Co-Working Space

The age of co-working spaces is upon us. This flexible approach to business life has grown exponentially in just the past few years, driven by the boom in startups, entrepreneurialism, and remote workers.

The co-working market now has more than 7,000 players across the world offering a huge range of different types of space, locations and facilities.The growth of the co-working movement has been powered by technology, most pertinently, the mobile worker. With the onset of mobile devices, these workers can be located anywhere, creating presentations on laptops, using tablets to review documents, and relying on smart phones to quickly reply to emails. Historically, in the rush to get their spaces up and running, many co-working players were forced to hastily extend office WiFi access to their new patrons, often by extending whatever legacy infrastructure was already in place within the venue. This approach clearly paid dividends initially as co-working gathered pace, but as the market has become more and more commoditized, simply offering basic office WiFi connectivity is not necessarily enough for co-working players to continue attracting new members and increasing revenue.

Making the most of office WiFi

Deploying office WiFi is a quick and easy way to reach members. It gives providers a centralized hub from which to promote their story to guests, to market the latest offers, and to provide other essential information about the space, from opening hours to any building maintenance information, policies regarding inviting guests and so forth. Everyone who logs onto the office WiFi gets taken to the hub before being granted access to the wider web, giving the provider a captive audience with which to engage. For the newest member of the co-working space, this portal could serve as a place to promote their business. Similarly, if some of the businesses located on-site are running networking events, the WiFi platform acts as an ideal place to highlight the gatherings and garner further local interest.

Co-working office providers need to ensure they’re using their office WiFi to capture more meaningful information about their members, this can include frequency of visits, time spent online etc. – and generate insights that can be fed back into the marketing mix to further drive personalized promotions and triggered campaigns.