Presence and client acquisition are not the same thing, and most of us who are not getting enquiries have been doing one while believing we were doing the other. The distinction matters because a coach who believes she is marketing, and getting no results, draws a very specific conclusion: that marketing doesn’t work for coaches, or that she is not the type of person it works for. Both conclusions feel completely logical from where she is standing, and both are wrong in a way that costs years.
The Pattern
The evidence for this is consistent enough to be immediately recognisable. A coach qualifies, builds a professional-looking website that tells anyone who lands there who she is, what she has done, and what kind of coach she is, sets up her LinkedIn profile, and begins posting three times a week on the days she has read are best for reach. The content is thoughtful and sometimes personal, going out reliably and on schedule. Likes arrive from fellow coaches and from people who already know and support her, but enquiries don’t arrive at all, and after six or twelve months of this the activity starts to feel pointless. The conclusion that follows – that something is fundamentally wrong, either with marketing or with her – is the most natural one in the world. What she hasn’t realised is that what she has been doing and what effective client acquisition is, are radically different.
What Recognition Means
Client acquisition produces enquiries because it creates recognition – the experience of reading something and thinking “s/he’s talking about me!” That moment – not the frequency of posting, not the professionalism of the website, not the number of networking events attended – is what makes a potential client begin to engage. Announcing our existence produces no recognition because it doesn’t give anybody anything to recognise themselves in. A post about achieving goals or living a more fulfilling life describes nothing about anyone’s actual situation, which is why the engagement it generates comes almost exclusively from fellow coaches rather than from the people who might become clients. Potential clients are not searching for a coach – most of them have never considered coaching as a solution to their problem, because they haven’t yet identified their problem as something coaching could fix. Content about coaching as a service will not reach them. They will only stop scrolling for content that describes their situation so precisely that it creates the sudden, startling feeling of being understood by a stranger.
Consistency
The reason most of us stay in presence mode for so long is that we have been told, by sources we trust, that consistency is what produces results. Consistency does matter, but only when the content is doing the right job. Consistent content that announces existence produces consistent silence, and the longer we keep at it without questioning what the content is actually for, the more entrenched the wrong conclusion becomes. The coaches I have watched break this pattern are not the ones who post more often or add more platforms to their schedule; they are the ones who change what their content is doing – from describing themselves and the coaching process, to describing the kind of person they want to reach, with enough precision that they stop and thinks “that’s me!“
When This Doesn’t Apply
There are coaches who build full practices without ever making this shift, almost always because they enter coaching with monetiseable credibility, a professional network extensive enough to sustain a referral pipeline for years. That is a legitimate path and I am not dismissing it, but it is not replicable by design, it does not usually outlast the original network, and it does not describe the position in which most of us start a coaching business.
What to Do Instead
The most common objection to my talking about focus and niches is that specificity feels like an advanced stage, something to address once the basics of visibility are in place. In practice, the opposite is true. Specificity is what makes visibility worth having, because it is the mechanism by which the right person stops and recognises themselves in what you have written. The shift worth making is not to post more often or show up in more places, but to identify one specific kind of person experiencing one specific kind of problem and write about that problem in enough detail that someone living it stops mid-scroll and thinks “s/he knows exactly what this feels like.” That is where presence ends and client acquisition begins, and it is available to any coach willing to get specific.
An Opportunity
If you’d like to understand more about what specificity looks like in practice, may I offer you a way to learn a bit more for free? Why not join my next free challenge, Nail Your Niche?
The challenge runs every few months 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 about how getting focused works.
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