386. The Future of Demand Gen in Coworking: AI, E-Commerce & Operator ROI with Miro Miroslavov
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Masterclass: 3 Behind-the-Scenes Secrets to Opening a Coworking Space
TRANSCRIPTION
386. The Future of Demand Gen in Coworking: AI, E-Commerce & Operator ROI with Miro Miroslavov
00:00:00,"Welcome to the Everything Coworking podcast where every week I keep you updated on the latest trends and how to's in coworking. I owned and operated coworking spaces for eight years and then served as the Executive director of the Global Workspace association for five years. And today I work with hundreds of operators and community managers every month, allowing me to bring you thought provoking operator case studies and inspirational interviews with industry thought leaders to help you confidently stay on top of what's important and what you can apply to your own role in the coworking industry."
00:00:44,"Welcome. I'm here with Miro Miroslavov. He is the CEO and co founder at Office RnD and it is happy hour time for him. Thursday after 5 o' clock and it's early for me. I got my early workout in and wanted to chat with Miro about e-commerce websites, doing business on websites and Office RnD has just recently launched what they call their growth hub."
00:01:09,"And we'll talk about what that is and more broadly, why e-commerce is important for your website and the function of your website and a little bit about what Miro thinks is going to happen in terms of demand gen, where that's going to come from given the growth of, of AI. So Miro, thanks for joining me today. Morning Jamie, it's a huge pleasure to be here. Thanks so much for having me."
00:01:34,"I'm very excited about this conversation. I've been living in this e-commerce and growth hub thing for the last year and a half, so. Yeah, well, this update is a big deal for your team. I mean you have to choose as the CEO where your resources go and what the team works on. And this was the big one. Yeah, absolutely. That was, that was the big bet for us that we, we did probably 18 months ago."
00:02:02,"And yeah, I'm happy that it worked out well, I'm very excited about it And I mean for full honestly, we've always had a little bit of that. I mean these type of public checkout pages and public schedules of different resources always been available, but always been available as a tiny little feature there that the user experience wasn't good, wasn't nicely integrated in many things like Google Analytics and things that you actually need wasn't nicely integrated in the main website."
00:02:33,"So overall the experience wasn't good for the user as well as for the operator. So at some point we decided we must invest, we must invest in building a real proper solution that actually. Yeah. Give the users better experience. Yeah. And open. Exactly. Right. I mean that's the goal. Right. Is you're creating a tool that helps customer or help your customer, who's the coworking space operator, do business online, I mean, and facilitate things like meeting room bookings and some of the really key aspects of our, of our business."
00:03:11,"But you know, I'd love to hear you talk about sort of the broader themes like on demand demand since, you know, the pandemic has been a real growth driver for our industry. Right. Like maybe a little unexpected. I was on with Charlie from the Mullen the other day and he was like, oh, our meeting room revenue sometimes is, you know, many times what we think it will be in a pro forma."
00:03:34,"Like just, you know, everybody's still kind of figuring out and they have a really cool product, this library product that they rent out for. You know, it's not just a meeting room, it's a big gathering space and just the demand for that type of product. But for people wanting to book On Demand, to your point, sort of before the growth hub, maybe you had to create some extra landing pages in front of the checkout process to, you know, really showcase the experience."
00:04:01,"And it was a little clunky and now it's so much smoother. But I'd love to hear you talk about kind of, yeah. The, the kind of the broader trends and why you think it's important for. To facilitate e-commerce on a coworking space website. Yeah, certainly. I mean, on demand's been. Well, yeah, we've seen ups and downs obviously with COVID for on demand at some point, you know, open space and tape assets, that was the worst thing."
00:04:30,"And so many people actually jumped in the direction of my. And more private offices. Now things settled back to, I would say more normal cadence where private offices always been and always will be the core product offering of any core key and flex space. But certainly the demand for on demand products has been growing at a really high pace for all products. Meeting spaces, event spaces, desks, private offices, day offices, everything's been growing significantly."
00:05:03,"And there are so many reasons. One of them obviously is the remote work in general and distributed teams that need a place to get together regularly or irregularly. There's so many of them now. So every city, every small town, everywhere, there is a need for, for space to get together and do real work, which is different than just coming together in a, in a Starbucks or whatever. Yep."
00:05:34,"You'd need a real place where you can, can actually do some work. So certainly, I mean, we have 3,000 customers now, so it's visibly. We see, we see that trend across, across the globe and across many, many locations. And operators. Yeah. And the, the expectation that somebody can buy online. I feel like there's still some resistance with operators. I mean I look at work with a lot of operators and look a lot, a lot of websites which we can talk about because you recently did a LinkedIn post on, on what you thought the optimal structure should be for a website."
