The Elephant In The Room: Why AI Can’t Create Your Marketing Collateral For You
There’s an uncomfortable truth coaches need to hear – AI can’t create your marketing collateral for you.
Yes, I know it can churn out LinkedIn posts, build client avatars, write email sequences and sales pages, but there’s an elephant in the room. The elephant in the room is this – if you haven’t done the thinking, it doesn’t matter what the tool can do, because it won’t achieve your desired outcome for clients.
As coaches, we are selling a service that most people don’t understand. Worse, many people think they understand coaching, and they’re wrong.
That means our marketing must do the heavy lifting of education before it can persuade. To market effectively, a coach must have a deep, nuanced understanding of who they serve and what those people are struggling with. That kind of clarity doesn’t come from a chatbot, it comes from doing the work.
Lazy Thinking, Poor Results
Many coaches fall into the trap of asking ChatGPT to “create an ICA” or purchasing a £27 ICA generator and thinking the job’s done. It’s not done, it’s not even begun.
This lazy thinking is fuelled by the fantasy that marketing should be easy. I’ve also heard this thinking described as ‘magic thinking’ – the idea that there’s a shortcut to a successful business, and it is the belief that you could ask a robot to do it for you in under an hour, and then get back to the bit you enjoy – coaching. I find it fascinating that coaches can be such lazy thinkers, because thinking is our stock-in-trade, yet we let ourselves down badly in this one crucial area of business.
The truth is that if marketing were easy, we’d all have thriving practices. That 82% global failure rate wouldn’t exist. Coaches fail not because they’re bad at coaching, but because they never learn how to acquire clients. We mistake marketing for something superficial, something that can be automated before we even understand it.
Garbage In, Garbage Out
The adage GIGO applies. Garbage in, garbage out.
If you feed AI vague, half-baked inputs like this ‘I coach professionals in transition to find clarity and confidence’ you’ll get vague, half-baked content in return. To the untrained eye, it might sound polished and even look impressive. However, those of us with trained eyes roll them. This lightweight stuff won’t work because it isn’t built on anything substantial or credible.
Effective marketing starts with specificity. We must understand our audience’s lived experience. We don’t need to have lived this ourselves, but if we haven’t, we do need to have had a front-row seat to lives of those who are living it. Also, we need to understand what keeps them awake at night, and we must describe that problem in their language, not ours. That kind of insight can’t be outsourced.
AI is a Multiplier, Not a Substitute
I’m not anti-AI – far from it. We teach expert-level AI skills in all our programmes. The significant thing is that we teach them after the thinking has been done.
Once a coach knows their niche, understands their ideal client, and has a clear marketing message, AI becomes a powerful tool for growth. It can save hours, help us amplify our reach, and refine and expand our ideas. However, and this is important, it cannot do the thinking for us. To use it well, use it for the grunt work, not the groundwork.
Marketing Like Coaching Is A Professional Skill
Can you imagine how contemptuous you’d feel if you heard of a coach who, rather than learning their coaching skills in a classroom, used AI to develop them? We’d be apoplectic about it, wouldn’t we? ‘What on earth are they asking ChatGPT?’ we’d scoff, ‘can you give me the 10 most effective coaching questions?!’
Our profession is already in a state of perpetual uproar and indignation about the number of people who call themselves coaches without having one of our credentials. No matter that many (if not most) of these others are not our kind of coaches at all. Posts containing statistics regarding the number of coaches on LinkedIn compared to the number of credentialled coaches are abundant, with people commenting on these posts and sharing their outrage.
That outrage doesn’t extend to coaches trying to shortcut the journey to effective marketing using exactly this process, which is a shame. If it did, perhaps coaches wouldn’t fail to thrive in such large numbers.
What To Do Instead
If you’re a coach tempted to hand over your marketing to an LLM, don’t.
Instead:
- Do the foundational work. Select a niche based on both your knowledge and its commercial viability, rather than relying on a random suggestion from AI.
- Define your ICA based on real-world experience, not AI guesswork.
- Learn how to describe your audience’s problems in their own words.
- Only then should you use AI to support your content creation.
This isn’t about making things hard for the sake of it, it’s about doing the work required to get proper results. Real clients and professional fees are what make a real business, and the truth is that AI can’t build your business for you.
Marketing is a professional skill. So is commercial thinking. Learn them both and then use AI to help you with the things it’s good at.
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