This article is part of the school of coworking course through Archie. Make sure to check out the other articles to learn more about how to start a coworking space business.?
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Coworking spaces have become so popular that nowadays they have competition at every corner. If you are a coworking space owner, your concern is going to be on how to stay on top of all your competition. We’ve prepared a step-by-step guideline that will help you not only identify your coworking space competition but also teach you how to learn from it and get ahead.
Step 1: Identify who your competition is
The first step to keeping up with your competition is figuring out who exactly your competition is. Depending on where you’re situated, you may already know your competition, but if you don’t a great and easy way to find out is simply through smart Google Searches.
You can start by simply searching up “coworking spaces in [your city]”. This will help you see most of the spaces that are also in the same area as you. Make sure you take note of their website, how they rank, and where they’re located to keep track of for later on.
Some spaces may also not call themselves coworking spaces, so you have to keep that in mind. Instead, try searching up things like “flexible workspace” or “shared workspace” and see if anything else pops up.
Once you’ve got your competition make sure you compile a list of them all, as well as any relevant information about them that you can scope out just by looking at their website and social media.
? Tip: A good idea is to get a spreadsheet and put all the information on there so that it’s easier to see and access.
Step 2: Visit their website
After you’ve made a list of all your competitors, it’s time to deep dive into their websits and gather as much information as you can. This is an important step because it will allow you to compare all the different coworking spaces to each other, as well as your own. Although it may take some time, it’s important that you are thorough with this step so that you can identify all the ways in which their business model works.
When going through their website, make sure you take note of all the data that you find. Try to have separate sections for all the criteria, so that you can see how each of them looks side by side. Don’t forget to also add your own coworking space on the list so that you can compare side-by-side.
Some questions to keep in mind when doing a deep-dive on your competitors:
- What are the prices for their rooms, desks, services, memberships, etc.?
- What does their website look like?
- Is their content optimized?
- What kind of resources do they have?
- What are their biggest selling points?
- What do they have that you don’t?
Step 3: Follow them on social media and keep up with their newsletters
Social media is a very important part of the business model today. A great way to gain insight into your competitors is by following their social media and understanding how they relate to their members.
When analyzing social media make sure you write down how often they post, and what exactly they post about. This could help you get a general idea of what most coworking spaces do with their social media pages, and how you can also jump on the train, but perhaps stay ahead of the game. Make sure you check out all the social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn and Twitter. Each platform will have different tones and styles, and you can see which ones coworking spaces like to use the most and how.
If they don’t have social media platforms, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they don’t engage with their members. Some spaces simply choose to instead do a weekly or monthly newsletter that they send out, which may include any news, updates, new features, and so on. In this case, you could try to sign up for the newsletter, however, you have to be careful because if people suspect you are snooping then that could cause problems. Try to gage the situation and see if this will be a possibility.
? Tip: Another great thing you can do to gain insight into your competitor’s coworking spaces is to look at their online reviews. You could do this on their Google listings or Yelp. This could help you understand how
Step 4: Take a look at their most shared and popular content
When you take a look at their social media pages, as well as their website, try to find the posts and pages that have the most traffic, shares, likes, comments, and so on. By doing this you’ll be able to understand what works and what doesn’t and shape your social media presence based on what you found out.
If you do this on your own, it may take a lot of time trying to analyze every single one of your competitors over all their social media platforms. Thankfully there are a lot of tools that you can use to save time and to understand your competitors’ brands thoroughly.
Online tools to track competitors:
- Buzzsumo: Buzzsumo helps you find your competitor’s most shared content. This is really useful if you don’t want to manually go through all their posts over all their platforms, which would take quite some time.
- Quick Search: Quick Search will give you you an instant overview of your brand online, but it will also allow you to enter multiple brands for analysis, meaning you can compare quite easily.
- BuiltWith: This is also a great analysis tool that you can either use on yourself or your competitors.
Step 5: Analyze their SEO
A great final step is to do an SEO competitor analysis. What this is is a way of researching the content and other elements of your competitor’s social media and website and making a comparison. For example, you can compare yourself to your competitors or your competitors to each other. This analysis includes links, keywords, content and so on.
SEO analysis is effective because it allows you to start somewhere and get a concrete idea about the research. Usually, SEO analysis is not done by individuals, but rather by tools that can collect a lot of data and generate reports easily and efficiently.
Keywords & tools
When it comes to keywords, is looking at your competitor’s websites and their top-performing pages in what we call a keyword gap analysis. What keywords are these pages using and how was it used in their content. Here you can compare their keywords to yours and see what kind they are using that you are not.
If they have dozens of keywords that they are using, it doesn’t mean that you must now use them all yourself. Instead, focusing on keywords that have a high ROI (return on investment) is the smartest move you can make. Find the keywords that bring in the most traffic and revenue and start using them with your own content.
A good tool to use for this is Ubersuggest, which is free and allows you to type in a keyword and in the content Ideas section you get a list of links and the domains that ranked for the keyword.
The other great tool at your disposal is Hootsuite Streams which will allow you to track keywords, competitors, and hashtags across every social media platform.
Conclusion
Having a successful coworking space business will require a lot of work, including making sure that you keep up with your competitors. The best way to do so is online, looking through all their platforms and learning from them. You have many options when it comes to this, but at the end of the day, the best thing you can do is think of what is best for your space.
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