00:06:10,"But, but, but even I would say to anybody listening, you need to let users transact on your platform. I often see websites where I cannot book a room online. I have to fill out a form or call. Nobody's doing that, right. Like that is yesterday. And if you're the only option in town then maybe people will do it. But if you are, if there's competition in your market, that's friction and people just don't want, want to put up with that."
00:06:44,"Right. I sometimes think we think of this B2B customer as being somehow different than the consumer. That's like on their phone buying things on Instagram. Right. Like, like the idea that I can push a button and buy something, you know, off of Instagram, but then I'm going to put up with like forms and a bunch of friction. If I want to book a meeting room or a day pass that there's a disconnect there I think for operators who just have not enabled that on their site."
00:07:11,"What is your thought on that? Yeah, you mentioned my, my LinkedIn post on the website analysis. That was an AI but with a little bit of human support at my end. Did you get it to do the diagram or did you do the diagram? I unfortunately I did the diagram which was the part. But I used AI to actually analyze the websites and the navigation there and come up with like the analysis of what's the perfect website based on 100 plus top core cubers."
00:07:47,"Certainly you need both options to be available on your website to book and to get in touch some form or another. And these are two distinct call to actions with two distinct user Personas that, that eventually will go through through the, through the different channels book now is is needed for, for the easy vanilla type transactions where you just need the type of you know what product you need and you just want to book it."
00:08:26,"Very simple, very straightforward. I need a room for my business trip. It better be close to my location, where I'm at and it better be nice and whatever. And then you also definitely need a contact form or tour booking or something where you need to speak to another human or an AI agent in that case because you have special needs and you have a very special something that it's not clear how exactly can be achieved."
00:09:00,"I literally was trying to book a hotel for a very with a special needs this weekend and I immediately discarded. It's so, so bizarre. Half the hotels I was looking at have a book flow and only book flow and half of them have only contact us. Whatever. Yeah, right. Like interesting versus. And I get the points why you do either one or the other. But no, actually I don't."
00:09:30,"I mean you need both because these are completely different use cases and you need both call to action because there are cases where you, you want to book straight and there are cases where you want to, you need to talk because you need to figure out certain things that are just so, so customer specific that we just can't. Like a company needs a red special event something something or a really special boardroom."
00:09:54,"And you're super nervous because that's a huge important meeting. You cannot just go and book it and assume that it's gonna. Right. You don't wanna make assumptions. You wanna talk to a human and you wanna confirm maybe there's catering or a special room setup or special tech or whatever it is. Right. It must be perfect. It must cover every single box that you, you, you need. And that's."
00:10:16,"Yeah. And. And also, I mean, you know, I think you were, you were making this point the user Persona. I wonder if this is changing generationally, but like I'm the. I do not want to talk to a human pretty much ever. I want to do everything online. Yeah, absolutely necessary. Necessary. Exactly. That's the, the, you know, plan D. My husband, however, never wants to do things online. That man has not touched ChatGPT or he, he's always saying to me, why don't you just call."
00:10:48,"I don't want to call. It's awkward. It's. Whatever it takes time. I just wanna do online. He will, he calls airlines. Like I do not wanna talk to United, you know, but his immediate thing, just call them. They'll help you. I'm like, no, they don't wanna help. They wanna charge extra for helping and whatever. So. But that's. That Persona still exists. The. I just wanna talk to a human."
00:11:11,"I do wonder, like, are, you know, your kids in particular. Absolutely. Great point. You, you also need. When you, when you have a Contact us, you must have the, all the different options. You must have an email, you must have a form, you must have a call us whatever or directly call there. Because yes, one of the hotels, I, I was checking there, there was only Cause and this is the last thing that I would."
00:11:36,"Now you're looking for other options, right? I mean, so that's interesting because you're like, well, unless you, unless it's really the want like the location or something that you need. It's like that friction is enough to, if you're on, you know, Expedia or some platform where there's a bunch of options, you're like, okay, well who doesn't make me call them? Where can I do this online? So people will, you know, operate based on their preferences."
00:12:02,"Yeah, yeah. And the last thing probably I'll add on that point is you need these call to actions and you must track how they perform so that you optimize for your primary call to action, your secondary call to action, and eventually third call to action. I probably would never recommend to have more than that, but that's how it goes. So you need to understand based on your products and based on your users coming to the actual real users, not your assumptions, not something that you believe or think is, is the right call to action."
