Hearing lots of chatter amongst groups of coaches and my ears always prick up when it comes to marketing chatter. The most recent to reach my ears was something that was said by a coach who had attended one of my workshops around why coaches need a niche and how to find one. The coach in question feels that this marketing work isn’t necessary, because actually, all that’s needed is one bloody good press release, and the clients will come.
If only it was that simple!
Clients Don’t Buy Your Story!
No matter how many times you’ve been told it, telling your story doesn’t help you to find clients in big enough numbers to make an actual coaching business. Personal storytelling doesn’t build rapport in the way that coaches are led to believe that it will. Telling the story of your new coaching business via a press release isn’t any more effective. How do people reading it know what you do? How is what they’re reading relevant to them?
The short answer is that it’s not.
There’s always the occasional client who can be found by sharing your personal story in the right place at the right time. However, financially secure coaching businesses are not built on ‘occasional’ clients.
Coaches really want the concept of ‘sharing your story is all the marketing you’ll need’ to be true. Of course they do! Sharing your personal story is easy. It’s comfortable and it doesn’t actually require anything other than the time to share it. If it actually worked, however, that 82% failure rate wouldn’t be true, would it?
Sharing your ‘new coaching business’ story is equally easy – although there may be the expense of paying someone to write the copy – and it’s equally ineffective in the long run.
Business Development Is Not Coaching
Marketing your coaching business requires a different skill set than the one you learned at coach training school. There you learned the skills you need to fulfil the delivery side of your business. The skills coaches lack are the ones that they need to create the opportunity to actually DO that delivery!
Creating a financially viable coaching business requires skills that cut through the noise of every day life and attract the attention of exactly the kind of client that you want to work with.
Is 2022 the time to make the focus of your personal development to learn business development that actually works? Always happy to chat, here’s my diary.