I’ve been reflecting on a bunch of stuff and I’ve come to a conclusion about good marketing.
It’s mostly around the fact that coaches still feel that marketing is grubby/grabby and pushy, icky….. (insert your favourite work for extremely distasteful)
The thing is that good marketing is both effective and comfortable, and I have been scratching my head about why more coaches don’t realise this. The reason that I’m scratching my head is that I have clearly demonstrated over and over and over again that coaches can market very effectively and in a way that’s comfortable for them by teaching dozens of coaches a year how to do it. They have implemented what I’ve taught and they’re rocking their coaching businesses.
So why do coaches still insist that it is distasteful? I have been puzzled about this for ages.
Then it occurred to me – it is invisible to everyone apart from the audience it’s aimed at. Coaches who don’t understand what good marketing is simply don’t even see the great marketing that The Coaching Revolution coaches post – because it’s not aimed at them!
It’s Not Distasteful!
The thing about effective marketing is that it’s aimed at a very specific target audience. There are no Coaching Revolution clients who have coaches as their target audience and so other coaches simply don’t see the effort – because it’s not aimed at them. Because they don’t see good examples of coaches marketing themselves and they only see shouty coaches marketing, the myth that it is distasteful continues.
I had a conversation with an MCC recently who told me that marketing is all ‘smoke and mirrors’. She couldn’t be more inaccurate if she tried!
Let me give you a couple of examples.
Good Marketing Examples
Amy Wilkinson is one of our clients. She joined us at the beginning of last year to learn how to market her coaching business. Her target audience is women in the food industry and she speaks to them consistently via posts in LinkedIn and an award-winning podcast (to name just a couple of things she does) neither of which she had before she started working with me. Amy has built an amazing coaching business because she has a target audience and a focused marketing message.
Sarah Clein is one of our clients. She works with mid-life women who work in the public sector. She now has a very focused marketing message and it speaks directly to the kind of women she works with. The way she markets her coaching business is not shouty or grubby and it’s very effective. Better yet, it’s comfortable.
Rebecca Amin is another coach we helped. Again, her focused messages speak to a very specific group of women. Women who have returned to work following maternity leave to discover that the job that once gave them joy is now strangling them. Again, it’s successful marketing and it’s not shouty, or attention-seeking. It’s comfortable and effective.
Invisible Marketing
What I mean when I say invisible marketing is that it’s invisible to other coaches. It’s absolutely not invisible to the intended audience. And that’s how it should be!
Good, effective marketing isn’t loud, shouty and uncomfortable. It is extremely focused, quiet and incredibly consistent.
If you want to grow a coaching business, perhaps we should talk? This is a link to my diary. A conversation with me costs nothing and could be the best decision you make all year!