00:12:42,"You should rely on hard data and you can even do, especially lately with all the good website content management systems, you can do easily A B testing and figure out actually which call to action performs better and highlight it more so that one call to action is highlighted, the other one is kind of secondary visibly so that you optimize for what's more important. Very likely that's going to be the book now because I mean statistically more people will need the book and then the colas, whatever, get in touch."
00:13:18,"Flow will be kind of more the special cases and special occasions. So that likely is a secondary. But you need to know, you need to test and be sure that that's the case for you. Yeah, yeah, the data. I'm running some Facebook ads right now and I have a video version and then two image versions and one of the images I didn't like that much, but it was like the only photo I could find."
00:13:43,"And in the back of my head I was like, watch that one outperform. Even though I think it's not as good and it is the second best. The video is performing the best, but the image I didn't like that much is actually the one that's performing. So yeah, you can't put your own preferences. You have to look at the data, which can be hard to do. Yeah, it takes."
00:14:04,"Takes discipline. It's not that it's hard, it just takes the discipline to, to say, well, I'm not, not always, not always. Right And I, I think too this, this may be like not a huge use case but we did the GWA webinar on e-commerce and someone in the audience was like, well I don't like the book now because I really want to screen people who come through."
00:14:24,"Like she had these like outlier use cases like oh, somebody showed up and brought kids, you know, or whatever. It's like, well you, you also, you have to enable the e-commerce because that is unusual, you know, and you can put language up to sort of discourage that or you know, you could check in with a larger group if they book a larger. But you, you can't be risk averse about who's going to book now."
00:14:47,"And I feel like sometimes operators get into this like super curated mode. It's like, well it depends on what your priorities are. If you want to optimize for revenue you gotta open it up and, and let people in and kind of adjust as, as you have these, you know, any sort of outlier use cases. Yeah. And it's, you should have your simple TLCs. And yeah, if kids and kids are an issue, just yeah, put it out there that you can bring."
00:15:14,"Yeah, them. Exactly. And yeah, as you mentioned, I mean if you, if you're optimizing for revenue then certainly you, you want to get these bookings and just to put it clear about what the rules are and yeah, people will decide. Yeah. So favorite sort of features about the new Growth Hub. Also, can you mention, I see lots of existing users who don't have it yet. So for the people listening who haven't adopted it yet, how do they, how do they upgrade?"
00:15:45,"Yeah, well so tell, yeah, give us kind of an overview. How do they upgrade? There's a new pricing structure to it. Walk through that thinking, give us the details. Yeah, so I mean the way, the way, the way we think about our platform is now it finally became a real platform, meaning that it's something much bigger that consists of multiple products, which is generally the definition of a platform."
00:16:12,"So you have a platform and then you have multiple products that you can use or not use. So essentially interact with and Growth Hub is, is one of them. We have Visitor Hub and other things coming up and then the main, the main platform. So Growth Hub is an, is an option. So you may opt in if you want to, if you want to be again, very serious about e-commerce."
00:16:35,"It's a, it's a dedicated e-commerce platform with huge investment on our side and huge plans for the future. What it does is as typically for an e-commerce platform is a storefront fully embedding in the website. So you have actually two modes, two ways of using it. One is to be directly embedded in the website itself. So there is no redirection. It doesn't get you to another place or another similar looking website."
00:17:06,"Which is something that we, we definitely wanted to try SC and it worked very well actually. So most customers do it this way. So it's kind of fully in the website so you don't lose context, you don't navigate to other places and things or you can use it again with the redirect, which is different experience. So maybe some people will prefer that. And yeah, it's fully focusing on the user."
00:17:36,"So everything that we do on that front is to actually test the user experience and figure out the best way for the user to achieve their goals and get the booking. That's, that's all that our team cares about at the moment. With Direct. Direct, obviously integration with the rest of the Ops Energy platform, Direct integration with your Stripe account so you get instant payment payouts, which is, which is pretty important obviously for customers."
00:18:04,"Same revenue kind of mage band as everything else in the platform. So it's very tightly of course integrated with everything there. We've put a lot of effort into the experience and now we're putting a lot of effort on other important things for overall making e-commerce work, which is the first thing is data. So we spend a lot of effort on integrating it with Google Analytics so that you can see the entire funnel."
00:18:34,"So how your website and your e-commerce platform as part of it performs, which is absolutely essential for having any marketing strategy because when you see the data you can, you can easily make a decision if you want to invest more, how much more, what's performing, what's not and how to improve it. So that was the second biggest thing after good user experiences. Now let's empower other operators to have an absolute clear visibility on the data."
