and, and for Gather, especially, it's just, they have multiple locations. And most of those locations, five of those locations, or four or five of those locations are in the city here and they're in different spaces, right. So, you know,

00:17:32 Caroline's located 30 minutes from where I live, but there's a location, you know, 10 minutes from her and 20 minutes from me, or even 15 minutes from me, depending on which way, which direction I travel. So it's, it's really easy if, you know, they're in the same city to be able to access any of the spaces. There's great conference room space,

00:17:51 there's phone, booth space, there's common areas. And in space like that, there's a mother's room and a wellness room. They have podcasts studios, which we actually were hoping to use today, but didn't get a chance to do that just and great events. So before COVID, and even, you know, honestly, during COVID and took, you know,

00:18:09 today all the way to today, there are events that occur and they occur safely obviously. And there are some protocols in place to encourage safety, but members never have a shortage of interaction. And I think that's, that's excellent. And the team of community managers is very good too. So, you know, there, there are people that care about it and you'll see the owners in the space every day.

00:18:30 We don't see the owners here as much, but we used to see them every day. So, you know, they're just, they're working out of a location that makes sense for them. And they're very visible. So that's why we like Gather. And that's what they do really well. From your perspective, if you're going to approach a project, it's good when the product did member experiences,

00:18:51 not the problem. Right. You can sort of work on the marketing and sales challenges. Yeah. We look for that. Yeah. So that was something that really stood out that gathered us really well. The problem wasn't the offering, it wasn't the service. It was through a business analysis, identifying, just making people aware, a lot of education in the Richmond area.

00:19:16 You know, we're about two hours from Northern Virginia, about two hours from Virginia Beach. And then they actually have regional locations and, you know, four in the Richmond area, three in Hampton roads area, which is closer to the beach. And we just, it's a newer concept to a lot of people out here. So it was a lot of just educating and the marketing,

00:19:36 once people get into the space, they're, you know, especially when, if they look at other coworking, once they know what Coworking is, you know, they're sold on Gather because of all those things. Rick mentioned that they do so well. So where we really felt like we could come in and make an impact was through there initially getting folks into the sales pipeline.

00:19:56 So with marketing and going, and the way we approached it was after the CRM implementation, after getting those foundational elements in place, really beefing up the content and thinking we did a content strategy, understanding the different personas, the different people that become customers, what those ideal customers look like, and what are they, what are they reading? What are they searching for with that HubSpot inbound methodology?

00:20:26 How do we get folks that are actively looking for this as a, a solution to a pain they're having? So it's not necessarily you're targeting those people that know what Coworking is and showing that Gather's a Coworking option, but also people that are working out of coffee shops are looking how to work out of their home. And maybe just don't know what this Coworking concept is.

00:20:49 So it's tailoring content to educate folks and meet people at multiple stages of their journey, whether they know what Coworking is, didn't know what Coworking was and become advocates to convert more. You know, word of mouth is always a, a good referral source. So that was our big push on the marketing front. And then getting those systems in place because Gather has this regional aspect that grew from when we started working with them with the CRM implementation and the content strategy,

00:21:20 they had three locations, I believe. And then they grew, you know, and this was pre COVID. And during the course of COVID have grown to seven locations. So they have, you know, a lot of regional management, like you mentioned needs to happen. Cause a lot of people, the value is compared to other co-working is you can go to,

00:21:41 you know, if I'm in this area of town one day, I can go to this location by more on the north side of town, I'll go to this location. So having those systems in place to, to show that and educate folks of the, the value of the multiple locations and then having those systems in place for leads to communicate, to making sure someone interested in this location goes to the right Community Manager to help them.

00:22:05 So that was our big focus in a pre COVID world when we started working with Gather. And then I'd love to episode you, you have recently on, you know, re new rules of engagement, what you sell so quickly when COVID hit our, what you sell had to pivot, right? Like many Coworking places, pre COVID. It was a lot of focus on,

00:22:31 you know, different areas of, of selling and Coworking. Maybe it's the open space or the multiple people in one office. And then it had to pivot to how we are selling a co-working membership or a private office. So that's what we really pivoted to in our approach in a post COVID world with testing different initiatives, implementing 3d virtual tours, which was a way to get people through the door and show them the beautiful space without them having to make that big commitment.

