If you're a business owner or operator of a coworking space, you know that competition is fierce when attracting new members. To stay ahead of the curve, it's important to take advantage of all of the marketing tools at your disposal. Paid search engine marketing or Pay-Per-Click (PPC) is one powerful tool that can help you reach potential members actively searching for spaces like yours. In this blog post, we'll discuss some tips on how to get the most out of your PPC campaigns for your coworking space. Let's get started!
What is PPC Marketing, and How Does It Work?
Pay-Per-Click marketing, PPC marketing, or paid search engine marketing is a form of paid online advertising that involves creating targeted ads and paying to have them displayed on the SERPs (search engine results pages) when potential customers enter certain keywords.
This allows businesses to connect with engaged buyers who are actively searching for products or services related to their business.
The process works by businesses bidding on relevant keywords that they want their ads to appear for when people search for those terms. The amount you bid will determine where your ad appears on the SERP. The higher your bid, the more likely your ad will be displayed at the top of the results page. Depending on the platform, you’ll be billed once a month or when your ad spending (which depends on the total number of clicks your ads get), reaches a certain threshold. As a business, you can usually pay by pretty much any means, from business credit cards to bank transfers, but you have to check first. For example, sellers on Amazon MX weren’t allowed to pay for ads with credit cards until last January 2021.
Once someone clicks on your ad, they’re taken to a landing page on your website, which is where you can start guiding them down your sales funnel to convert them into customers.
PPC Marketing Is a Type of Performance-Based Advertisement
Contrary to other types of paid marketing, such as running ads on a radio or TV station where you pay a single fee for the allotted time on the air, regardless of whether or not people actually see the ad, PPC marketing is a form of performance-based advertisement. This means that businesses only pay when someone clicks on their ad, making it a very cost-effective and targeted marketing strategy, especially for businesses that primarily sell products online.
How Can Coworking Spaces Benefit from PPC?
As we mentioned earlier (and as you surely already know), competition for new members is fierce in the world of coworking spaces. A well-crafted PPC marketing campaign can be much more effective than other types of advertisement because it offers the following benefits:
- It allows you to target customers more specifically. PPC marketing allows business owners and operators to target their ads based on relevant keywords closely related to the products or services they offer. This means that your ad is displayed only to people who have a real interest in what you're offering, which can be much more effective than simply running a general ad that reaches a wider but less targeted audience.
- It's more cost-effective. As we mentioned before, PPC marketing is a form of performance-based advertising, which means businesses only pay when someone clicks on their ad. This makes it a very cost-effective marketing strategy since you're only paying for actual leads who are interested in coworking spaces. In other words, you're not blowing money on presenting ads about coworking spaces to someone who went online looking for tips on how to be a better gardener.
- It's more trackable. One of the best things about PPC marketing is that you can actually see how your campaigns are performing in real-time, which allows you to make optimizations and adjustments as needed to maximize their performance. For example, if a particular keyword or ad isn't getting many clicks, you can increase the bid amount or change the ad to make it more compelling.
PPC marketing can be an extremely effective strategy for attracting new members and growing your coworking space business. In the following sections, we'll go over some important tips on running PPC campaigns for your coworking space more effectively.
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Tips on Creating a PPC Campaign that Targets Your Ideal Customer
To make an effective PPC campaign, the first thing you need to consider is who you're targeting with your campaign. Every business has its ideal customer, and coworking spaces aren't the exception, so here are some tips on how to reach the right audience:
Tip 1: Do Your Research
The first step in any marketing campaign is to research and understand your target audience. This means taking the time to understand who your ideal customer is, what their needs and wants are, and what kind of language they use when talking about coworking spaces. More importantly, you want to know what keywords they use when searching for a coworking space to join.
Once you understand your target audience, you can start crafting your ads and keywords to reach them more effectively.
Tip 2: Choose the Right Keywords
Choosing the right keywords is essential for any PPC campaign, but it's especially important for coworking spaces since competition is tough. You want to choose keywords relevant to your coworking space and used by people who are actually interested in finding a coworking space.
To do this, you can use a keyword research tool like Google AdWords Keyword Planner or ahrefs to find keywords that are relevant to your space and that have relatively low competition. Sometimes it makes more sense to target long-tail keywords that are highly specific and therefore better targeted than short-tail keywords that have massive amounts of traffic and are therefore more expensive, while at the same time being less targeted to your ideal customer.
For example, if you want to run a PPC campaign for a highly competitive keyword like “coworking spaces,” you’ll probably have to bid very high to get any clicks at all. Those clicks will be very expensive and not necessarily valuable, considering that many people might just be looking for general information about coworking spaces and not thinking of joining one. But if you target a longer keyword like “coworking spaces that accept credit card payments,” since this keyword has a much lower search volume and less competition, it’ll be much cheaper for your campaign. Additionally, it’ll be much better targeted, because someone looking for a list of coworking spaces that accept a particular payment method are likely thinking of using the service and want to make sure they’ll be able to pay. So, these readers are more likely to convert into sales offsetting the lower search volume and making every click more valuable.