00:19:14,"And now we're moving into other exciting elements like dynamic pricing and custom flows for all sorts of different types of resources and things that can be booked or subscribed to like memberships and things. Very exciting, very exciting stuff. Obviously maps integrations with Google and AI integrations with the different language models. So plenty of exciting things with the main goal to sell more. I mean be anywhere and where the users are and get them on board."
00:19:52,"I have a couple of questions. Do you, are you seeing, are you seeing people transact on small offices online? Do you, I mean, do you have enough kind of data to see like that's a. Something people will do. Yeah, definitely. We, we see. We see a lot of day offices and small offices and people do book them or subscribe for. For. For small memberships. Yeah, yeah, that's an easier sale."
00:20:18,"I mean it's is as easy as a, as a dedicated desk in general to get an office for one to. Yeah, exactly. Three, four. Yeah. And people are willing to do it online again. I feel like some operators have that like. Well, we don't want people buying, you know, so it's their choice. Right. What assets they put. You know, make book now on the platform. They don't have to put offices up."
00:20:41,"But you're seeing it happen. Yeah. And especially if it's. It depends on the commitment, I think. I mean if you do more traditional kind of license agreement like a yearly annual contract, then that might be a little trickier and barrier. But if it's like a monthly. Monthly membership for a private office for one. Yeah, yeah. Click and buy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. I'm interrupting for a second. Are you working on starting a coworking space?"
00:21:17,"I often emphasize how important the planning stage is. You've heard me say most unrecoverable issues happen well before you open your doors. And they are related to the size of your space, your real estate deal and a few other things. If you think you are going to pick your favorite coworking space and reverse engineer what you think you see happening in there and then pick your own paint colors and your favorite furniture, you are in for a surprise."
00:21:50,"This business is really about making the right fundamental decisions that align with your individual personal and financial goals. So we want to help you avoid the mistakes that a lot of operators make in planning and launching that can really set you back in terms of time and finances. So we have got your back. We have created a free training to help you really get behind the three key decisions that we think are the most critical for you to get right when you're designing your coworking business."
00:22:28,"The model, not the colors, the model. And these insights come from years of operating, designing the model for two different locations, and then my work with hundreds of operators as they work on their businesses. So grab your spot in our training class. You can watch it anytime. It's totally on demand. And start your coworking journey with confidence and the right strategies in place. You can grab that training at everything coworking."
00:22:58,"Com forward slash masterclass. So I'd love to hear. And I'll put the link to your post on your analysis of optimal Website structure. Can you talk about a couple of key things that you think are important on a website that operators like may not be doing? Like, like the focus on the book now or the e-commerce like what is the purpose of of the website? And a couple of high level."
00:23:25,"Obviously don't have to walk through your whole diagram but, but some of your key takeaways from that exercise. Yeah, I mean, yeah, the book now is certainly the. Should be the primary call to action. So that should be your themed colored button on the homepage, right? Yeah, to the right. Yeah. And. And then in the center or whatever left on the place like equivalent with book a tour like it gets prime real estate."
00:23:57,"Yeah, I, I would say that's, that's the, the primary vocatory is a secondary. Ooh, that's a hot take Miro. Okay, well I mean and again you need to test that. You need to test that and you obviously. And look at your analytics testing. This is super easy to do like one version with book tour primary, book now secondary and then swap it, see what happens. It's. You can, you can run it in parallel or one month after another and easily see the data."
00:24:36,"What performs better overall, how many tours versus how many. How many bookings you're getting. So yeah, the perfect structure of the website. I mean you need very, very well articulate and real clear content and menu that follows your locations. A little bit about the space. But when I say locations, be extremely specific and clear your address details about the locations. It's bizarre. Websites don't even have the address."
00:25:10,"I know I was open yesterday, I was like okay, I can't even find the address. It really should be in the footer because your nap, your name, address and phone number should match your Google business profile and it should be in your footer so that Google can crawl it and check it. Yeah, yeah, period. No, yeah, you know where your location is, but everybody else does not. Yes, yeah, yes."
00:25:35,"Yeah, yeah. And, and especially I mean a lot of people travel, a lot of people are not local so they may not speak the same the local language and never use. Yeah. Something that is not very wildly widely recognized. Your products, obviously you need a section about your products on the website. So everything that you offer, meeting spaces, virtual desks, different types of memberships. That goes without saying, but it needs to be there in the manual and we have links to all the different products from where you can also obviously have the, the different products will have their own call to actions of course."
