How long do we need to spend on marketing? It is a really good question with several answers depending on which part of it you mean, so let me deal with the biggest one first.
If you’re planning to run your business for the next 10 years, you will need to market for the next 10 years. Marketing has to be as consistent as the business is, and it doesn’t stop once things are going well. Once your client acquisition process is robust, you’ll know what to do, what to say, which things people respond best to, and where you need to be. What you will never have is a point at which you can stop doing it.
That’s true of every business anywhere, not only of coaching businesses. No clients means no business, and so every business needs a reliable way of finding them consistently.
Where, As Well As How Long
Part of the time, the question is a location question. Every professional coach should have, for example, a well-optimised LinkedIn profile, but beyond that, where you need to be depends entirely on WHO you’ve chosen to work with
Let me give you an example. Imagine two coaches: one of them works with teachers, and one of them works with lawyers. Offline, those two groups exist in completely different places: different professional bodies, different conferences, different publications. You won’t routinely find a teacher who belongs to the Law Society, for example, and lawyers don’t spend their time at teaching conferences.
When you know WHO they are, you know WHERE they are, that’s why when coaches say they work with professionals or with women in transition, they have no clue at all about where they’re supposed to be. You need to be able to answer the following questions:
- Which professionals?
- Where do they gather?
- Which women?
- Which publications do they read?
- Which conferences do they attend?
Narrowing it down to, say, women with challenging careers still isn’t anywhere near detailed enough, because you still can’t answer any of those questions.
Without an answer to those questions, you can spend a great deal of money and time trying to be everywhere on the basis that your potential clients must be somewhere. There’s a version of this that comes up reasonably often, which is the coach who says they work with humans because they don’t want to narrow their focus. On the delivery side of the commercially viable coaching business analogy, that’s true and rather lovely, but on the client acquisition side, ‘humans’ is not focused enough for any client acquisition process to work.
The Heavy Lifting Is At The Start
If you start today knowing nothing about marketing but you’ve decided to learn, there is a chunk of work at the front end that is more demanding than anything that comes later.
To start with, we need a niche or a target audience (they’re synonyms), that’s commercially viable, and working that out is a chunky piece of work in itself. Next comes an ideal client avatar (ICA), which is a ficititious individual that embodies the psychographics and demographics of the people in the audience that you’ve chosen. Having one means that you’re able to speak to people rather than to a category.
Then, the next piece of work is what I call the 3am Cascade. We need to understand what’s going on in the head of our potential client at 3:00 in the morning when they’re lying awake worrying about the thing that we can help them resolve. There’s usually one big all-encompassing worry at the top, with a series of smaller ones cascading below it. At 3 am, any of those smaller ones can feel overwhelming. It’s a strange time to be awake and worrying, and we’ve all done it, so we know how it feels.
Then what?
Once you have the ICA and the cascade, you’re in a position to start to build a marketing message. At The Coaching Revolution, we teach you to write that as a keynote presentation, and the point of the keynote presentation is to position you as an authority. Not an authority as in the best coach in the world, but an authority on that particular group of people with that particular problem, the intersection of the WHO and the WHAT.
A good marketing message is not a sales pitch, and it doesn’t shout, “Buy my stuff!” It demonstrates that you understand these people, that you know what they’re struggling with, and that you have empathy for the situation in which they find themselves.
Building that marketing message, the work is labour intensive, and the majority of it is thinking. Coaches tend to enjoy it rather more than they expect to because it’s challenging thinking and reframing, which is familiar territory.
Staying Current
Marketing changes and the places that we need to be with our marketing message change faster. TikTok arrived in 2017 as a daft place for teenagers to do silly dances, and now the premium brands, political parties, and the newspapers are all on it. They wouldn’t be there if their potential clients weren’t also there, and if their potential clients are there, ours are too. Twitter became X and EduTwitter, which was a genuinely useful place for teachers to be, and therefore for us as coaches to be, isn’t what it was. So some of our time goes on knowing what’s shifting and adjusting what we do, and that’s separate from active marketing hours.
Tools change two and large language models (LLMs) are probably the biggest change in years. For the record, they can’t do your marketing for you. They can amplify work you’ve already done, but if you ask one to build you an ideal client and a marketing message from a standing start, it just doesn’t know how specialist marketing for coaches is. Talk to it about coaching, and it thinks, like the rest of the world does, that coaching is an exchange of knowledge. Do the thinking first, however, and LLMs become genuinely useful.
Time Each Day
I’m talking here about computer work, not time you might spend in conferences or networking, etc, but online work. In the beginning, expect to spend an hour a day creating marketing assets on top of the time spent learning how any of it works. Once you’re competent, that changes. You can schedule content, you can automate parts of it, and nothing you’ve created is wasted, so material can be reused rather than written from scratch every day.
What you can’t do is outsource marketing that isn’t working yet. If you don’t have a working client acquisition process, somebody else can’t create one for you. I’ve seen many, many examples of coaches who’ve tried to outsource all of their marketing, and I have yet to see it done successfully. The reason is that until your process works, you can’t support or supervise the person you’ve handed to because you don’t know what good looks like.
