I remember standing outside a business park in the rain, handing leaflets to people who were doing everything they could to avoid eye contact with me.
This was marketing at MWB. We called it street marketing, which made it sound more strategic than it was. In practice, it meant turning up somewhere with a stack of printed flyers, a smile and the quiet hope that someone, somewhere, might actually read one before putting it in the nearest bin.
That was 2010. Today, I advise flexible workspace operators on AI strategy, automation and digital customer acquisition. The contrast is not lost on me.
The Analogue Years
Before Google dominated everything, workspace marketing was largely local, physical and relationship-driven. You networked. You knocked on doors. You ran promotions with local businesses and hoped the local paper might give you a mention.
There was something to be said for it. You got to know your local market properly. You understood who your customers were because you actually spoke to them. And there was a certain satisfaction in filling a building through sheer persistence and initiative.
It was also, by any modern measure, almost entirely unmeasurable. You handed out 500 leaflets and had no idea whether any of them led to an enquiry. You ran a local radio ad and crossed your fingers. Attribution was a concept that hadn't yet arrived in most workspace marketing departments.
The Digital Revolution
When Google PPC and SEO started to take hold, it changed everything. Suddenly you could put your workspace in front of someone the moment they searched for office space in your city. You could measure clicks, enquiries and conversions. You could see, with some precision, what was working and what wasn't.
CRM systems arrived. Marketing automation followed. Email campaigns replaced printed newsletters. Websites became the primary shop window, and the quality of your digital presence started to matter as much as the quality of your building.
For operators who embraced it, the results were significant. For those who didn't, the gap between them and their competitors started to widen in ways that were difficult to close.
The digital revolution also brought a new problem: volume. More channels meant more content to produce, more platforms to manage and more metrics to track. Activity started to be confused with effectiveness, which is a trap that plenty of workspace operators still fall into.
The AI Revolution
What's happening now feels like a bigger shift again.
AI tools are changing the way marketing content is created, how customer research is conducted, how prospecting is approached and how operators analyse their own performance. Tasks that once took hours can now be done in minutes. Content that required a specialist can now be produced by a small team with the right tools and a clear brief.
That's genuinely useful. I use AI tools every day and they've made me more productive. But I'd push back on the idea that AI is a marketing strategy. It isn't. It's a set of tools, and tools are only as good as the thinking behind them.
An AI can write a blog post. It can't tell you whether that blog post is the right thing to be doing for your business right now. An AI can generate a hundred social media captions. It can't tell you whether social media is where your prospective customers are actually spending their time.
Commercial judgement, customer understanding and clear positioning still have to come from somewhere. At the moment, that somewhere is still a human being.
What Hasn't Changed
Sixteen years in, the things that actually drive results in workspace marketing are remarkably consistent.
You need to understand who your customers are and what they actually care about. You need to give them a compelling reason to choose you over the alternatives. You need to make it easy for them to enquire and to buy. And you need to build relationships that generate repeat business and referrals.
None of that is new. None of it is particularly complicated. And none of it has been replaced by technology, however sophisticated that technology has become.
The operators who generate the most direct business aren't necessarily the ones with the biggest marketing budgets or the most sophisticated tech stacks. They're the ones who are clearest about their positioning, most consistent in their communication and most focused on commercial outcomes rather than marketing activity.
The Danger of Confusing Activity with Effectiveness
This is worth dwelling on, because it's a mistake I see regularly.
More content doesn't mean more customers. More channels doesn't mean more reach. More automation doesn't mean more efficiency. If the underlying strategy is unclear, or the positioning is weak, or the messaging doesn't resonate — then doing more of it faster just means failing at greater speed.
Marketing should ultimately be judged by commercial outcomes. Enquiries. Viewings. Signed licences. Revenue. Everything else is a means to that end, not an end in itself.
The Opportunity Ahead
One thing I find genuinely encouraging is the opportunity this creates for smaller, independent workspace operators.
For most of the last decade, the larger operators had a structural advantage. They had bigger budgets, dedicated marketing teams and the resources to invest in technology that smaller businesses couldn't afford.
That gap is narrowing. The tools available to a single-site independent operator today are, in many respects, the same tools available to a business with fifty locations. The playing field isn't level, but it's considerably flatter than it was.
The operators who will make the most of that opportunity are the ones who combine modern tools with sound marketing fundamentals. Not one or the other. Both.
The tools have changed. The technology has changed. The speed has certainly changed. But marketing still comes down to understanding people and giving them a good reason to choose you.