We think we can type ‘give me an ideal client for my coaching business’ or ‘give me a target audience for my coaching business’ into ChatGPT or Claude, and whatever it produces will be both valid and viable. We think AI can solve our marketing problem, that it can tell us who to market to and what to say. It can’t, and believing it can is keeping us stuck.
What AI Can Do
If we ask AI to generate a target audience for my coaching business, it gives us something generic. ‘Senior professionals’ or ‘mid-career professionals’ or ‘entrepreneurs struggling with work-life balance.’ It sounds plausible and it feels like a good answer, because we can coach senior or mid-career professionals, or entrepreneurs
The problem is that although we can coach them, that output is far too vague in terms of demographics to be useful for client acquisition purposes. For example, where do we find these people? What specific challenges are they facing that our coaching can help resolve? What language do they use to describe their situation? AI doesn’t know the answer to those, and so it can’t tell you.
When AI generates an ‘ideal client’, it can feel like we’ve hit the jackpot in terms of detail. It will give us a name, an age, a job title, some challenges they’re facing and it looks comprehensive. However AI doesn’t understand us as individuals, and who we are best positioned to serve. It doesn’t know the right questions to ask to help us get there either – I know because I’ve tested and tested and tested it.
The fundamental problem is that AI doesn’t understand that people don’t know what our kind of coaching is, but they think they do and they’re wrong. Even ChatGPT and Claude don’t really understand the difference between our coaching and other types of coaching. So the target audiences and ideal clients they generate are based on flawed assumptions about how coaching businesses actually work.
The Knowledge Gap
AI can be useful for marketing, providing the coach does the thinking first. This is where we come unstuck, because we don’t know what thinking to do. The reason we don’t know is that we have a massive knowledge gap when it comes to client acquisition, but we often don’t realise that.
So we take our ‘I don’t know how to build a coaching business’ problem to coaching, because well, that’s what we do when we need to do some deep thinking, isn’t it? However – and this is really important – we can’t coach or be coached across a knowledge gap. What I mean is that we can’t coach a marketing strategy out of a head that doesn’t have one in it. What we can do is coach ideas out of a head, but that doesn’t mean they’re good or effective client acquisition ideas.
I once spoke to a coach who spent £5,000 on getting thousands of leaflets designed and printed. It was her intention to drop them at hairdressers, doctors’ surgeries, dental practices and so on. “I want to put them everywhere where people have time to read,” she told me. When I asked about the content of said leaflets, it was all about the coaching process and the many, many different people she felt she could help – if only they understood the power of coaching.
Needless to say, there was nothing in these leaflets that gave the reader a clue as to why they might want coaching. That’s what happens when we don’t know what we don’t know. We take action that feels productive but is completely ineffective because we’re operating from a knowledge gap.
Unconscious Incompetence
A big issue is that coaches tend to be highly intelligent, and that means that we rely on our intellect, because we’ve done so with great effect our whole lives. However, the thing about marketing that makes it difficult to improvise is that it is utterly counterintuitive and so we’re operating at the unconscious incompetence level, but we are completely unaware that’s the case.
We think we understand marketing because we see it everywhere. We think we can figure it out because we’re smart and capable people. We think AI can fill in the gaps we don’t even know exist. So we ask it to generate our ideal client or our target audience or our marketing content, and we use what it gives us, and we wonder why it’s not working.
It’s not working because AI can’t think for us. It can’t do the deep work of understanding who we’re best positioned to serve, what specific challenges that group faces, what language they use, where they can be found, or what value we can articulate that will make them want to work with us.
What Needs To Happen First
We need to have done the deep thinking, and we need guidance to do it. We need to learn what we don’t know. That’s not something AI can help with because AI doesn’t know what we don’t know either.
Once we’ve done the deep thinking, chosen a niche that fits us properly, and created a marketing message for that niche that demonstrates knowledge and understanding of the situation they find themselves in – the one that working with us can help resolve – then (and only then) can we use AI as a tool to create some of our content.
Even then, we need a framework for that content, because no one will buy our coaching unless they know, like, and trust us first. Some of us are lucky enough to already have this within our networks, and these are the coaches with what I call ‘monetisable credibility.’ There’s roughly one in five of us that have this, and it tends to have been built over a stellar corporate career. The rest of us need to use our marketing to build know, like, and trust.
AI can help with content creation once you know what that content needs to say and who it needs to speak to, but it can’t tell us what to say or who to say it to. That requires human thinking, guided by someone who actually understands how to market a coaching business.
AI Is A Tool, Not A Strategy
AI is simply a tool, and like any other tool, it only works if we have learned how to use it properly. Just because AI can generate content does not make that content good or effective at client acquisition. To do that, we need to use it to do the heavy lifting after we have done the deep thinking.
The deep thinking involves understanding who we want to work with at a level of detail that AI can’t generate. It involves creating a marketing message based on genuine understanding of that person’s situation, not generic descriptions of coaching benefits. It involves knowing where to find these people, what language they use, what shame or embarrassment might be stopping them from seeking help, and what specific outcome they’re hoping to achieve.
That’s not something you can get from typing a prompt into ChatGPT, it’s the result of proper client acquisition training combined with our own thinking around our knowledge, experience, and understanding of who we’re best positioned to serve.
Once we’ve done that work, AI becomes incredibly useful. It can help us create variations of our content. It can help us draft posts and articles based on our marketing message. It can help us brainstorm headlines or refine your language, basically it can do the heavy lifting of content production.
However, it can’t do the thinking and it can’t fill our knowledge gap. It can’t tell us who to market to or what to say to them in a way that is effective. It can only help us to be effective, and to execute on a strategy that we’ve already developed through proper learning and deep thinking.
What We’re Avoiding
When we turn to AI to solve our marketing problem, we’re often avoiding the real issue – that we don’t know how to market a coaching business and we need to learn. We’re hoping technology can shortcut learning, we’re hoping we can outsource the thinking to a machine.
Sadly, we can’t. Marketing a profession that nobody understands requires human intelligence, guided learning, and deep understanding of both coaching and your specific target audience. AI can amplify that work once it’s done, but it can’t replace it.
If you’re using AI to generate your ideal client, your target audience, or your marketing content without having first learned how client acquisition actually works for coaches, you’re building on quicksand. What AI gives you might look professional and comprehensive, but it won’t work because it’s based on generic assumptions that don’t apply to coaching businesses.
The solution isn’t better AI prompts. The solution is learning what you don’t know, doing the deep thinking with proper guidance, and then using AI as the tool it actually is – something that helps execute your strategy, not something that creates your strategy for you.
AI can’t do your marketing for you. But once you know what you’re doing, it can help you do it faster and more efficiently. The question is whether you’re willing to do the learning first, or whether you’re going to keep hoping that technology can bypass the knowledge gap you didn’t know you had.
An Opportunity
If you’d like the chance for a robust conversation about this – or to just flat-out tell me why you think 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!
Recent Comments