00:23:08 I mean, in a time of going in person, somewhere of having to get them in the door before you could really start selling them, we could sell them virtually through a virtual tours, seeing the space from the comfort of home. And then we utilize that as a lead generation opportunity in order to complete the virtual tour, you have to provide your email address and you had,

00:23:33 and then we had, we knew which location they were interested in. We had their contact information and we could implement our sales process virtually now and, and adapt some of that in-person selling virtually and do a hybrid method. So I'm curious about the results of that, because I've been thinking about that since Rick had showed me the, the 3d to where,

00:24:01 and I feel like most coworking space operators will get nervous about the option for the 3d tour, because they're like, no, no, no, no, no. I need to get them in the space because that's where the magic happens. So, you know, I need them to schedule an in-person tour and then putting it behind an email wall, I think also would make people go,

00:24:23 you know, what, if they don't do the tour because they don't want to give you their contact info. So I'd love to hear you talk about sort of the, you know, maybe the trade-offs that you've thought through and just how is that working? Yeah, Yeah. That is a trade-off right. Do we gate do we on gate? And there was hesitation to doing virtual tours,

00:24:44 pre COVID it's kind of initiative. We started pre COVID too, because it's still a valuable initiative. And then obviously having some, some COVID protocols and people being more resistant for a little while that sped up that effort and excitement about that. But it was a tougher sell at first because yeah, it does, there is nothing that replaces an in-person face-to-face opportunity for that Community Manager to connect to a lead.

00:25:16 But we found that, you know, the reason to gate it was so that we could have that sales opportunity. Right. So without that contact, email Address, phone number, yeah. And just creating a super low barrier to entry, like as little information that you need to reach out to them that makes it valuable lead, but a lower burden on the person.

00:25:42 So maybe you don't ask for a phone number because a lot of people are a little weary of giving phone numbers. I think people have to determine where their kind of line is, but we kind of, for those virtual tours, we kept it really simple. And just email, like not even first name, last name, like that was more for scheduling a tour and in-person tour.

00:26:03 But then we had that email to follow up with them. The community managers had a sales systems in place with HubSpot that once that conversion happened with HubSpot workflows, they met this criteria, then everything was automatically set for the Community Manager. So we moved a lot of that admin burden of, okay, well now I have to make this reminder for myself to do this and I have to send this email and I have to,

00:26:29 it there's, you know, automated emails that go out there's email sequences that you can customize. So it doesn't seem like a canned response that you have once you get a little more information from that week. And then there's automated tasks that get put on the Community Manager is kind of checklist for the day and HubSpot. So when they log in, they see,

00:26:49 you know, a lead that converted a week ago, okay. I have a touch point with them and this is the, you know, email that I'm going to send them. And they're, here's this template and here's these points of customization. Then I can look at their contact record, look at their notes from that tour and really make it personalized for them.

00:27:08 So that's kind of the, the beauty of having those systems in place, having a CRM and having that data all in one place. Hey, I just wanted to jump in really quickly before we continue with our discussion. If you're working on opening a co-working space, I want to invite you to join me for my free masterclass three behind the scenes secrets to opening a coworking space.

00:27:32 If you're working on opening a coworking space, I want to share the three decisions that I've seen successful operators make when they're creating their Coworking business. The masterclass is totally free. It's about an hour and includes some Q and a. If you'd like to join me, you can register at Everything Coworking dot com forward slash masterclass. If you already have a coworking space,

00:27:55 I want to make sure you know, about Community Manager, University, Community Manager, University is a training and development platform for community managers. And it can be for owner operators. It has content training resources, templates from day one to general manager. The platform includes many courses that cover the major buckets of the Community Manager role from community management, operations,

00:28:21 sales, and marketing, finance, and leadership. The content is laid out in a graduated learning path. So the Community Manager can identify what content is most relevant to them, depending on their experience and kind of jump in from there. We provide a live brand new training every single month for the Community Manager group. We also host a live Q and a call every single month so that the community managers can work through any challenges that they're having or opportunities get ideas from other community managers build their own peer network.

