When we realise we need help with marketing, we do what seems logical – we find a ‘how to set up a business’ course and try to follow the advice given. We might spend money adding ourselves to coaching directories or we may attend expensive sales training programmes. We implement everything we’re taught, and it doesn’t work.
So we conclude that either we’re doing it wrong, or that the market for coaching is saturated, or that nobody wants to pay for coaching. We don’t realise that the problem isn’t us – it’s that we’ve been following advice designed for utterly different businesses.
Where We Go Wrong From The Start
Generic business training tells us (for example) to build a website, so we build a beautiful online CV style website, that talks about us, our coaching qualifications and all the different people we can help. It may even talk about our coaching philosophy. We spend hundreds or thousands of pounds on it because we’ve been told a website is essential.
The problem is that nobody cares about those things. Worse still, no one will land on our website because no one is searching for a coach. It’s an expense that isn’t needed until we know exactly what the website should say, and spoiler alert – it’s not about us as coaches at all.
We’re told to network, so we go to business networking events and try to explain what we do. We’re told to use social media, so we post about coaching. We’re told to offer free sessions, so we give away hours of our time. We’re following all the advice, and nothing works.
The biggest barrier to success that we face as coaches is that we fail to realise that client acquisition is a professional-level skill that we do not have. It’s very difficult to improvise something that is completely outside our knowledge and understanding – and even more difficult because we don’t realise it’s outside our knowledge and understanding.
The Fundamental Difference
Generic marketing advice works for businesses selling products or services that people understand. If we were accountants, lawyers, therapists, psychotherapists, or architects, then people would know what we do. That means they know when they needed our services.
The problem with being a coach is that most people don’t know what we do, and even worse, they think they know and they’re wrong. They think we’re going to teach them something, which is incredibly frustrating when that’s absolutely not what we do.
This fundamental difference changes everything about how we need to market. Generic marketing advice assumes that potential clients understand the service being offered and are actively looking for it. With coaching, neither of those things is true.
Generic advice tells us to make ourselves visible so people can find us when they’re ready. However, people aren’t looking for coaches because they don’t know coaching exists as a solution to their problems. Generic advice tells us to explain what we do, but explaining coaching to someone who’s never experienced it is like explaining colour to someone who’s never seen it – the words don’t land.
What Works For Coaches
The marketing approach that works for coaches requires a depth of knowledge and understanding of our target audience (or niche, it’s the same thing) that generic training never mentions. We need to completely understand not only who our target audience is, but what they’re struggling with that working with us can help them to resolve. We need to be able to articulate this using their words, not ours.
One of the things that Coaching Revolution clients say regularly is that they’re surprised by how much more there is to client acquisition than they realised. They thought they understood marketing because it seems quite obvious, doesn’t it? Cast our nets wide and make sure as many people as possible know what we do. The problem with this approach is it’s based on clients already understand the service – and they do not.
Coach-specific marketing training looks completely different. It starts with choosing a specific target audience, not “anyone who needs coaching.” It involves developing a deep understanding of that audience’s demographics and psychographics. It requires creating a marketing message that speaks to their specific challenges in their language, not in coaching jargon. It means becoming visible to the right people, not just being visible generally.
Generic training says “build your brand.” Coach-specific training says “understand your potential client so deeply that you can describe their 3am worries in their own words.”
Generic training says “have an elevator pitch.” Coach-specific training says “articulate the specific outcome(s) your specific chosen audience can expect from working with you.”
Generic training says “be consistent on social media.” Coach-specific training says “create focused content that speaks directly to your chosen audience’s challenges, consistently.”
The difference isn’t subtle, it’s fundamental.
Why We Keep Trying Generic Approaches
We keep trying generic business training because we don’t know there’s an alternative. We’ve been told that if our coaching is good enough, our clients will find us. We’ve been led to believe that marketing is just common sense, that we can figure it out as we go along, that it’s not really a specialist skill.
So when we struggle to find clients, we blame ourselves. We must not be good enough coaches. We must not be implementing the advice correctly. We must be missing something obvious that everyone else can see. We don’t realise that the advice itself is wrong for our situation. We’re being given instructions for building one type of business when we’re actually building a completely different type.
The Knowledge Gap Our Profession Won’t Acknowledge
Our whole profession needs to be a lot clearer about the knowledge gap that we all have around client acquisition, instead of the current ‘if your coaching is good enough, your clients will find you’ approach.
That approach might work for the 20% of coaches who have monetisable credibility – existing networks of senior contacts who already understand what coaching is. For the other 80%, it’s utterly useless advice that sets us up to fail.
Generic marketing training compounds this problem because it assumes we’re starting from a place of customer understanding that we simply don’t have. It gives us tools and tactics without addressing the fundamental issue – that we’re selling something people don’t understand to people who don’t know they need it.
If Generic Training Hasn’t Worked For You
If you’ve tried to implement stuff you’ve picked up from various generic courses or free webinars, and it hasn’t worked, it’s not you. You’re not implementing it wrong. You’re not missing some obvious piece of the puzzle. You’re not failing because you’re not good enough.
You’re failing because you’ve been following advice designed for a different type of business. The advice itself is fine – for accountants, therapists, product-based businesses, and any other service where customers understand what they’re buying. It’s just completely wrong for coaches.
Coach-specific marketing training exists because we need it, because client acquisition for a profession that nobody understands is a specialist skill that requires specialist knowledge. Because we can’t improvise our way to success when we don’t even know what we don’t know.
The solution isn’t to try harder to implement generic advice. The solution isn’t to take another generic business course and hope this one will be different. The solution is to acknowledge that coaching requires a different approach entirely, and to learn that approach from people who actually understand the unique challenges we face.
Generic marketing training doesn’t work for coaches because we’re not a generic business. The sooner we accept that and seek out training that’s actually designed for our specific situation, the sooner we can stop failing at marketing and start succeeding at client acquisition.
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? We run it several times a year and 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 to your client acquisition efforts? Register for the challenge by clicking here.
Recent Comments