As owners of professional services businesses, we have three important resources. Time, energy and money. Of the three, time is the most precious because it’s irreplaceable.
There was a point in my life where I did everything myself, on the basis that what I did have was time and money was in short supply. Whatever needed doing, I’d figure out how to do it myself. It’s given me a lot of useful skills – for example I created The Coaching Revolution’s website. I originally learned how to use WordPress via books, internet searches and thousands (and thousands!) of videos. I actually enjoy this type of thing, so I didn’t mind spending the hours doing it. Would I do it now? Not a chance!
Use Your Time Wisely
Coaches tend to be older people, and what that means is that we don’t have the luxury of having all the time in the world. Before you jump up and down, yes, I know that there are some great younger coaches, but in the main, coaches are 40+ (and lots plus in some cases).
Outsourcing is something that you should consider carefully and there are many incredibly talented virtual assistants out there. If you’d like a recommendation, you will find that you get excellent, reliable service from Kylie Jones and her team at Advantage VA.
Outsourcing is a great thing to do because it frees up your time, that most precious resource, to do the thing that you want to do the most – coach!
What Do Coaches Want To Outsource?
The thing that coaches usually tell me that they want to outsource is their marketing. They want to outsource it because they say, it’s time-consuming and they don’t enjoy it. What they really mean I believe is that they don’t really understand how to market and so they want to have someone else do the marketing work and for them to just do the delivery work.
The good news is that this is entirely possible to outsource your social media marketing. In fact, it’s something that we recommend to our mentees when things get busy.
The not-quite-so-good news is that you can’t outsource a marketing message that you haven’t actually created!
A good social media VA isn’t there to craft a marketing message for you, they are there to take your marketing message and craft posts for you. They can write posts that sound just like you wrote them. It takes some time and effort between you to tweak it so that they consistently sound like you, but once that’s done, it’s wonderful!
But they are not marketers – they can’t do the hard yards for you…
Marketing Message For Coaches
Crafting a good marketing message takes a lot of effort. (The definition of a good marketing message by the way is one that actually results in paying clients.)
First of all, you need to choose your target audience (your niche) and your target client (ideal client) within that audience. Make no mistake, it’s a choice. It’s not something that will somehow magically reveal itself to you over time.
In the time you spend waiting for something to evolve and make itself apparent to you, you could have chosen a niche and an ideal client, written a brilliant marketing message and actually have clients paying you a professional rate for your coaching services. You’re going to have to do the work in the end, so you may as well do it now and save yourself some of that precious resource – time.
Choose Your Niche
Once you’ve chosen your niche and your ideal client within that niche, you need to get super-clear on what problem that they have that is so pressing for them, that they will pay you to help them get rid of it. Clearly – this problem must be something that coaching can help them with (stating the obvious here, but just to be clear!). This problem must be so big that it’s having an impact on other areas of their lives. It’s keeping them awake at night worrying and fretting about it, but they have found that they can’t seem to sort it out on their own.
Your marketing message needs to talk about this problem, and how you understand what it’s doing to your ideal client’s life. You can talk about the things that they may have already tried to do to resolve the problem and maybe offer a few tips of how they can start to solve it. You need to talk about what their life will look like when this problem is gone – and how they will feel.
When you market in this way, you’ll find that what happens is that people with similar traits to your ideal client will read your posts and think ‘that’s me s/he’s talking about!’. This is the holy grail for marketing, getting people to identify themselves in what you write.
What happens is that you become an authority in that particular niche and with that particular kind of client.
Now You Can Outsource
At this point, you can outsource your social media marketing because you know what you’re doing and it’s working.
A working marketing message is something a social media VA can work with, an ‘I can coach anyone’ message is not.
The Best Time-Saver Of All (in marketing anyway)
Creating a sales pipeline and getting it flowing is a long game. It takes up to a year to do it if you know what you’re doing. If you don’t, you can go round in circles, spending lots of time marketing ineffectually. A point to remember is that it takes less time to market effectively because you can cut out the things that you find don’t work. If nothing is working, you can’t very well cut everything out, can you? This is why those 82% of coaches fail in the first two years. They fail because they can’t find paying clients. They work hard, market ineffectually and they fail.
How much better then, to work with someone who knows what they’re doing? To work with an organisation that delivers an ICF accredited Diploma in Marketing For Coaches? Our coaches succeed.
Should we talk? This is my diary.
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