Marketing for Coaches and Consultants

If you're a coach or consultant, it doesn't matter how awesome your coaching services are, or even how great you are at selling. If you have no one to sell your coaching services or products to… you're honestly outta luck! That's why having a marketing strategy is so important. Without your specific marketing strategies in place, it's going to be very hard to grow a coaching business. (Hint hint… that's why we are doing a deep dive here into marketing for coaches and consultants.)

As a coach myself, I know you want to focus on the impact you are making with your coaching business. The good stuff that you love is focusing on the transformation you provide with your services and working with coaching clients. Right?!

With the ever-changing digital space, it's important to do a check-in and ask…
Are my business and marketing foundations in place?

Am I really making the most out of these platforms in the shortest amount of time?

In this live video, we'll go over the basics and a few ninja strategies that will allow you to stand out and be known so you can attract your ideal clients and build your coaching or consulting business.

Get Your Foundations in Place

Marketing for coaches and consultants can get complicated at times but one thing remains constant; having your foundations in place. Who are you? What are you an expert at? If you don’t know how to answer those questions, it will be hard for people to want to buy from you. Then you have to figure out your ideal client. This can be an ever-evolving idea. You don’t just set it and forget it; this is something you should constantly revisit. 

And another super important foundation to figure out is what are you offering? What are the benefits? How are they delivered? You must be super clear on your offer. What are the transformations you provide to this ideal client? As long as you can listen to feedback from your clients and process those ideas, that can also help you figure out an offer.

Let’s go deeper into your ideal client. The best way to get started is this checklist that we have created to help you figure this out. Pick one real human being who you would love to work with. Maybe it’s someone who is already a client of yours, or maybe it’s a client that you aspire to serve. Answer these four below questions as related to this real human being. Use Google Docs so it can be a living, breathing document. Do this with at least three different human beings, and you will see the commonalities that emerge between all three people. 

• • What are the personal attributes of this person? Yesterday, when we did this exercise, we came up with a woman in her late 30s who is married, has kids at home, etc. Also, write things down about her energy: she is committed to positivity, a driving work ethic, and moving with the changes. Not all of our clients fit that description, but I started with that one person and wrote things down without judgment.
  • What are their professional attributes? These will be things about their professional life. Are they a business owner? Are they a schoolteacher? What you will find here is this will start to tell you things. If they are a business owner, they will have a slightly different calendar schedule than a schoolteacher, who will have summers off, than someone working in a 9-5 job.
  • What are their aspirations? What do they want? What are they looking to achieve? We have a member of GLAM who often talks about wanting to work solely from her hot tub; I used to do lots of my Q&As from the hot tub. The details in this are so important. Are they looking to build a business? Are they looking to have a better family life? Do they want to feel more confident?
  • What pain points do they have before they start to work with you? We have a Money Map Messaging exercise we do in GLAM because their pain points will likely be different at different levels of working with you, and it’s worth considering these different pain points and aspirations when crafting the marketing messaging for your different services.

Building Value-First Relationships

Now that I have an awesome team, there are a few things I have let slide because I am not owning that piece. This one for me is a really good reminder. It’s also something I’ve had on my to-do list that I have been procrastinating on… Make a list of the people you actually want to serve! If you don’t know who you’d like to serve, how is the universe supposed to know? There is this idea of the Dream 100, and it’s a great idea to implement here. Your marketing will fall flat if you don’t know who you want to serve. Back in the day, when our director of education Kelley and I made a list for ourselves, Kelley included people like Les Brown. I was skeptical of that inclusion. Guess who is now someone I have built a bot for and am running a coaching program with? Les Brown! He wasn’t too fancy for us after all. Don’t keep this list a secret. Write it down and show it to someone! You also want to create a list of Power Partners, those who help you serve your client relationships. 

You next need to find the actual humans. Write down their Facebook page, Instagram handles, YouTube channels, website URLs, and email addresses. 

Reach out to them through building value-first relationships. Ask them, “How can I support you?” Since I am serving business owners, I love to say, “Is there anything you have coming up? I’d love to share it on social.” Super easy. We build this big thing around this type of reaching out. This type of relationship-building does not require you getting on connection calls with everyone. As a coach/consultant, you are serving human beings, and they want to know what it’s like to have a relationship with you. It’s about those very specific value-first relationships, which I’m calling consistent connections, and it’s also about consistent content. Set aside as little as 15 minutes a day and comment on some posts on social media. This wakes up the algorithm so that your content will show up in front of those folks more. You can systematize your relationship-building! Consistent content is all about creating content that you share on a consistent basis, such as doing a live video once a week on my Facebook page. 

