I want to be careful with this one, so let me say at the outset what I am not doing. I am not invalidating anybody’s experience, and I am not suggesting that something difficult which happened to you wasn’t difficult; I know it was.
If, as you read this, you find yourself reacting more strongly than the subject seems to warrant, I’d encourage you to be curious about that reaction and keep reading, because this one matters.
Where Credibility Usually Already Exists
One of the best places to look for a niche in which you have maximum credibility is your own career history.
You need a WHO as well as a WHAT, and that’s true even if the thing you want to coach around has nothing to do with work. A niche sits at the intersection of the two: the topic you want to coach around, and a specific group of people. Professionals isn’t focused enough. Neither is women, senior leaders or business owners.
The WHO is an industry, profession or sector. The reason you need one is that marketing effectively means describing the problem somebody is grappling with in their context, well enough that they think this person understands how difficult this is in my particular environment. It means demonstrating knowledge and understanding of the situation in which they find themselves because of the problem they have, and demonstrating empathy for the situation, which matters just as much.
What You Know That Nobody Else Does
Say you spent an entire career in HR in manufacturing. Irrespective of the kind of coach you are, you understand the lives of people who work in HR in that sector.
I don’t only mean the day-to-day of the job, though you probably understand that too. I mean the rhythm of their lives. How what happens at work lands at home, and how what’s happening at home shows up at work. You understand the humans in that vertical better than anyone who hasn’t worked there, because the detail is the thing that matters.
Here’s the test: something appears in the news that touches that sector. You could talk to those people about the nuance of its impact on them, on their work, on their industry. Somebody outside it knows only that there’ll be an impact of some kind. That gap is exactly what effective marketing requires. In fact, it’s essential.
When the Sector Made You Unwell
This is where the pushback gets serious, and it’s why I asked you to notice your reaction.
I have conversations with coaches who left a sector for health reasons. Sometimes that was catastrophic burnout, what we’d once have called a nervous breakdown. They hear me say the best place to look is your career history, and what they hear is a suggestion that they go back to the environment that made them unwell.
You’re not going back. Choosing that sector as a niche has nothing to do with returning to a toxic workplace, clocking in at nine and clocking out at whatever hour you used to leave. That isn’t what this is.
This is about taking something valuable out of that experience, which is your knowledge of the lives of the people who work there, and using it to support them.
Some coaches become the coach they wish had been available to them. If someone had been there at a particular point, perhaps the crash wouldn’t have happened, or perhaps different choices would have been made a little earlier. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and plenty of us can look back and see where a conversation with a coach could have changed the direction of things and potentially the trajectory of our lives.
What I’m asking is that you take your knowledge of those people, the pressures and the strains, and also the good parts, because there are always some, and use it to help those humans.
When the Values No Longer Fit
The other version of this makes coaches angry rather than upset. They’ve worked in one sector their whole career, and their values and that sector’s values no longer align.
I was talking with a group of coaches and one of them was in exactly that position. I don’t quite remember the detail, but it was something like they wanted to coach charity CEOs, but they had no experience of the charity sector at all. They simply don’t know the stresses of running a charity, and they couldn’t describe a charity CEO’s life in a way that would make one of them think that’s me, that’s my situation, I’d like to work with this person.
When I raised it, the answer was: but I’m a coach, I can coach anyone.
“I can coach anyone…”
They’re right, they can. On the delivery side of the business, we can coach that CEO perfectly well. What we can’t do is market to them, or at least not nearly as effectively as somebody who has spent time in that world, and there are plenty of coaches who have worked in the charity sector who now coach there too. It’s impossible to market as effectively as one of them if we have no knowledge of the lived experience of the people in that sector.
We don’t have to have been a charity CEO to coach one, and we don’t have to have been one to market to them either. What we do need is a deep understanding of their lives and the rhythm of those lives.
The same answer applies when a coach says they want to work with people at a level they’ve never reached themselves. We don’t have to have worked at that level, but we do have to understand the nuance of their year: the pinch points, and the moments where the feeling is (for example) thank goodness that’s over for another year.
The Rhythm of a Year
My accountant told me that January is a rough month, and that on 1 February, once everything is filed, there’s a moment of sitting back. I didn’t know that, because I’m not an accountant and I’ve never worked in accountancy. I don’t know what else is going on for an accountant across the year either, which is why I couldn’t market to accountants.
Understanding the rhythm of a year for the people you want to market to isn’t a nice to have, it’s an essential.
My Coaching Isn’t About Work
You still need a WHO when the coaching has nothing to do with anybody’s job.
Take a health coach working with people who want to reverse, say, a pre-diabetes diagnosis through lifestyle changes. On the delivery side, they could coach anyone with that diagnosis.
On the marketing side, it falls apart without a context. We need to know where the triggers are: when work gets stressful and the chocolate bar happens, when it’s fish and chips on the way home because there’s nothing left in the tank. Knowing when the busy times are, when the pressure is on, and off too, is what lets us build a marketing message that person can see themselves in.
Why This Is Mechanical, Not Philosophical
LinkedIn isn’t the only place you should be, and it isn’t the only thing we teach, but it’s the backbone, because it’s where people go to check you out. I always use it as an example of why knowing sector, industry and profession matter so much, because we all understand how it works.
To find the kind of people we want to work with, we search for them by job title. That’s how the platform works. We can’t search for a pre-diabetes diagnosis, and you can’t search for people struggling with anxiety and overwhelm, because that’s not stuff people usually share on LinkedIn. Even if they do, it’s not likely to be in their job title, or experience.
Here’s a little experiment to try. Go to LinkedIn, type overwhelm into the search bar, and look at what comes back. Hundreds of coaches saying they work with people who are overwhelmed. That shows us everything about how well overwhelm works on its own as a marketing message (spoiler alert – it doesn’t work!).
Many of us share a belief that if we write something on LinkedIn, or any social media platform, everybody sees it, but that is not how this works. Attention is one of the most valuable commodities of the twenty-first century, which is how these platforms make their money: they sell our attention. If we write a post, it’s shown initially to a tiny fraction of our connections and what happens after that depends on what those people do.
So a coach who posts for months and gets no traction will tell me that marketing doesn’t work. When I look at what they’ve written, there’s no focus to it. They’re talking about coaching, and they’re talking about themselves.
If it isn’t focused, it isn’t marketing – it’s just words.
Why Coaches Say They Hate Marketing
When a coach tells me they hate marketing, what they’re describing isn’t marketing.
It’s the same problem the public has with the word coach. They think they know what we mean when we say we’re a coach, but they’re wrong. Coaches do exactly the same thing with marketing. They picture something braggy and boastful, something that involves blowing your own trumpet about what a marvellous coach you are.
That isn’t marketing. Effective marketing is comfortable, and it’s ethical, and it starts with knowing who you’re talking to. The best place to look for them is looking at whose lives you already understand.
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. It isn’t a four day commitment, it’s reasonably light touch, and it’s good fun as well as being properly challenging to think about. By the end of it you’ll have a clear idea of where your niche sits, your WHO and your WHAT, and you’ll be able to describe what you do in a single sentence that means something to people who aren’t coaches! Won’t that be wonderful?
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.
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