00:26:18,"And certainly, I mean for private offices, the primary Call to action will be book a tour for the other. Many of the other products will be booked now directly book and pay whatever. So yeah, and simple clear content. I think that's, that's the most important part of, of the website. But also with AI by the way the models actually prefer simpler, nicer, well structured websites. Which is a little different than Google."
00:26:54,"Than Google. I mean Google also prefers simple and nice things but you can trick it into long tail and kind of big heavy content which, which has benefits. But that's, that's a different, different thing. It's not for, for the main website. The main website should better be very straightforward, easy, simple to, to understand for humans and artificial intelligence. Yep. Totally super scannable. One other quick thing I just thought of in terms of your testing and prioritizing book now versus book a tour is occupancy."
00:27:33,"So you might switch the priority. Right. Like if you're at nine. I'm just, you know I'm working with an operator in New Jersey and I was looking at their site yesterday and their occupancy is 90% on their offices and they have this 20 person training room that is really underutilized and so we need to make that like front and center. That's the priority. So the book a tour."
00:27:56,"Right. Might get deprioritized in that case because what the opportunity for revenue right now is really on demand. So. Yeah, yeah. And in many ways, in many ways the, the book now is hundred times more valuable than book a tour. Yeah. If you're starting to sell me Miro, your point is about the data. It's like. Well yeah, no, you go sorry, you not just have someone coming for a tour but they will pay for it."
00:28:32,"So you if, if someone goes through, through the booking process and buy a day pass. Yeah, book meeting room. I mean they obviously will getting a tour and, and the products and money, you get money from that. Yeah, yeah. And you're getting paid. So yeah, inevitably that's, that's so much, so much better. I mean that puts them the potential user in the funnel, directly down the funnel while the tour is up there in the prospect realm."
00:29:03,"You need to sell them much harder because they are directly experiencing part of the product. And of course from there you can start million marketing activities to upsell them to a private office or anything based on the information that you receive. Anyway you will know if this is a company a one time user freelancer. What type of company is using this meeting room? Are they local? Blah blah, blah."
00:29:34,"So you have a ton of Information that you can use for your marketing purposes to upsell them more workspace products. Right. Which is an important part of the sales funnel that a lot of operators are missing. I think that what do we do with the leads? What campaigns are we running to upsell? Right. Like running specials on virtual offices or meeting room packages or. So you're capturing that and that needs to go into your CRM and get used."
00:30:01,"Yeah, yeah. In our case, once this booking is made, that gets into the system and then it gets into. Into HubSpot. And now because we. We also reworked the HubSpot integration, we're just rolling version 3. It's really in the next couple weeks you'll get also the. All the details about the different products that they use right there in HubSpot which can further allow you to segment the customers, put them in the right."
00:30:30,"The right bucket and start. Start different marketing sequences for. Based on the type of products they used, which can further automate your entire marketing motion. Yeah. And so I would. For the listeners who are paying for HubSpot and not doing anything with it because that is super common. HubSpot's tricky for. For operators who don't have multiple sites because the free version you can do almost nothing with and then you're into the 600 to $800 a month version which I consistently hear people are using but paying for and not really using."
00:31:13,"So either stop using it and use something much simpler or pay somebody to set it up for you and set up these workflows which you can easily do with upwork or you can get a, you know, a contracted resource to do that for you and just get it set up and figure out some of those use cases. Yeah, fair point. I mean CRM implementations and overall there are so many HubSpot partners that can help, but it doesn't cost too much, but the outcome probably."
00:31:45,"Well, it'll be worth it. Yeah, exactly. The investment. I mean to your point, now that the e-commerce is so important and then the data's there, do something with it versus not. Hey there, I'm jumping in again. This time I'm speaking to those of you that are either getting ready to hire a community manager or who have a community manager and you would like to support their training and development."
00:32:14,"We know how challenging it can be for coworking space operators to create their own training and development material to support their community managers. And this is so important in terms of onboarding new community managers and supporting the growth of your existing community managers. So the platform is really around a Couple of things. One is access to a community of like minded folks. We have a very active slack group with really wonderful questions that are posed every single day and we find that's one of the biggest values."
00:32:52,"We have community managers from all over the world and this is an excellent group of community managers that have invested time and effort into getting better at that role and they are the kind of folks that you want your community manager to be by and hanging out with and they know their stuff or sometimes they don't and they ask questions and we help them out. So I'm in the group."
