Analyzing eight bangkok coworking spaces through a competitive perspective
Coworking spaces are a lucrative business in Southeast Asia, especially in Bangkok, where new alternatives pop up each month for freelancers, startups and productive people to do their work in a creative environment.
As the market starts to become more competitive, how do these different coworking spaces find their customers, and how great are they from a marketing perspective?
We have previously written about our work experience in a few notable coworking spaces here in Bangkok. In that article we mentioned that it would be interesting to see how these different coworking spaces do their marketing. Let’s begin.
Coworking spaces in our study
In this study we’ll take a look at eight prominent coworking spaces in Bangkok. A few of them we’ve used ourselves as our working environment; others we then discovered through different types of media–from a simple Google search to participation in an event that took place in one of the coworking spaces.
We do not favor any of the coworking spaces mentioned in this study. This is only a playful analysis of a few competitive companies and how they utilize their different marketing channels to promote their brand and find new or potential customers.
See this post as an educational piece of work to understand how your content can impact your business and brand visibility.
Marketing metrics of value
There are several different marketing metrics that can be collected and measured over time that will give you a good overview of brand exposure and audience engagement for each competitive company.
In this study we used a mix of traffic and search metrics to evaluate the quality of the website along with three different engagement metrics to evaluate brand awareness and audience loyalty. Each metric was collected and analyzed during a period of one month between September 2017 and October 2017.
Below is a list of metrics that we’ve used and analyzed in this study.
- Traffic rank
- Search ranking
- Search visibility
- Referring domains
- Domain authority
- Social Media activity (Facebook)
- Engagement rate
- Applause rate (likes)
- Amplification rate (shares)
- Conversation rate (comments)
- Engaged fans
- People talking
With these metrics we can paint a fair picture of each competitive coworking space, how they stack up against each other, and how they can improve to become better.
Let’s start to look on how they perform in searches.
Search visibility and ranking
Organic traffic is the best marketing channel you can have. It’s free and around 90% percent of all online experiences begin with a search engine. In other words, when people want to find out about something, they’ll use a search engine, and this is often where a brand gets its first exposure.
For a brand to be visible in search engines and for it to be successful with its organic brand exposure, it will need to develop and put a content strategy in place. This plain could be anything from looking over your language and wording on your website, to an extended strategy with keyword targeted content pages or blog articles.
The most important part of content strategy is making sure your business can be found by common search phrases that reflects your business objective and personas that fit your product. In some cases there is huge competition around certain search phrases and it could be good to find a niche that none of your competitors are using.
To measure each coworking space’s search visibility and ranking, we used common search phrases like “one day coworking space”, “shared office space”, “short term office rental”, “temporary office”, and a few more.
Please note that we did not use any branded keywords, as those will give biased results. Most people who do a random search for a solution, do not know the brand name of the provider anyway.
Let’s first look at how much traffic each coworking space has.
Website traffic
But website traffic does not necessarily bring you customers, so we we also need to compare search ranking and visibility.
Search ranking
To measure how much potential qualified traffic a website can reach, we can use their average search ranking position, which is based on all available content on their website and their average search position based on a few selected search phrases that describes business objective.
Simply explained, it means that content visible on the first search result page has more likely to get more traffic than a page that appears on the second, third and so on. The ranking is measured by a page position from 1 to 100 (1 being the first result). The positions for all keywords are averaged to get a score. A score under 10 is great, while above 30 is considered poor.
Search ranking position
Search visibility
To measure how likely someone will find a website, we can use a search visibility score, which is a score measured as percentage from 0 to100, where each ranked content is given a score based on their search ranking position.
A score of 0% means you have no pages in the top 100, and a score of 100% means that you own all the top ranking positions for all of your targeted keyword phrases. Realistically, it is very rare for a website to score above the mid-40s for non-branded keywords.
Search visibility score
Quality of traffic
Having a lot of traffic to your website doesn’t always bring an increased business value. Visitors are there for a reason and based on our study, we can clearly see that the company with most traffic, is getting that traffic for content that is irrelevant for their business objectives.
A large irrelevant amount of traffic will surely give you a larger amount of exposure, but the people who specifically look for your services or product will be harder to reach. Try to focus on content that brings you quality traffic, i.e. the people who are looking for your solution at the moment, as you’re more likely to get a value out of those people than from random website visitors.
Traffic by quality
As you can see from the search visibility and traffic quality chart, the higher visibility score you have, the better qualified content you provide, which then will help you to both increase your website traffic, website ranking and hopefully customers who are more likely to buy something from your brand.
If you’re interested to learn more about search ranking and visibility, please have a look at our article where you can read more about how you can improve your content strategy and search engine optimization.
Brand awareness and engagement
To understand brand’s exposure and how loyal customers are to their brand, we can use a few important social media metrics. It gives us insights on how the audience engages with the brand and how likely they are to amplify the brand message between their friends or others.
So does having a huge number of followers guarantee good interaction results, or is it important to focus on audience quality?
Let’s look how the number of followers correlate (or doesn’t) with each coworking spaces’ activity on social media.
Audience size
We can clearly see that one coworking space has a lot more followers than all the other coworking spaces combined, but this does not necessarily qualifies this company as great when it comes to brand awareness and reach.
Is it worth having all those followers? Will they bring a value to the company? Let’s take a look at how loyal the followers are for each company.
Engagement per post
Engagement rate per post gives a good indication of how well recieved your content is. A company with a lot more followers will of course have a higher amount of engagement, so for us to paint a fair picture of loyalty, we also need to look at engagement by audience size.
Engagement per audience size
If we break down the engagement metrics based on the audience size we get a totally different picture. We can clearly see that a company with fewer followers actually is as strong as one of the companies with a lot more followers when it comes to brand loyalty and how well received their message is.
Result and conclusion
It looks like a few of the mentioned coworking spaces in this study are doing excellent work in attracting new potential customers through organic searches with websites well structured to attract those types of visitors from business related searches. Others have a very poor web presence and need to work on a content strategy so they don’t fall behind.
We can clearly also see that a huge amount of social media followers does not automatically equal great brand awareness and those followers will most likely never become your customers. It clearly show us that creating quality content and regularly measuring your engagement rate on social media is as important as it is to measure SEO for your website.
Many companies tend to publish quantity over quality, and it feels like a few prioritize and waste their time and energy on efforts that do not deliver results.
In this study we have measured and evaluated the following coworking spaces in Bangkok. Each was compared strictly on available data. We encourage visitors to try each one!
Tools that was used
In this study, we used Outsmart, a social media analytics software that can be setup to track, measure and report on your most important marketing metrics. It has support for content tracking, engagement tracking and competitive benchmarking.
Outsmart is easy to get started with and the software will send you weekly and monthly updates on metrics that are important for you and the growth of your business.
Don’t fall behind, keep track of your closest competitors already today.
Author
