"I'm a great coach and I'm dedicated to helping people - I just don't know how to get clients" is a familiar wail I hear.
Because for nearly EVERYONE starting their own online business - there's a rushing realisation of "oh shit, the buck stops with me and it's up to ME to win new business" and if we'd come from corporate there'd have been an entire team whose job it was solely to do that - or we came from an industry in which "winning business" wasn't high on the list of priorities because it was an essential service!
And suddenly here you are.
You've got an online business, you know damned well you want to work for yourself, have the flexibility to make your own schedule - whether that's because you want to work LESS, have less responsibility - or because you choose to spend your time elsewhere (children/hobbies/reading good books/eating cakes 😁).
And it turns out if you build it (your website) and distribute a few flyers (social media) then they actually won't automatically come.
Listen. I've been there. Afraid to leave the house or my phone for a second in case I missed a call from someone desperate to work with me. (Reader: they didn't call and I had to re-think my entire strategy! - and more importantly - stop passing up things I wanted to do in my personal life just in case I missed a call! Tip: Don't publish your phone number - you don't want to live at the beck & call of phone-calls from strangers and your marketing strategy should be working for your benefit - not tying you to the desk/phone!).
As a coach your job is to demonstrate why YOU are the one to work with and not your competitor.
The ONLY way you can do that is by creating and distributing content - because otherwise you're not giving your potential clients any clear reason as to why they should work with you - and, if they're shopping solely based upon price then they'll likely be shitty clients anyway. If you're coaching - and likely to be doing 1:1 coaching when you start out - then that's a lot of time & effort invested in to someone who ONLY chose to work with you because of your price - and not because you were the person they simply couldn't NOT work with. BIG difference!
Marketing Strategies for Coaches
But there are leagues of content.
At the bottom we have "Monday Motivation/Tuesday Tips/Wednesday Wins" - aka - imma fucking die of boredom or get in the sea! 😂
Then we have brief ditties on Social Media, be they a few motivational paragraphs, low-quality information or short instructional videos.
All good in theory - but just bite-sized pieces of information for any potential clients - and because you're limited in quantity you can release in any one go - it's hard to get any substantial message out there.
Plus of course that stuff disappears with the scroll...
Get Coaching Clients to Come to You!
For sustainability and longevity in your marketing strategy, you need to implement an Inbound Marketing Strategy involving self-hosted content. What that means is, your content is hosted on your OWN website, so it's not at the mercy of any algorithm and also remains your proprietary content - most people don't seem to realise that once you upload anything to a plethora of other channels, that it becomes "owned" by that company!
What it comes down to is what comes under the umbrella of "Blogging" - whether that's posts such as this, reports, case-studies, white papers, demonstrations or whatever else you might be able to exhibit to demonstrate your expertise - the point is, you are showing that actually you do know what you're talking about and that you're NOT just full of blether & bluster!
Because for every one of you who REALLY KNOWS HER STUFF, there are 10 others who think it's a piece of piss and post some god-awful "pseudo-inspirational lame-as-fuck staring into the middle-distance" post - and I'm guessing you don't even WANT to have to attempt to "compete" with that.
So to differentiate yourself - instead of taking your "hustle" to the people - you bring YOUR people to you... via your blog, your website, your optin + your ethos.
When you start doing that - that's when you KNOW you've stepped up and have brought the game to you rather than chasing around with the other STEPFORDs. 😉