00:28:56 We also have a private slack group for the group. So if you're interested in learning more, you can go to Everything. Coworking dot com forward slash Community Manager. I'll say to that business owners are super protective of their time. And so if you can offer them a way to see a space from the comfort of their office or their home Without, I mean,

00:29:20 I just, I remember the pain of going and looking at so many different office spaces As you're taking time away from your clients and your team, and it's right. It feels like it costs you a lot to do that. And if you think about it right now with the pandemic New York city, half of the office space is sitting empty in New York city right now.

00:29:42 And people are companies have decided we're going to work remotely. And when, when this is all said and done, and people can really get together again and people feel a little bit more comfortable leaving their homes, coworking is set to explode, I think. And you're going to have people that want to go to a Coworking set of their offices remote, but they still want to go somewhere to work.

00:30:05 And they want to do that in a cost efficient way. If you can give them a way to look at that during their Workday and prove a business case to their boss, that you know what, maybe, maybe you can go get an office for two days a week, or maybe they're paying for it on their own and want to do that post pandemic.

00:30:23 You're giving them a way to do that conveniently. And that convenience is priceless for someone who's actually looking for office space. Yeah. That's such an important point. Sometimes we sort of forget to, we focus on how we want the process to go and forget to put ourselves in same thing with your 60 day close stat. You know, people will ask me,

00:30:44 well, how often should I follow up? And I say the same thing you just described. Okay. Pretend it's you, you know, you're busy. The kids have done a simple, you got, you're managing a jillion things. So think of it as project managing this person right. Until they tell you, no, I don't want your space just assume they need help.

00:31:03 You know, reminding them, Hey, don't forget. You're looking for office space and, you know, connecting the fit and all those good things. But sometimes people are just busy and distracted. And so right. If you don't manage the lead, then they might sort of give up or, or pay attention to the, to the company that is like project managing them.

00:31:25 Cause it's just easier. Yeah. Yeah. And I think a big thing we learned from the case study was meeting the potential customer where they're at. So whether it, you know, with marketing before it was only really conversion point was to schedule a tour, come in person. That was it by providing options that, you know, work for your different persona,

00:31:52 whether it's a virtual tour, whether it's, you can even, you know, if you don't have the technology or the investment to do a big fancy virtual tour, you know, 3d module, we even piloted scheduling, you know, guided tours with that Community Manager using their HubSpot meeting link. And you can, you know, they can do it on their phone and walk you through the space.

00:32:14 So that's a different kind of idea and way that you can try a virtual or a guided tour. You have a little more control that, of that conversation. So it's a kind of hybrid of an in-person tour with the Community Manager and a virtual tour, and then different markets and different things are gonna work for different people. So we're on the east coast and,

00:32:36 and we, you know, our specific client, you know, we found social media doesn't really work for them, but that might work for another client, but we tried a lot of different approaches with the marketing tactical mix with different offers, you know, a free one day pass, a free three-day pass a daily office rental. We tried virtual office memberships and HubSpot really allows that opportunity to provide those special offers without,

00:33:02 with utilizing landing pages and specific automations tied to that campaign that, that sent to that particular user, you know, how they converted, you know, what they're interested in without over cluttering your website with all these different options. I know you mentioned that in a previous podcast was, you know, you don't need to offer a million different options to a million different people,

00:33:27 but you have these options, Cheesecake factory menu. Somebody said that the other day, I was like, oh, I love that I'm gonna use that, But you have these options. And you know, it comes up in a conversation. You can send them to that resource if they are searching for that type for they're interested in a virtual office membership,

00:33:48 or just having a physical address, you can target with certain keywords on paid search that drive to that specific offering that specific landing page without tying up your whole website with, you know, 500 different offers. So I think it's, it's a good way to test things, see what gets engagement. We definitely tested things at work to what didn't work, but an example was we had this idea for an education membership.

