I speak to dozens of coaches every week. Quite often, some of them have spent thousands of pounds on Facebook ads before they find me. They’re broke, confused, and convinced of one of two things – either the coaching profession is saturated, or marketing simply doesn’t work.
Neither is true.
The Facebook Ads Trap
Typically, a coach creates a coaching programme. They’re excited about it because they’ve invested time and money into their ICF accreditation and now they need clients.
Someone tells them Facebook ads are the answer. They set up a campaign, select their budget, and watch their money disappear without a single sale. For the record that money can be hundreds or even thousands of pounds.
The problem isn’t Facebook ads themselves, the problem is timing.
You Think You Understand Marketing (But You Probably Don’t)
One of the challenges we face as coaches is that no one knows what we do, but they think they do and they’re wrong. The same can be said about coaches and marketing.
Most coaches believe marketing means casting their net wide so everyone knows about their new business, but that’s not what marketing is about. Put simply, if it’s not focused, it’s not marketing. Marketing is about focus, ruthless and uncomfortable focus.
When I ask coaches who their target audience is, I hear things like mid-life women or anyone who’s struggling with anxiety or people in transition, and these aren’t target audiences. They’re demographic groups so broad that Facebook has no idea who to show your ads to, which means you’ve created what I call a “flabby focus”, and Facebook will happily drain your budget trying to figure out who might possibly be interested.
What You Should Do Instead
Before you spend a single pound on advertising, you need to do the foundational work, and that means choosing a target audience with whom you have credibility, not everyone who might benefit from coaching, but people who will actually listen to you because you understand their world.
Then, you need to create an ideal client avatar from the demographics and psychographics of that group, getting specific about what’s important to them, where they work, and the challenges that keep them awake at night, which working with you might resolve.
You need to make sure they can a) afford professional rates, b) are easy to find, and c) have a problem that coaching can resolve, because all three factors matter and if you miss one, then they’re not ideal. What not being ideal means is that your marketing won’t generate enquiries or business.
You should start curating an audience of those people on LinkedIn, which obviously isn’t the only platform out there but is definitely the one that all professional coaches should have a profile on and the best place to start.
Once all that work is done, you can start the business of marketing. You need to become visible to this audience with a message that speaks to the challenge they’re facing with empathy and understanding, rather than with generic transform your life words.
The Real Cost Of Getting This Wrong
When coaches jump into Facebook ads too early, they don’t just lose money – they lose confidence and conclude the market is saturated or that marketing doesn’t work, and then they give up on building a sustainable coaching practice.
The coaching profession isn’t saturated – it’s that a generic message simply isn’t reaching the right people because you haven’t done the work to identify who those people actually are.
What To Do Right Now
If you’re a coach wondering about Facebook ads or any other form of marketing, I’d like to encourage you to do something different – submit your specific marketing question to my free service Pick Sarah’s Brains. I use these questions to create targeted content that addresses real challenges coaches face.
Recently, a coach asked me What is the cheapest but most effective way to reach my target niche on Facebook? How much do sponsored ads cost and are they worth the investment? It’s the wrong question, but it is quite a common one.
Submit your question and ask me about your target audience, your current approach, or where you’re stuck, and I’ll use it to create content that helps you and dozens of other coaches facing the same challenges.
Please stop throwing money at Facebook ads and start doing the foundational marketing work that actually builds a sustainable coaching practice, because your future clients are out there, but they can’t find you if you’re shouting into a crowded room instead of speaking directly to them.