You can scale these relationships with partnerships. The first way to do this is get booked on interview shows, and in turn book those folks on your show. You can also do speaking engagements in other people’s groups. 

If you have a friend/power partner whose clients are similar to yours, offer to do a free training for their group. Put yourself in front of them. As a coach/consultant, it’s necessary for you to offer your expertise. Create systems, frameworks, and processes that are named and proven to work. If you can teach some of those concepts, people will see that you are in fact the real deal. Case studies and testimonials to help back you up are also key. Be sure that you aren’t cannibalizing your actual programs and services. Share things that are focused on diagnostic tools so that you don’t give them the solution; you know that an actual solution requires a real conversation with them about their specific situation. Thus, make sure you are always creating a gap between your free content and your paid content. What is that new problem you are creating? 

Paid Content

Once you have reached a point where you are ready to put some money behind your marketing strategies, retargeting ads are a great place to start. A retargeting ad is like if you go to a shoe site, and there is a shoe you look at, the ad for that shoe will follow you. It’s a follow-up campaign. 

There is a change with iOS where Apple products are saying you have to have permission in order to be retargeted. I personally prefer ads that have my information because I prefer ads that are relevant rather than random ads. But you do have to keep this in mind now. 

On Facebook and YouTube, you can also retarget viewers. I can set up an ad saying, “If a viewer watched 50% of this video, I am going to have a good guess that maybe they are interested in marketing for coaches and consultants, so I will send a retargeting ad to them.” These types of campaigns are super affordable and a great marketing strategy for coaches to keep in action. 

You can also pay for ads targeted toward a specific audience. Once you have gotten clear on your ideal client, you have all of these data points about them. This makes it much easier to create ads geared toward them because you have done the “market research.” But you should start with the organic first. 

Create a Follow-Up System

Let’s talk about the client journey. The awareness begins with an entry point. You then want to have some sort of lead capture tool. It’s not enough for someone to watch your videos because you don’t own the social media platforms, so you want to pull them off of the social platform onto a list. In order to do that, you need a lead capture opt-in form. We use ConvertKit. Next is the thank you experience; now that they have opted in, you need to thank them for doing so. From there, an email nurture sequence. With each email, you want to have a specific reason for them to stay connected to you. Think of this as a parfait, adding these things in one layer at a time. We have Messenger and SMS follow-up, which can come from a human or a tool like ManyChat. Then you have to find a way to take their money. Create a sales page! People often work on their marketing strategies and forget about the sales. But don’t forget about the opportunity to capture more sales by thanking those who have already purchased from you, welcoming them in to your system, and asking them for referrals. 

When you are creating your consistent content, the absolute best thing you can do is live video. It’s more efficient because you don’t have to worry about recording and editing. It’s more effective because you are having a one-to-many conversation, but it feels like one-to-one. This also allows you to chop up your video into so many pieces to repurpose this content in a myriad of ways, such as podcasts, YouTube videos, IGTV videos, LinkedIn videos, and more. Most people skip these foundational pieces and jump ahead to creating content. If you want your ad and marketing strategies to work, you must have these foundations in place.

A Bonus Livestream Marketing Nugget

Given that we had some technical difficulties at the start of this call, I want to show you a bonus nugget. I use Rebrandly to create easy, branded links, and inside the tool, you can plug in a link to a pre-scheduled post. When the video goes live, a new link is generated, so I update Rebrandly with the new forwarding link to the live video. This can help more people find the content you are creating, thus driving traffic to your business and eventually make more sales. Don’t trust the algorithm on Facebook to take care of this for you. If you do a pre-scheduled call using BeLive, I highly recommend doing this. 

If you are promoting something in your show, BeLive is a great tool to use for your streaming. The live sales feature allows you to share an image in your stream, which triggers the associated link to be posted as a comment in the chat. If you are interested in becoming a partner with BeLive, earning a commission on referrals as well as your referrals’ referrals, you can apply here. 

We've covered a lot of ground about marketing for coaches and consultants, but there is still so much more to cover. Reach out if you need help with your specific situation or have any questions at all! I hope this blog post has been helpful in giving some food for thought around how to get started on building a rock-solid coaching business strategy that will propel your success forward.

Additional Resources

• Follow us! Facebook, Instagram
• BeLive (sponsor)
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• Rebrandly
• ConvertKit
• ManyChat
• Expert Secrets by Russell Brunson

Traffic Secrets by Russell Brunson