00:34:11 All these teachers are home. You know, they're trying to teach from home and, you know, have distractions with their own kids or we're in a university area. And maybe they're students that, you know, want to be, have a focus space. They don't have that wherever they are back, didn't work for our market. But, you know,

00:34:30 try something, try, give yourself a time bound period to try something. You know, typically at least a couple months is reasonable. Measure it, see how it performs, optimize with a few tweaks. And then if it, if it works great, if it doesn't drop it and try something different, but that's the great thing with digital is being able to test and experiment with different offers and see what gets the most engagement.

00:34:59 I love that mindset. Don't be afraid to test some things will not work that's okay. Yeah. It's not personal. Just test it. And you have the analytics to know sort of objectively is this working or not working? Good idea. Bad idea. Yeah. I love it. What are the other kind of aspects of the marketing mix that you worked on on this project?

00:35:26 Let's see here. Sorry. I have quite a few section notes. So yeah, we, we manage all kind of inbound marketing channels. So a paid search, email blog content, we track paid social, organic social. We supported that strategy and then they had another person on the brand perspective that, that managed that. But really our focus was anything that is converting quality leads that result in tours and result in customers.

00:36:04 And if it didn't accomplish either of those two goals, we said, this has value for maybe overall brand, or it has its value in a different place, but our focus is on generating those leads. So really our umbrella, we ha that was our, is it something we should do? Is that something we shouldn't do? Did it con generate quality leads?

00:36:26 Did those leads convert to customers and we tested channels and we had that data and insights through, you know, the platforms themselves, Google analytics, Google ads, Facebook ads, but then really all tied into one with HubSpot created real time dashboards that we could track this. You know, we set KPIs and benchmarks that we wanted to meet for the primary indicators of success for this client,

00:36:54 which was total tours, web sessions, and then tours that resulted from those specific channels we measure, manage, excuse me, paid search and organic search. And we had a reporting call on a monthly basis where we on track off track for those goals. And then we, I haven't tracked weekly multiple times a week. How were we, you know,

00:37:21 tracking if we break those down on a weekly KPI, are we on track to reach that monthly goal? And then we had conversations with the client and the, the leading indicators of different levers. We felt like we could pull to change those numbers or what we thought was positive and where we saw kind of areas for improvement to test and invest our time for the following month.

00:37:43 And that kind of made our roadmap of these are our priorities of what we're going to focus on, because this is what made the meaningful impact. So I love the tactics that you've shared, but also that process of like, let's look at it every week. So I also just recorded an episode talking about like your, and this is an attraction thing.

00:38:04 I don't know if you guys follow the attraction in us. And they say like, look, your PNL is like, when the story is over, right. You can't impact the story anymore when you're looking at your monthly numbers. But if you look at it weekly, then to your point, okay, what levers can we pull in order to impact the numbers?

00:38:24 And are we going to be on track and not on track and just getting like comfortable making the time to do that and having, did you do that well? Like, did you partner with the Gather team to do that? Or were you doing it for them? Or what did that look like? Yeah, so I helped them with, you know,

00:38:40 we had to collaborate because they know the, the meaningful metrics that lead up to those business goals. But I collaborated with their chief marketing officer, James Crenshaw, which we would, he was my primary point of contact. He was the one that I worked with and really said, this is what we need to do. This is on track off track.

00:39:02 And these need to be our priority focuses on marketing this month. This needed to be what we need to do from a sales perspective. And this is updates. We can make it HubSpot to accomplish those things. So I worked on creating a real time dashboard where you can update the date ranges and you could check in Bailey, you can check an hourly if you wanted and seeing,

00:39:25 like watching the stock market. Yeah. Yeah. And you can see how many web sessions you're, you're getting. So typically I'd be in there a couple of days a week, kind of see how things are tracking, have that intentional time set weekly. This is my check-in point for the week to see based on this monthly number, if it's doing well on a weekly average and identify a game plan from there.

00:39:49 So that was super helpful that you're not spending time digging to just get the numbers, right. That's a lot of pain point we hear from clients is they spend all this time to find those numbers. So removing that barrier of you can see these numbers and you can invest more time analyzing them, strategizing how you want to make meaningful impacts of those numbers.

