It feels logical, doesn’t it? The more people who know about our coaching businesses, the more clients we’ll get. Casting our nets wide, reaching as many people as possible, keeping all doors open. It’s common sense.
Except it’s completely wrong, and understanding why requires us to confront something our profession rarely acknowledges.
The Big Problem
Unlike every other professional service provider, we cannot simply hang up our shingle and be open for business. Accountants, architects, therapists (I could give you an exhaustive list of other providers of professional services) – everyone knows what they do. This means that people know when they require the services of one of them. With coaching, this is rarely the case.
Precious few people understand what we do. Worse, they think they know and they’re wrong. They assume we teach something, like a sports coach. This fundamental misunderstanding changes everything about how we need to market our services.
What it means is that we need to sell an outcome, not coaching, and to sell an outcome, we need to understand what outcome our clients want. To do that, we need to know who they are – specifically who they are, not vaguely who they might be.
What Happens When We Cast Wide Nets
When we try to market to everyone with broad messaging, the practical result is nothing – literally zero on the client acquisition front. We may get engagement from other coaches who understand coaching language, but our vague posting doesn’t result in enquiries from people who want to pay us for coaching.
This leads to us feeling that marketing doesn’t work, which is a conclusion I hear regularly. When I do hear this, I ask why do we suppose people choose Apple or Android phones? Or why we drive particular cars or wear particular brands of clothing. Of course marketing works! The thing is, there is no such thing as unfocused marketing. If it isn’t focused, it’s not marketing, it’s as simple as that.
How The Brain Works
The brain only notices what feels personally relevant. Human attention is not neutral – it’s a filtering system designed to ignore almost everything. We only notice messages that trigger one of these responses:
- this is about me
- this is my problem
- this is my situation
- this feels urgent
Focused marketing activates that relevance filter – our Reticular Activating System. Unfocused marketing never gets past it.
If our message tries to speak to everyone, it triggers no one’s ‘relevance filter’. The brain just ignores it. We could post every single day with generic messages about coaching and transformation and reaching potential, and every single person scrolling past will unconsciously dismiss it as not relevant to them – in reality they don’t even see it, their brain doesn’t see anything that triggers consciousness. Coaches may see it of course, because it is relevant to us.
This is why focusing on a specific target audience actually reaches more potential clients than trying to reach everyone. Specificity is what makes the brain pay attention, breadth is what makes the brain scroll past.
Why We Can’t Accept This
Believing that focus works better than breadth forces us to give up comforting illusions, and most of us are psychologically attached to those illusions. There’s a lot going on under the surface that makes this particular piece of marketing truth so hard to accept.
Scarcity fear overrides logic. When we’re worried about not having enough enquiries, not having enough income, not having enough certainty. The idea of shrinking our audience feels dangerous even when the evidence says it works. Our nervous system hears focus as loss, not as leverage. We think “if I narrow, I will have fewer chances” when the reality is “if you narrow, you finally become visible”, but fear is louder than data at the beginning.
We confuse reach with impact. We’re obsessed with numbers – followers, likes, views, impressions. Those numbers feel like progress because they’re measurable and public. Focused marketing often looks smaller on the surface with fewer followers, fewer comments, and a tighter audience, so our brain misreads effectiveness. We chase reach instead of impact (conversion). We want to look successful before we can afford to be successful. A single well-matched client is quieter than 1,000 vague viewers, but impact is hard to see.
Our ego is structurally involved. We still want to be admired, and focused marketing is not flattering to the ego. Focus demands that we say this is who I work with. That will create rejection and disagreement from others within our profession. Unfocused marketing protects the ego – everyone (ie other coaches) can still like us, everyone (ie potential clients) will literally not see us. Focus invites judgement, and we avoid that until confidence or necessity forces it.
Our learning has been contaminated by platform culture. Most entry-level marketing education is built on “post daily,” “go viral,” “be consistent,” and “grow your audience.” Almost none of it is built on buyer psychology, message-market fit, demand-led positioning, or purchasing behaviour. So we absorb a growth model that rewards noise, and then when someone tells us to narrow, our entire training collapses. It feels like heresy because it contradicts what we’ve been drip-fed every day.
Vagueness feels safer than being wrong. Focused marketing means being precise, and precision carries the risk of being wrong. If we say “I help newly promoted NHS managers who feel out of their depth in the first 12 months,” we can be challenged on that. If we say “I help people reach their potential,” no one can prove us wrong. Vague language offers emotional protection, and we take protection over performance.
We don’t yet trust the process. Focus only makes sense when we believe that marketing compounds, trust accumulates and visibility builds over time. We live in short feedback loops – did it work today, did I get a lead today, did anyone message me today? Focus means building slowly at first and we don’t want to go slowly. So we default to activity that feels busy rather than strategy that works.
The Unfiltered Truth
We struggle to believe in focus because our fear is louder than evidence, our ego is louder than outcomes, our training is built on noise, our nervous system equates narrowing with risk, and our confidence isn’t yet strong enough to tolerate exclusion.
Once we’ve been ignored enough, wasted enough time, and burned through enough generic content, focus might stop feeling like theory and could start feeling like relief.
The Limiting Belief
As coaches, we’re all about challenging limiting beliefs. We help our clients identify and shift the beliefs that are holding them back, but for some reason, this particular limiting belief – that casting our nets wide is the right approach – is very stubborn and rarely recognised as a limiting belief at all.
It’s perceived by our profession as a universal truth, which makes moving from that confirmation bias very difficult indeed. We’re so convinced that more reach equals more clients that we see the evidence right in front of us showing that it doesn’t work as proof marketing doesn’t work, rather than proof that what we’re doing might be wrong.
Casting our nets wide feels like the right thing to do because it feels active, inclusive, and safe. It feels like we’re maximising opportunities rather than limiting them. What it does in reality is make us invisible to everyone (apart from other coaches) because we’re specific to no one.
The coaches who build sustainable practices aren’t the ones reaching the most people. They’re the ones reaching the right people with messages that make those people think “they’re talking about me.” To achieve this requires focus and specificity, it requires us to let go of the comforting illusion that more is better.
If you’re ready to have this belief challenged, if you’re ready to consider that everything you thought you knew about reaching clients might be backwards, may I offer you an opportunity?
An Opportunity
If you’d like the change for a robust conversation about this – or to just flat-out tell me why I’m wrong – why not join my next free challenge, Nail Your Niche? There’s even an option to upgrade to a VIP version, which gives you 3 x 60-minute group mentoring sessions with me for just £99 (inc VAT) – that provides us with time for a lot of robust conversations!
Are you ready to learn why having a focus for your coaching business will make all the difference? Register for the next challenge by clicking here.