Tip 3: Research Your Competition
We all know who our direct competitors are, and the best coworking business owners also have a good idea of their extended competitor landscape. But knowing who our competition is is only the beginning. You also have to keep an eye on what they're doing, particularly in PPC campaigns, since they'll likely be competing for the same keywords you plan to target.
When you study your competition, start by analyzing their copy. Make a list of common and uncommon terms they use, how they pitch their service, what types of assets they display on the ad's landing page, and how they collect user contact information.
You should also sign up for any free product or service they offer and make a note of what they ask for in return. In short, take a trip down your competitors' sales funnels to understand how they're attracting their customers. There are many other tried and true competitor research strategies you can learn online that will help you find out what other coworking spaces are up to.
Studying your competitors and their ad copy is an important part of your coworking space's PPC strategy. It helps you understand your competitor's strengths and weaknesses, allowing you to learn from the former and take advantage of the latter. This also gives you information about who they're targeting and not targeting, possibly inspiring you to follow suit.
Tip 4: Run PPC Campaigns on LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a powerful platform for running PPC campaigns for coworking spaces. For obvious reasons, coworking spaces frequently target professionals in different fields, and LinkedIn is a platform where these types of people are easy to find.
LinkedIn allows you to target your ads specifically to the professionals you think would be interested in your coworking space. For example, you can target people who work in specific industries, have certain job titles, or work for companies of a certain type.
Tips for Optimizing Your PPC Campaigns for Better Results
Once you have a good idea about who you want to reach with your PPC campaign, it's time to craft your ads and landing page copy and set up your campaign. This will be slightly different depending on the particular platform you're using to launch your PPC campaign.
However, no PPC campaign is perfect right off the bat. The good news is that you can tweak and optimize it as time goes by, using different metrics to guide your way or some online marketing tools to help. Here are some tips on optimizing your campaign to reach your goals.
Tip 5: Run A/B Tests Whenever You Feel You Need To
A/B testing is an experimentation technique where you compare two versions of something against each other to see which one performs better. This can be applied to pretty much anything in your PPC campaign, from the copy in your ads to the images you use or the call-to-action buttons.
Whenever you're unsure about something in your PPC campaign, run an A/B test. For example, if you're wondering whether it's better to use a short headline or a long headline in your ads, create two ads with each type of headline and see which one performs better.
You can also use A/B testing to test different landing pages. If you're unsure which of two landing pages is better, send one half of your traffic to one landing page and the other half to the other and see which one converts better.
When A/B testing, it's very important to make sure you only change one variable at a time; otherwise, it may be hard to know what change triggered the difference in ad performance.
Tip 6: Keep an Eye on Your Quality Score
Quality Score is a metric that measures how relevant and useful your ads, keywords, and landing pages are to the people who see them. The higher your Quality Score, the more likely your ads will be shown, and the less you'll have to pay per click.
Quality Score is important because it can impact your ad campaign's costs and effectiveness.
Monitoring your Quality Score and improving it should be a part of your regular PPC optimization routine. It is one of the key metrics to track when running A/B tests.
Tip 7: Learn from Your Competitor's A/B Tests
A/B testing can be expensive and time-consuming, and only the biggest players in the coworking scene have the financial muscle to A/B test everything to their marketing team's content. Fortunately, you can learn from your competitor's A/B tests without running them yourself.
How?
By using web crawlers and other online tools to analyze your competitors' websites' performance.
Web crawlers help you extract data and analytics from any web page, including your competitors' test pages. This will give you an idea of what variables your competitors are testing and which ones are performing better.
You can use this information to develop ideas for your own A/B tests or gain insight and use the results in your own PPC campaign. For example, suppose you discover that your competitors have been A/B testing the button colors on their landing pages. You could use this information to test different hues in your own campaign or use the same color that performed better for them.
The Bottom Line
Running a PPC campaign for a coworking space can be a daunting task, but it's worth it if you do it right. By following these tips, you'll be able to target the right audience and optimize your campaign to improve your chances of reaching your campaign's goals and, ultimately, your business goals as well. Remember to A/B test whenever you feel unsure about something and keep an eye on your Quality Score to make sure you're always improving. Finally, learn from your competitor's A/B tests to save time and money while gaining valuable insights in the process.
The article was written by Jordan Bishop, a personal finance expert and travel hacker who holds a degree in finance and entrepreneurship from Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Canada. He is the founder of Yore Oyster and How I Travel, two sites to help you optimize your finances while living an international life. He recently published his first book, Unperfect, an exploration of problem solving.
