We see other coaches posting on LinkedIn and we shudder. The humble-bragging about qualifications, the ‘I’m so humbled by this feedback’ posts, and the oversharing of deeply personal struggles. It makes us uncomfortable just reading it, and the thought of having to do the same thing ourselves feels deeply inauthentic.
So we don’t market at all. We convince ourselves that if marketing requires us to be that version of ourselves – performative, oversharing, constantly talking about the wonderfulness of our credentials – then we’d rather not bother.
The thing is, what you’re looking at isn’t actually marketing. It’s just posting on LinkedIn, and posting and marketing are not the same thing.
What We Think We Have to Do
Many of us have been told we need to share our story to build rapport. This advice has led to what I call ‘bleeding all over LinkedIn’ – uncomfortable-to-read posts where coaches lay themselves bare across social media, sharing every personal struggle and vulnerability. These posts always get lots of engagement from other coaches saying ‘you’re so brave to be this vulnerable! However, what’s interesting is the fact that the engagement is almost entirely from other coaches. What I mean is that it’s not from potential clients.
We also think we need to talk about our qualifications endlessly, listing every credential, every course we’ve taken, every methodology we’ve studied. We think we need to position ourselves as experts by talking about how much we know about coaching and the superiority of our particular qualification. The reason that reading this kind of stuff feels inauthentic is that, frankly, it is.
Talking endlessly about our qualifications isn’t effective marketing, because nobody cares about our qualifications. We care, of course, we care very much indeed (and they are an essential part of being a coach in my opinion) but our potential clients do not. The vast majority of people have no idea what we do, let alone what our qualifications mean. That doesn’t seem to stop many of us from talking about them, though.
To be fair, some clients do care. Public sector organisations often care because they have boxes to tick and our qualifications can make up part of that. Interestingly, barely any of our coaches have ever been asked about their qualifications – even those who work in corporate settings.
What Marketing Actually Is
Marketing a coaching business isn’t about you at all – breath a sigh of relief, because it’s not about self-promotion at all. It’s about choosing a focus – a specific target audience or niche (those terms are synonymous) – and talking to that group about challenges they’re struggling with that working with you can help to resolve.
Most coaches resist this idea because they don’t understand two things. First, that niching isn’t about their coaching delivery – they can still coach anyone who comes their way. Second, that choosing a focus is the difference between success and failure for any coach without monetisable credibility.
When coaches do have a clear target audience and focus, what they write about looks completely different. They’re talking to a specific group of people about real problems, demonstrating their knowledge and understanding of the situation. Other coaches often don’t even recognise this as marketing because they rarely see it. The reason they rarely see it is that coaches who are marketing well have removed other coaches from their connections.
A significant portion of marketing work involves curating an audience of people who resemble the type of individuals you want to work with. Most coaches welcome the opportunity to work with people who are not coaches, so they deliberately build connections with their actual target audience rather than maintaining large networks of other coaches.
Why This Feels So Hard to Believe
We get stuck in the delivery side of our businesses. Most of us believed that our coaching skills equalled a coaching business, that 100% of the skills we need, we learned at coach training school. The truth is that when we complete our training, we have 50% of the skills we need – the delivery skills. The other skill set we need, which coaches don’t often have, is the ‘creating the opportunity to do the delivery’ skills – client acquisition skills.
It takes some time to get our heads around the idea that niching sits on the opposite side of our business to our delivery. That whilst we may market to one particular target audience, we can take advantage of any opportunity to coach people that may come our way – we just won’t be marketing to those other people.
Since we’re stuck in the delivery side of our business, we get confused about the idea of talking about client problems. We want to be optimistic and upbeat in our content – which doesn’t actually sell coaching. People buy for one of two reasons, to fulfil a needs, or to solve a problem. With coaching, it’s always about solving a problem.
The other concept that we find confusing is that marketing is about our knowledge and experience. When we’re coaching, we do not insert our knowledge and experience into the coaching conversation (recent ICF Core Competency updates notwithstanding). However, our client acquisition absolutely and definitely requires us to use our knowledge and understanding. That’s how we demonstrate that we understand what our potential clients are going through.