00:40:13 And then the time on the creative execution, the content, the deployment, the measurement of that kind of continual circle of inbound and remove some of that time here. Then you get more time back to do those other things I see with the dashboards that you created are those in HubSpot? Yup. Yup. Those live in HubSpot. So we found that's,

00:40:38 that's the beauty of having everything all in one place. You, you post your content there, you deploy your content there, you have your CRM set up there. You can see the full picture of marketing through sales, through customer retention, acquisition, everything. So we could, we had all that data that we could manipulate it and show what channels are most effective for us.

00:41:04 What specific marketing tactics we're converting at a higher rate, not only of individual members, but maybe what you could drill down and say, what was the higher dollar amount of value of that lead one lead might be, you know, $300 a month. So for example, one might be a thousand dollars a month. And how did those different lead did they come in differently?

00:41:28 Did they engage with different content? So how can we replicate the process and get more of those higher dollar value customers? So there's a lot you can do when you have the data and data is powerful when you have that to make smart businesses. Yeah. One of the things that's coming to mind is sometimes the challenge folks will have and Gather maybe getting to this point where the private space is full.

00:41:56 So now what, right. It takes longer time usually to attract and then convert like the flex desk or the dedicated, I don't know if Gather has dedicated desks, but they're like the non-private memberships. And with HubSpot, you can look at, okay, what content, those leads that do convert, how do they come to us? What content are they engaging in?

00:42:22 Like you can get those insights because the question is like, okay, how do I get more? Right. Well, yeah. Like where are they coming from? How do I get more of that? And with that data, you can get to that without just guessing. Yeah. Yeah. With specific contact properties, with specific lists, you can seek,

00:42:41 create those groups of people and see how they came in to you see how, whatever behavior you want to see. Yeah. Yeah. That's a great point. And having that data is so important because if you really wanted to, you could, you could track which of your members are at risk of churning and leaving. Right. So, so then if you have a wait list,

00:43:03 then you can reach out to a certain number of people on the wait list and fill those openings really, really quickly. So that's why having a system and, you know, some software kind of behind the scenes to make all that happen and organize that is so important. I mean, you really can predict your cashflow at this point. Okay. So that was what my episode was about.

00:43:24 It was about like, okay, your here's what you need to think about at the beginning of 2022. And it's like, if you don't look at the numbers, you can't predict, you just have no idea. And so you're just doing right and guessing, and which is, I think it's challenging for some types of entrepreneurs to like get out of that,

00:43:41 just like go mode and really look at the data and put the systems into place, but it makes everything so much more predictable. And then you have, you know, an accountability partner to help you like, okay, what are the levers we can pull without just sort of spaghetti at the wall. Right? Like what can we test and let's look at it.

00:44:00 So I'm curious, do you still work with, Gather on sort of that, like let's look at the numbers and the dashboards, or did they kind of take that over once everything was in place? Yeah. They kind of took that on and are managing it themselves. So I actually went on maternity leave for a little while, had my baby during COVID.

00:44:24 So yeah, that was, was a point where we really empowered them to you have those systems in place, know their numbers and they could kind of take and manage things, but we saw just really meaningful results. It, even what made us write this case study was even in times of COVID. So during 20, 20 12 times 12 X ROI from inbound marketing.

00:44:54 So if you're thinking, should I invest in a vendor, should I do this myself and weighing that, that really shows the value that we brought back to them of saying for every dollar you spent with us, you got $12. And then the annual revenue was $950,000 in annual revenue. So almost a million dollars just directly attributed to inbound marketing. And again,

00:45:20 we could see this data because we had, you know, HubSpot tracking in place. We had the CRM, we knew a lot of marketing really will only tell you, this is how many leads we got you. Or this is how many came from this channel. But having that full picture, you can say, this is the dollar amount that this person that converted on this channel that engaged with this piece and really shows the full picture brought you.

