Three times a year, I run a free challenge called Nail Your Niche for qualified coaches who are struggling to find clients who can, and will, pay a professional rate for their coaching. When coaches say they hate ‘marketing’, they’re usually right because what they’re describing isn’t actually marketing. What they’re describing is something they’re mistakenly calling marketing.
What Coaches Think Marketing Is
When coaches tell me they hate marketing, they usually mean one or more of the following: posting on social media without knowing who they’re posting for, attending networking events that produce interesting conversations and no clients, running Facebook ads to a funnel that doesn’t convert, or trying to generate visibility in a general direction and wondering why nothing comes back. The issue is that none of these things are actually marketing. Marketing, by definition, requires focus – a specific message aimed at a specific group of people with a specific problem. Without that focus, what we’re doing is broadcasting into a space where nobody in particular is listening, and calling it marketing because we don’t know what else to call it. No wonder it feels like something to hate.
This is remarkably similar to the problem coaching itself has with public perception. Most people think they know what coaching is – and they’re wrong. Most coaches think they know what marketing is – and they’re wrong too. The difference is that coaches at least have the training to correct the first misunderstanding. The second one, most of us are left to figure out alone.
What Client Acquisition Really Is
Client acquisition is marketing and selling. Those two things together, done with enough precision and aimed at the right people, are what produce paid client work. Neither marketing nor selling should be frightening, because both describe learnable skills rather than personality traits – and the reason they feel hateful to most coaches is that the versions of them we’ve encountered so far haven’t worked.
Marketing, done properly, means communicating in a way that makes a specific group of people feel seen and understood, so that some of them become curious enough to have a conversation. Selling, done properly, means having that conversation in a way that helps the right person understand whether working together makes sense, without pressure or performance. Neither of those things requires us to become someone we’re not. They do require us to know, with real precision, who we’re trying to reach and what problem we’re helping them solve.
Why the funnel isn’t the problem
Funnels, content strategies, email sequences, social media platforms – none of these are inherently the problem. They’re simply mechanisms, and mechanisms work when they’re pointed at the right target. The coaches who spend money on Facebook ads and see nothing back aren’t failing because Facebook ads don’t work – they’re failing because the targeting isn’t specific enough and the message isn’t for anyone in particular. The mechanism is fine but the foundation it’s built on isn’t.
This is why client acquisition work has to start before any of those decisions are made. Before the platform, before the content strategy, before the ad budget – the question of who, exactly, and what problem, exactly, has to be answered with enough precision that every subsequent decision has somewhere useful to point. Without that, the most sophisticated marketing mechanism in the world produces the same result as posting into the void – a great deal of effort and very little to show for it.
An Opportunity
If you’ve been telling yourself you hate marketing, there’s a good chance you’re reacting to versions of it that were never going to work for you in the first place. Not because you’re incapable of it, but because they weren’t grounded in anything precise enough to produce real clients.
That’s exactly what we focus on inside Nail Your Niche.
It’s a free, short challenge designed to help you get clear on who you’re trying to reach and what you need to say so that your marketing stops feeling like broadcasting—and starts leading to real conversations with people who could actually become clients.
If you’d like your marketing to stop feeling like effort and start leading to clients, you can register for the next challenge by clicking here.