00:33:14,"We have coaches that are in the group to support them. So we love when they ask questions for things they need help with because the other aspect of the program is really around helping them get resources they need to make their jobs easier and to learn things that they can use in their role to be better at their job. So we provide some done for you resources like Google business posts, detailed event ideas, et cetera that they can just kind of grab and go and use."
00:33:45,"And we also provide monthly resources that add to our training library so they can do our certification and then we have a lot of electives that help them kind of get better at all the things that that go with the role. So the Our community managers wear a lot of hats. So we break our content into industry knowledge for new community managers, Community building operations, sales and marketing and leadership."
00:34:13,"So the leadership bucket is great for our more advanced community managers. We also virtual office and digital mail training and coffee training for anybody who needs to know how to use commercial coffee brewers. So we have some of the I'm just going to give you kind of a sampling of content that we have. So in our community building modules we have Hosting your first member events Building community with budget friendly events Member event swipe files Our sales and marketing modules we have tour training."
00:34:49,"We have the training on the full coworking sales funnel so they understand what that looks like. We have social media planning frameworks, we have what else do we have? Three simple steps to an Effective Marketing Newsletter these are just some of our samples. Ooh. These are some of our best utilized topics. Demystifying the process of letting your coworking members use your address for their Google business listing how to close a tour Operations modules, How to set up automations, how to do a new member onboarding audit simple ways to use AI to boost your productivity."
00:35:26,"We have over 40 courses in the program so we cover kind of higher level topics and then we also cover things that are timely like the CMRA updates, Google business updates, etc. So we get together monthly to do official training and we also host a best practice sharing call which is one of the fan favorites of the group and the Slack group. So if you have any questions at all about the program, don't hesitate to reach out."
00:35:57,"You can learn more and register at everything coworking.com forward/community manager. Now back to our episode. Okay, so, okay, we talked a little bit about website the We. So you brought up this terrifying topic about how demand gen is going to shift over time and maybe not in the next year or two years already. Yeah. I'm curious what you think. I mean Vero and I were talking about our chat GPT use cases."
00:36:28,"I do think it's hilarious that like my, I'm a pretty avid user and it's still amateur, I think. So I, you know, one of my sort of professional development plans is learn better how to use AI. But my little feed I started new chat about, oh, the laundry soap didn't come out of my new Lululemon sweatshirt. How do I get out to business strategy chats that I have with the voice app while I'm walking the dogs or whatever."
00:37:01,"It's incredible. And you mentioned, you know, you needed a new watch and you, you asked it for recommendations and boom. So people are searching differently. Yeah. Give us your, your thought on how that's going to impact how users find us and Google Ads and Websites and because Google Ads, I mean, that's my recommendation too to operators. Like if you're opening in a reasonably competitive market, you know, get, get a, you know, do a demand process with your Google Ads person."
00:37:31,"Use somebody like Ruben Lau who's an expert. But you know, ads are a pretty good lever to pull. And Facebook ads can work too. You're concerned that that's going to shift? Yeah. Tell me what you're thinking. Yeah, well, I mean, I'm not concerned. It's. It's happening. It's happening. It's here. Yeah. And we also were hoping so Google Ads works for every business. I mean more or less. If you, if you can measure the customer acquisition cost and you can you compare it to your lifetime value of the customer."
00:38:12,"So essentially how much we're making, if it makes sense, then it makes sense. You invest more, you get more. It's declining rapidly on its own. I mean, Google Ads on its own, it's kind of rapidly for everyone, including us. We're seeing it. Everyone is seeing it. SEO as well. Yeah, SEO and SEM. So search engine. Search engine Optimization, search engine marketing. Overall, Google on its own is declining fairly rapidly."
00:38:51,"I would say it's no surprise. I mean, you brought it up. I literally bought a smartwatch today entirely in ChatGPT. I didn't even leave it kind of there. I put my everything that I needed, unlike my Apple watch, I want something different. Bob likes playing extremely well. The thing recommended five options so well and explained so well why I need to buy one of them I just bought was."
00:39:26,"It was that simple. And, and of course this is, this is, this is hurting Google and overall the, the, the paid ads because otherwise if I go and search smart watches, blah blah, I'll get like five sponsored ads and then I probably will click some of them and then do whatever. So it takes so much time for you to go through that process through Google because you have to."
00:39:52,"Do you click multiple links or do you know, you hope you get some source like Wirecutter who's done the reviews. But I guess, I mean, that's a question though. I mean the models are pulling that content from somewhere. So yeah, what are, where do we need to show up for that to. Yeah, so I'll get to your question, but one step back. So, but ads in general work."
