Fishburners

Summary

Fishburners is the birthplace of many Sydney Startups over the past 2 decades - being a coworking space and startup community located in the heart of Sydney CBD.

It offers other benefits including financial support, mentorship, networking events, and state of the art facilities. It’s main streams of revenue are:

Coworking Desk Memberships
Event Space Hire
Founders Hub (digital membership)

Our Roles

Paid Digital Advertising
SEO Strategy and Execution
Guidance - Lead team on content creation & leveraging their existing network

Challenge

We started working with Fishburners as a client in early-mid 2020. This was during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, which was a challenging time for Fishburners given their main target market was people looking for a physical space to work in, or host a physical event in.

Insights

Our strategy was to shift the primary marketing focus from coworking desks to the digital/virtual offering called Founders Hub. The idea behind this was that the majority of Fishburners’ target market of founders and startups would temporarily not be looking for a physical desk, but would still be looking for all the additional benefits that come with being a Fishburners member – access to the startup community, networking, mentorship, startup resources and more.

Solution

Focus on your audience, tug on their emotions, provide value and be there when they need it.

Our goal was to increase brand awareness and increase web traffic primarily to the Founders Hub page, which would in turn lead to more conversions.

Building the creative around a digital coworking space membership was an interesting challenge, given the fact that it isn’t the most intuitive product and communicating what exactly is included in the offering (as opposed to a coworking desk membership). We made sure to make the ad creative have a good balance between having the right amount of information and being aesthetically pleasing.

After doing some extensive keyword research as a starting point to assess exactly what our target customers search for, we built out several ad campaigns on Google Ads, Facebook & Instagram. We spoke with internal stakeholders, current members, potential targets to understand their needs and key problems that any of the three services Fishburners offered could solve. The budget was entirely focused on Founders Hub campaigns in the beginning, but we allocated small portions of the budget to the other revenue streams as well, once the pandemic situation began to ease and opportunities arose.

We decided to split the available budget and aim to achieve different goals with different ad types:

Video ads on YouTube, to provide a lot of information about Founders Hub in an interactive way
Display/Banner ads on Google, Facebook & Instagram to reach the large target audience and increase brand awareness for Founders Hub
Search ads on Google, to generate high quality leads for all revenue streams

We also made sure to put conversion tracking in place, using several platforms such as Google Analytics, Google Ads and HubSpot, in order to accurately track how effective the different ad types are in achieving our goals. On a monthly basis, we would prepare a detailed ad performance report and have a meeting with the client to assess the ad performance and strategise the changes required and next steps.

Along with a digital ad strategy by which we wanted to get relatively quicker results, we were also looking for longer term organic growth by making consistent SEO improvements to the Fishburners website. The aim was to increase the organic ranking for identified important keywords over time, in order to generate free traffic to the website. We implemented the following:

Metadata update - including relevant keywords in the page titles, meta descriptions and H1s for all key pages of the website
Adding relevant internal links & CTA buttons throughout the website
Including relevant keywords on the key landing pages on the website
Reviewing the content available and using key pieces to drive traffic and awareness
Leveraging partnerships to get greater awareness but also provide relevant traffic and backlink opportunities.

We are also currently working with the client to do a complete makeover of the Founders Hub and Coworking Space landing pages. Based on best practice guidelines, we are making changes to both the layout and content, in order to build an aesthetic looking, clear and easy to understand offering which should lead to more conversions.

The communication strategy was relatively simple. Use the existing communication channels (Slack, Email, Social Media, onsite signage, etc) to reinforce that Fishburners is the place to begin your startup.

Messaging focused on a lot of the existing messages but we placed key pieces of content into all channels highlighting what you can learn at Fishburners to encourage trial of the virtual membership.

The client already leveraged ebooks, trials, site tours to capture leads so the focus was on establishing the value of the product, its uniqueness and what exactly was available.

Results

Not only did we drive people to connect digitally with the Fishburners team and their website, we drove a 169% increase in website traffic and over 500 new potential leads and members during the first two months. This helped Fishburners re-engage with their wider community to drive revenue growth at a very challenging time.

Stats

Total Web traffic

In the period July – Aug 2020, as compared to the previous period Feb – Jun 2020, we had the following results reported from Google Analytics:

169%

169% increase in website visitors

125%

125% in new users to the website

Ad Performance

Over a two month period we had the following results:

1M+

The ads received over a million impressions, which was key to increasing brand awareness

~40,000

The ads generated approximately 40,000 visits to the website

7,500

The ads generated over 7,500 video views

500+

The ads resulted in over 500 conversions (a request to book a tour or submit a contact form)

We can confirm that results have continued with similar growth and slow improvements on key organic rankings throughout the rest of 2020 and have met the client’s objectives.

Feedback

The work that Geoff and the Passionberry team deliver is high quality and fantastic given the budget. They work with lean startups and organisations so understand that everything we need should be cost effective and ROI focused.

Their depth of knowledge and ability to make the most of our own team’s skills and resources and compliment that with their team and network of freelancers means we get more campaigns away of a higher quality in a way that engages the entire team. They have the right mix of experienced heads and young marketers to ensure they have a finger on the pulse of what's new while making sure it meets the strategy we’re working towards.

Overall, they are an agency that we trust and a partner not just for our marketing but our business overall. You’d be lucky to work with them.

Nicole O'Brien

CEO