A Familiar Scenario
We’ve all experienced the situation where someone asks what we do. We say “I’m a coach” and the person we’re talking to almost certainly has no idea what that means – worse still, they think they understand and they’re wrong. They might ask “what do you coach on?” which sends us into a situation where we describe the coaching process, explaining that we help people reach goals, overcome mental barriers and limiting beliefs by holding space for them and being a thinking partner.
Whilst that is absolutely true, it is utterly meaningless to non-coaches because it’s not their language, it’s ours. They don’t understand “holding space” or “thinking partner” – not really – and so they stop listening. To be fair, when someone pours jargon at any of us, we don’t understand, so why should non-coaches understand our jargon?
If however we can answer the “what do you do?” question with a specific answer, people understand. Saying “I work with [target audience] to help them overcome [problem] so that they can [desired outcome]” is a whole lot easier for people to understand than holding space.
That specificity is what makes marketing feel authentic. When we’re talking about something real – actual problems that real people have – rather than vague coaching concepts, we can be ourselves. We can draw on our knowledge and experience. We can show that we understand.
Building Know, Like, and Trust
For someone to buy coaching from us, they need to know, like, and trust us. Credibility with our clients is built on the client acquisition side of our business. In contrast, credibility with our peers is built on the delivery side.
When we write content that speaks directly to the kind of people we want to work with and demonstrates our knowledge and understanding of their situation, as well as our empathy for them, we build trust. They see that we get it, that we understand the situation they’re in. The know and like parts come from being ourselves when we write.
When we write from our knowledge and experience, we can use our personality, and we can share carefully curated glimpses of our life. No one wants to see us oversharing, laying ourselves prostrate across LinkedIn – that’s not a professional approach. Instead, we might share snippets of our lives that are innocuous. For example, I share things about my love of travel, my pets, and other ‘light touch’ glimpses into my life. That people can see there’s a real human behind my writing is enough.
Vulnerability vs Authenticity
We’ve confused vulnerability with authenticity in marketing, but they’re not the same thing.
Vulnerability in marketing is unnecessary. Potential clients want to think we have our act together, that we know what we’re doing, that we’re professionals. They really don’t want to know about our personal struggles because they’re just that – personal.
Authenticity is about being ourselves, about injecting our personality, our passion, our values, and our beliefs into our marketing. Those are things that matter to potential clients. They want to work with someone real, someone who understands their situation, someone who has a point of view and isn’t afraid to express it. Marketing like this doesn’t require us to bleed all over LinkedIn. It requires us to be professional, knowledgeable, and genuinely helpful to the people we want to work with.
An Emotional Hurdle
When coaches finally understand that they should be talking about client problems rather than their own credentials or their ‘story’, the first hurdle they hit is fear. They worry that a target audience is too small a group of people, that in choosing a group, they’re closing doors when it feels like they should be trying to open all the doors they can.
The truth is that the opportunities we’re worried about missing out on are usually theoretical. When coaches say they feel they should be spreading their nets wide, not focusing in, I ask them how that approach is going for them so far? The answer is always the same – it isn’t working at all.
What Actually Feels Authentic
Once we start talking about specific client problems to a specific audience, everything shifts. We’re no longer trying to be all things to all people. We’re not pretending to have expertise in everything. We’re not oversharing or humble-bragging or doing any of the things that made us uncomfortable in the first place. We’re simply showing up as ourselves – knowledgeable, experienced professionals who understand a particular group of people and the challenges they face. We’re becoming the obvious place for potential clients to come when they need the support we can provide.
That’s authentic and professional. Even better – that’s marketing. It’s never about bragging, oversharing, or tooting our own horn. It’s about showing up as ourselves and being genuinely helpful to the people we want to help.
If you’ve been avoiding marketing because it doesn’t feel authentic, you’ve probably been looking at the wrong examples. What you thought was marketing – the oversharing, the credential-listing, the performative vulnerability – isn’t actually marketing at all.
Real marketing feels authentic because it’s about the client, not you. It’s about their problems, their challenges, and their desired outcomes. When you’re talking about something real to people who actually need your help, there’s nothing inauthentic about it.
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