Proportions
Across the time we have available to spend on our coaching businesses, expect to spend between 35% and 50% of it on client acquisition, with 50% to 65% of it on delivery once your client acquisition process is working. If someone tells you it can be done in 15 minutes a day, caveat emptor, because this isn’t specific to a coaching business, any individual running their own business needs to spend roughly that proportion of their time finding clients.
I also don’t mean you have to sit at a computer writing LinkedIn posts or articles for various platforms for the 35-50% of your time. Some of that time might be spent at conferences or networking, in-person stuff which we all enjoy, but what it isn’t is delivery time.
I know that ratio makes coaches angry, and I understand why. Most of us reach coach training, having never had to find our own clients for anything, so this is genuinely unfamiliar ground rather than something we are being slow about. The people who spot it early tend to be the ones with a background in marketing or sales who get halfway through a training programme and think, “Hang on, where are these clients going to come from?”
For the rest of us, it takes longer. We go out and we talk to people, having been told that good conversations will lead to clients, and they do lead to the occasional client, so we keep going. At some point, it becomes clear that this isn’t sustainable and we need to do something differently.
Then we have two choices:
- Get over our feelings about marketing, accept that we don’t understand what marketing is, and learn how to do it well.
- Go back to working for someone else.
Associate Work
Associate coaching is a perfectly good choice. Somebody else finds the clients, and you deliver the coaching, which suits plenty of us. However, it is becoming much more competitive to find well-paid associate work. For example, the platforms like Ezra, Lyra, CoachHub, and BetterUp, it’s incredibly competitive, and the pay for coaches onboarded recently is quite low. I know of coaches being paid £25 to £35 an hour for their coaching work.
Associate work is competitive enough that there is even an organisation in the UK that sells coaching to companies and whose associate coaches deliver pro bono because those coaching hours count towards logged hours for accreditation. There’s a waiting list to work there. I have one question about this situation, which is: if the arrangement comes with supervision and community, which is the exchange of value that’s offered, why can’t the coaches have those and be paid for their work that’s being sold?
We Don’t Hate Marketing When It Works
The reaction to the 35% to 50% figure is usually some version of horror, and “I have to spend how long?? But I hate marketing!”.
Here’s the truth: we don’t hate marketing when it works, when it’s bringing us clients. Nobody hates it when it’s working. It’s only unbearable when it isn’t working, and I’d be willing to back my back teeth that the reason it isn’t working is because it’s unfocused.
Marketing isn’t logical or intuitive, which is the difficulty that we have. Casting our net wide and letting everybody know what we do, telling them we work with professionals or people in transition, all of that feels like the right thing to do. That’s a knower’s mind at work. We think we understand how this works, and we do not.
Client acquisition is a professional skill. At The Coaching Revolution, we’ve worked with people who hold marketing degrees and have had entire careers as heads of brands and heads of marketing for large organisations. They came to us anyway because they were aware that they knew how to market somebody else’s product, but they understood that they didn’t know how to market their own. That’s wisdom from people who really do know. Part of why they struggle is that our education systems produce employees rather than entrepreneurs, and building a business requires us to be entrepreneurs. A large part of that is being able to find enough clients to sustain the business.
There’s No Part-Time Version Of This
If one of us just wants to coach a few clients on a Friday and another wants a practice with associates delivering the work for them, both of those coaches need to mark it for the same amount of time. There is no part-time marketing or light touch marketing. Before anyone buys coaching, they have to understand what we do and how we can help them. They need to see enough of us to know, like, and trust us before they will part with any money at all. That takes the same amount of time whether you want three clients or 30.
One of the biggest misconceptions about how, say, LinkedIn works is that posting means everybody sees it. Attention is one of the most valuable commodities there is, and it is expensive to acquire. Large organisations buy it, which is what a sponsored post is. The rest of us pay for it in time. Please don’t rush off and buy ads. Without doing the background work, you simply do not have enough information to do anything except give the platform a syphon into your bank account. We teach low-cost and no-cost marketing in the first year because it is entirely possible to spend a fortune on tools that promise the earth when what’s needed is time building an audience and your own knowledge and experience of how client acquisition works.
Two Sides
I know that mentioning knowledge and experience when we’re talking about coaching sounds wrong, so let me put it against the two sides of the scales analogy that I use to describe the two skill sets required to run any business. On the delivery side of the scale, coaching is not about our knowledge and experience. On the client acquisition side, it is entirely about our knowledge and experience, because that’s what allows us to identify the individuals we want to work with (the WHO), the problem our potential clients have (the WHAT), to describe that problem accurately, and demonstrate that we understand the impact it’s having on the lives of our clients. We also need to be able to demonstrate empathy for the situation in which our potential clients find themselves.
An Opportunity
If you’d like to understand more about what effective client acquisition involves, may I offer you a way to learn a bit more for free? Why not join my next free challenge, Nail Your Niche?
It runs several times a year and it’s reasonably light touch with no need to commit for four whole days. You’ll come away understanding where your niche is and how to describe what you do in a single sentence that actually makes sense to people who aren’t coaches. There’s plenty of room to have a robust conversation with me, including disagreeing with me entirely if you’d like to – I love these conversations!
There’s even an option to upgrade to a VIP version, which gives you 3 x 60-minute group mentoring sessions with me. That provides us with time for a lot of robust conversations about how marketing for coaches works.
Recent Comments