00:40:19,"So Google Ads on its own works still. It's in decline, but it's still working. So as long as it's working, get it. That's totally right. That's obviously not the case. But overall there's so many other ways and there are display ads that work really well and there are such good tools to actually utilize where you can run ads across so many channels, social and other websites. So you may land on different websites now in many different ways, but when you land on the website actually you may still be served with a display ad that's relatable to you and that makes sense to you and that may still be, hey, do you need a meeting room for your team?"
00:41:15,"Like more retargeting? Yeah, yeah, retargeting. And there are actually very good tools nowadays to manage that. So ads in general work and for your e-commerce strategy to work, you need to utilize ads one way or another. Unless you have an extremely strong brand and somehow magically you get like hundreds of thousands of users a month, which doesn't happen for normal people. Yeah, and even Industrious runs ads."
00:41:52,"I mean they're opening near me and I'm getting biggest spend on Google, I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there is a good reason why they do that, of course. I mean it works. Yeah, Industrious, we work everyone's doing that. So you need to do it as well. I mean it works, it converts. As long as you have this also this part of the story that people can actually transact."
00:42:20,"I mean at the end of the day people can't. Right? So however they find you, if they're looking for a meeting room and they can't buy it on your website when they get there because they will. Or you mentioned integrations with maps or you know, I mean, so your job is to sort of figure out how people find coworking space operators and then be there for that transaction."
00:42:46,"But back to, and this is not necessarily your area of expertise but like your Watch example, I mean that model was pulling from other content, right? Like articles online who have reviewed the like it's not making it up, it is pulling from the Watch's website or editors who have written about the Watch or reviews on the Watch. Like so that stuff have to, has to exist, right? You, you still want Google reviews, you still want content on your site."
00:43:14,"So we even want more Google. Yeah, more of everything. So it's a little bit different than the previous kind of very pure search engine optimization where you just try to win whatever keyword which is very technical and kind of trying to game the system a little bit. You cannot easily game the LLM, the large language models. Of course, I mean people will try and they eventually will. Some will."
00:43:44,"But, but you're right, I mean the LLM will look at more or less everything and will heavily weigh into Google reviews, all sorts of reviews, map reviews, whatever the websites there are that actually compare watches and even it probably watched Most of the YouTube videos on that topic. Knows exactly what's been talk to Content marketing is still critical. It's. Yeah, you must be out there, your brand must be out there."
00:44:20,"And I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll throw in actually a tool that can be extremely helpful. So HubSpot launched a free product called AI Check Checker. Something. I'll drop it in a moment but it's, it's completely free. So you go there and you type your brand and you get extremely good information. And the reports from the three main AIs at the moment, ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini. Currently these are the three options it will give you extremely good report how the AI sees you and the details, what you can actually do to see you better and what's your share of voice."
00:45:09,"And it's really good. Wow. Yeah, interesting. Yeah. And we'll see a lot more of that. I mean There are also paid tools doing that. It's not easy to exactly tell what the LLM the AI is doing, but you can kind of guess what actually is doing and, and kind of reverse engineer what's happening behind the scenes and, but HubSpot did really good job with this. So I, I, I suggest you all go there."
00:45:43,"And you're a HubSpot fan? I am, yeah. No, no, it's helpful because I have some resistance towards it for smaller operators because probably just because they tend to underutilize it and it's a big investment. You know, when you're, you're looking at a P and L and 6 to $800 of it is the CRM. If you're not using it and getting an ROI out of it, that's a big expense."
00:46:05,"The team stack as you know, adds up pretty quickly and you know, hits the margin. So you got to get an ROI out of it. Definitely. Well, I mean HubSpot was obviously started with the smallest of the smallest companies being their focus. Now it's certainly going up market and, and all that. So it's inevitable that there will be newer, simpler, easier CRM systems for smaller operators. And that's totally great."
00:46:34,"Yep. But not necessarily the same investment in tools. I'll have to see what you know. Yeah, because I mean HubSpot is such a broad platform. You know, as you mentioned earlier using that phrase. Okay, Miro, I'm over time with you probably because we had such a long pre chat at the beginning of our conversation. Okay. So we're going to provide some links to some of the things Miro mentioned, certainly the Growth Hub."
00:47:02,"Any other kind of themes you want to leave us with before we depart? Yeah, I mean I think that just to probably to summarize it, we didn't touch upon the pricing but the ownership to chat about that as well. We're experimenting with how to specifically back to the Growth Hub thing. Obviously it needs to be priced somehow we settled at the moment on a commission slash take rate that we feel like makes sense and it's on par with, with the industry."
