Case Study: The *Viral* Workhorse Holiday Blog

Workhorse was our first Edmonds client and I love telling our origin story because it’s a warm and fuzzy.

With an infant strapped to my person while I (Whitney) pushed a stroller around my new town of Edmonds, WA, I yearned for a local client. I didn’t want to drive to meetings in Seattle much anymore and I didn’t thrive on fully virtual teams unless they were unicorns. I romanticized meeting clients at local restaurants or at their offices overlooking the ferry landing.

Then, one cold winter day in 2019, I got a new Instagram follow: an account full of vibrant Seahawks and running horses photos that said it was a coworking space but had a broken link when I clicked the URL in its bio.

I sent a message: “Do you need help with marketing?” I asked.

“Yes! When can you come in?” the wonderful wizard of Oz replied from the other end of our conversation.

We set up time to meet. We met a few times, actually. The second time I had to bring both kids (both of whom pooped and cried in quick succession) and I was hired to essentially catch all that needed catching in this new business concept none of us had ever worked on before, a coworking community for local entrepreneurs and remote workers.

An ever-evolving scope of work

In startups, everyone pitches in. The ironic beauty of the pandemic for Workhorse was that our opening and closing the same week of March 2020 gave us extra time to figure out our concept, pivot to accommodate our members’ changing needs, and build awareness in the community.

Originally, I counted my hours and spent a lot of time working the front desk. But, anyone who knows me knows I am not a patient or accommodating customer service provider when I’m faced with entitled whiners and coworking spaces attract a lot of those.

I reminded the owners often that the business would suffer with me chasing people down the hall with the dishes they left in the sink expecting me to wash, so as soon as they hired friendlier front desk staff, I went hard on Workhorse’s marketing.

Local social media, blog, email, and SMS marketing

With my rising out of the customer service weeds, I was able to spend more time on Workhorse’s marketing, locking myself in my writing cave to post about us all the places I could—across social media platforms, on our owned channels like our blog and email, and playing with SMS marketing (one of the most successful communication channels for Workhorse to this day).

From the beginning, and because that’s where he found me, the Workhorse founder loved floating one of my trigger terms around. He wanted us to go viral, and he meant on Instagram.

Workhorse goes viral

After five years of passionate debate and another work handoff—this time, I handed off Instagram marketing to my friend and frequent collaborator Gillian—I started consistently posting two blogs a month for Workhorse.

About ten months ago, I asked Eric on my team to write a series of events and holiday-related blogs for Workhorse (in between these, we’d post Member Spotlights highlighting the Workhorse community, something I started around when Workhorse opened).

And around October, that “9 Work Christmas Party Activities for Adults” blog started going “viral.” Check out what that looks like site traffic-wise below.

All traffic up 413% and organic traffic up 622%! Unreal! As you can see from the image, Google was the largest referral source.

Check out the growth if you look at month over month just one week later. All traffic up 400%, organic up 482%. Still buh-nanas.

And guess what? No one had to dance, find a trending audio, or point at phrases on a screen. It all happened from publishing high-quality content people were searching for and waiting. We didn’t promote the blog in emails, on social, or at all.

A local business gone global

For a local business like Workhorse to be getting that much organic traffic in a month is absolutely wild.

Now, Workhorse’s goal is to serve local entrepreneurs and remote workers, but does five-figure web traffic hurt, especially if that traffic is leading more local people to our events offerings?

No way.

I started joking with the owner about how we’ve finally gone viral—not in the way he wanted us to, but viral nonetheless. He smiles and we move on to the next item on our agenda.

As for me, I’m going to relish this virality for a long, long time. If you read one of my previous blogs about writing your holiday content early, you may have noticed I love the idea of writing about key, annual dates early so your content is ready when people start searching, but I didn’t anticipate how much traffic that single blog would drive.

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