00:45:45 And then, you know, so that was more of the marketing value brought in. Then just the sales piece, like how much we had a, you know, 66 plus percent increase in total tours. We had a 33% increase in active members, even during 2020. And then that TA decreased time in that sales process. So we were moved with automation and touchpoints and,

00:46:13 and different pieces that we added during the sales process. We removed 10 days from the average time a tour was in that scheduled stage to when they, you know, either signed on to be a member or said, no, I've made my decision. I don't want to, you know, you have won a decision one way or the other, ideally,

00:46:32 you know, 33% increase in an active members, but, and then average time, oh, I'm sorry. So 10 days in that tour scheduled. So the time they signed up for a tour and then came in and then it was 33 days. So they went from, you know, we said kind of at the top of the call, 30 to 60 days and that kind of wait and see they'd come in for the tour.

00:46:58 And then they were waiting on a decision that was actually 33 days. I misspoke. So I'm removing 10 times, 10 days getting them from expressing interest to coming in the door and then removing a month of time of getting them to, you know, they've come into the space and they've decided on a contract. Amazing. And now they have all of these systems in place and the processes to have the confidence that,

00:47:28 you know, Ricky's, they can predict their cash flow and they can probably predict occupancy ramp up. So when they're doing new locations and looking for financial support, they can tell a story that they can believe in. They're not, sort of guessing, guessing at not that they were doing that before, but I think that happens a lot when we don't know our numbers.

00:47:47 And then we sort of, you know, cross the fingers and hope it turns out the way we want it to turn out. Not that marketing's ever perfectly predictable or human behaviors ever, ever perfectly predictable, but so I'm curious, and we're almost at the top of our time, so I don't want to overdo our time, but did you manage their paid search?

00:48:08 You mentioned involvement. Okay. So only this is only a case study for one operator, but I'm always curious the impact on leads was social, a driver of actual leads for Gather or mostly paid search and other content marketing. Yes. So for them, you know, they didn't really invest in paid search as much until we took it over and paid search became there besides,

00:48:35 you know, a manual entry or word of mouth or somebody coming in through referral became their second highest converting channel. So even under organic search, so paid search was super effective for this particular client. And in this instance, and again, I think that goes to having a really smart member of our team, doing the keyword, targeting, writing the right ad copy,

00:48:59 having that support and the content of the landing pages were driving folks to that. It's tied to that copy. And then it's something people are interested in. So paid search was by far the most effective channel of besides, you know, organic search being. The second of our inbound marketing mix email kind of was down there, but for this particular client social didn't lead to those even paid social.

00:49:25 We, we tried different, you know, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, oh, yeah. Targeting those professional audiences on LinkedIn, even still with the paid social paid search was their most effective channel in converting customers. That's helpful. I always think it's good to test. Right. And figure it out, but it's, it's always interesting just to, to hear and social to your point.

00:49:50 I, yeah. And I think you've kind of alluded, like there are other reasons to continue doing social, you know, organic social, you know, just wipe it off the list because it doesn't drive actual leads, but you want to manage resources right now that you've tested and you know, then you can manage budget and time that the team spends on things that drive the lead volume.

00:50:10 Yeah. And that's what we do with our client. It has a time and place, but how much energy do you put into it? If it's not driving, you know, what value does it bring and how much time do you put into it? Where do you utilize your, spend your resources? And we have clients that we test out paid search and it doesn't work.

00:50:25 And we tell them, you know, we're going to test it for this amount of time. We're going to allocate this amount of spend for it. And if you're not getting a good result, a good return on your investment, we're very honest and saying, this just isn't an effective channel for you. We're not going to overly push a channel that,

00:50:40 you know, we want to be good stewards to our clients of, of recommending a mix that works for, for their audience, for their business and accomplishes their business goals. Yeah. I love that. Okay. Sorry. We're, we're rolling on our time here. Any other kind of aspects of the, of the project that you wanted to share that we haven't gotten into yet?

00:51:06 I think we naturally got covered. All of them covered the highlights of, of the big wins. So that, that was the big thing was taking a moment to reflect on, on the wins and a challenging year in, in a heavily impacted industry. It hasn't been easy to be in Coworking or any offering where you rely on people being in person.

00:51:31 Right. So, and it comes in, comes in waves with, with the waves. So, but as Rick kinda mentioned, I've always felt this too, even though I'm home right now, you know, I'm itching to get back. You know, I have two under three and under, and I'm itching to get back into Coworking. I think there's a lot of value.