00:47:41,"If we call an industry. There's, there aren't that many, there aren't that many options. But also it's, it's important to play fair. We are a platform and, and we need to play fair. We cannot and we should not use bad tactics to, to get customers and kill competitors so that then we, we can charge. So in general it has to have a price and, and it's, we believe that aligning the end result between us and, and, and the operator makes sense because we do want to make everything possible to get that booking through."
00:48:22,"And, and this way with a take rate, we, we, we are equally incentivized to work extremely hard for every single booking. So that's why I take rate. What's going to be the number? Honestly, we don't know. We'll figure it. And it's normal for an emerging industry to start a little higher over time. These percentage points will go much lower over time. That's how it goes. That's how it happened with pretty much every other e-commerce platform."
00:48:53,"So it will settle somewhere at some point. So, and yeah, my, my final words are just invest in, in marketing in general and you'll see better outcomes. And certainly tools are part of it. They might feel expensive, but everything goes down to roi. Return, investment. Is it worth it? If you see it's working, then it's great. It's working. Use more of it. Totally. And right, but, and you need to be looking at your analytics."
00:49:28,"Right. Because I, you know, I would suggest test the growth hub and you see on your end it works. There's an roi. But when people make it easier and, and have less friction for booking, people book more. So when you're thinking about it as a tool like that's why you use a CRM, because you get more leads, you follow or well, you, you close more leads that way."
00:49:53,"Right. It's like any platform or tool that you pay for, it's an investment because there's an, there's a better outcome. So yep, look at it that way. And to your point, if it's that doesn't work, then don't do it. But also, you know that your whole sales funnel and I think you were, you know, making this point earlier, it's like, look, if you have a lead and it gets to your website but it can't transact well, if you've paid for that lead either through content marketing or ads, then you've just wasted money."
00:50:22,"Like that whole user experience needs to be optimized. So, and if they can't transact well on your site or easily and they abandon and go to somebody else's site again, you've paid, you've paid in many different ways for that lead and then they leave and you only get so many leads. Right. In our industry, it's local, it's, you don't have a national market, I mean, except for people who are traveling."
00:50:46,"So those leads need to be optimized and the math, I should, you know, Do a little math. But examples sometime. But I mean, when you. The. It's tiny percentage points that make a big difference in the revenue. Right. In terms of conversion. Like if you're getting leads in and then, you know, you're converting, you know, 2% versus versus 3%. Like that's actually a big difference in revenue, especially if it's recurring, if it's on, you know, and, or if it's a lot of on demand leads that are bouncing because they can't do what they want."
00:51:17,"So it, the whole experience matters a lot more than I think. I'm always surprised when I do the math, even though I know it. Right. It's like it matters a lot more than, than intuitively. You think it does. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, Miro, I could talk to you forever. I have to go do school drop off, so gotta go. You have to go home to your two lovely children and have dinner with your family, hopefully."
00:51:43,"Thanks for, yeah, thanks for doing this. Thanks for all the work that your team's doing. I'm excited. I think overall in our industry we're just seeing a lot of technology advancements from office R and D, from a census, from a lot of folks out there who are devoting their, you know, careers are accelerating. I can, I can say that for sure. Things are accelerating for good. So yeah, products are getting better every day and that's, that's very exciting."
00:52:12,"Yeah, it totally is because the world, to your point, is moving really quickly and we need to keep up and the. As the industry continues to grow and it's a way for, it's, you know, it's all sort of in the spirit of or in the end goal of helping more people use Flex and helping them transact and helping operators make money. So that's, I mean, I know we all have."
00:52:34,"You're wise. But we need to make money to stay open and to. Yeah, we need to be very profitable and have a healthy 20, 30% profit margin. I mean this is really where the industry needs to land. Yeah. Can't get there without. The only way to get to 20, 30% profit margin is to really well utilize all of your resources at all times. 100% soon. Yes. So your on demand bookings cannot be sub optimized in order to get to that margin."
00:53:08,"You got to be rocking and rolling on all fronts. So. Yeah. So I'm grateful that the technology is enabling people to hit those margins. So thanks. Okay. Until next time. Yeah. Thank you for listening to today's episode. If you like what you, you heard. Tell a friend, hit that subscribe button and leave us a rating and review. If you'd like to learn more about our education and coaching programs, head over to everythingcoworking.com"
00:53:37," We'll see you next week."
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