00:51:50 It brings in creating community. I think there's a lot of opportunity for growth as more businesses. See, they don't need to spend all this money. Like we learned in 28, 20 16, The Ricks of the world. Yeah. You don't need to spend this money or the people moving, you know, we're in a, a different location in Richmond that we're two hours away from DC.

00:52:14 It's a little bit more of affordable living here. I know multiple people that have moved from DC to here. I know multiple people have moved from New York to here that they can work remote, but they're getting sick of being at home. So I've shared, you know, Gather as an option for them. I, I think your personas and your audiences are going to change as,

00:52:36 you know, as we continue to get through COVID and there are different kinds of personas even for different locations. So Gather had a location downtown, and you know, that audience might look different, like might be, you know, younger and or older, cause that's Timothy who lives downtown. They might want to bike to work. They might well have different wants and needs that you can use in your content using your targeting.

00:53:02 And then I'm more of a boring, suburban person that I love having the fun downtown looking office while being able to drive 10 minutes and not go downtown. So that's a value of, of Coworking in more of these midsize cities and more of these suburban outlying areas of you have a lot of population living there that are working. And then now they're, you know,

00:53:27 want to get out what the values of a community want the values of a, a building to go to a private space, but don't want the commute. So that's kind of a, a learning from this too. You have both drunk the Kool-Aid I see. Yes. Love it. The co the co-working Kool-Aid For sure. Yeah, for sure. I'm just mentioning closing to,

00:53:52 you know, focus on the numbers that that is going to marketing does not have to be complicated. The numbers will tell you what you need to do. They will prescribe the solution. So follow know your numbers, follow the numbers, and that will tell you what to do. And I just wanna encourage everyone out there because I think Coworking is getting ready to go through a pretty big steep adoption curve as we come out of the pandemic and people,

00:54:16 their offices are remote. They want to get back into an office. So I just wanna encourage everyone listening to, you know, if, if you can get through this things are things are pretty good on the other side. Yeah. The, the worst of times, hopefully, you know, evolving into the best of times. So I would think there are some folks listening who are a little bit envious of the Gather team for taking sort of this pre-COVID COVID time to go through this process.

00:54:43 And now they're ready to roll right there. They're equipped. So I would just love to share if, if folks are interested in the process that they went through, want to learn more about your team and the work that you do, any favorite ways to get in touch. We have your agency website, we have Rick and Caroline on LinkedIn. We have the case study linked up in the show notes as well,

00:55:06 but what's the best way if someone wants to learn more, get in touch. Yeah. So I would just say, so our website is Rick whittington.com. So he can't spell that. Try WC inbound.com. That's a, that will get you to the home page. Yeah. The Gather case studies there, all of our contact information and our information is there,

00:55:27 but there's, there's always, you know, you can reach out to me at Rick, at Rick whittington.com and I'm, again, I'm, I'm really happy to just have conversations. I'm not, you know, coming on this and talking about a client, I don't want to, you know, to brag or seem like, you know, we know it all because we certainly don't and marketing is trial by,

00:55:45 you know, it's trial and error. There are things you learn for every client, but you know, if someone wants to reach out and just talk about some of these results, or if they want to get some ideas for their own, their own locations or centers, we'd be happy to talk. Yeah. I think that's what I, the feeling I get from talking to you and Caroline is just like,

00:56:07 like excitement. And there's something about having these conversations, you know, with a partner, right? Like a, not a business partner, but somebody who like gets it and understands it's hard. And you know, you just have that. It's I think so. So yeah. I encourage you to reach out. And Rick and I were introduced by Casey Clark,

00:56:30 who is the CEO of Cultivate Consulting and just same thing. We just like talked to business and talk shop. And I said, you know, really interested in what you're up to for my own interest and my audience interests. So I appreciate the fact that that conversation turned into you, both taking the time to come on and share your insights. So thank you for,

00:56:52 for doing all of that. And Caroline, I know you spent some time putting together those awesome nuggets and sharing really detailed aspects of the process. So I think we've all learned a ton and appreciate that a lot. Thank you.

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