Is Your Marketing Mindset Preventing You from Growing Your Coaching Business?
Is *shift my marketing mindset* on your list of to-dos?
As a life coach, do you worry that you’ve got to up level your marketing mindset so you can engage and attract your dream clients?
If thoughts like these creep into your daily self-talk…
… Talking about my services to attract coaching clients is my least favorite thing. (Right after accounting.)
… Promoting my business feels self-promotional. Or salesy, sleazy, queasy.
You’re not alone!
This was my giant problem after becoming an instant, overnight entrepreneur due to a massive layoff.
You’d think marketing myself would have been a piece of cake for me. After all, I had been a marketing professional for (too many) years in corporate America.
But marketing / talking about my own business was a completely different animal. You won’t be surprised, after years of promoting other people, products, and services, I was terrible at marketing my services.
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For the first two years after becoming a marketing consultant for small and mid-sized businesses, my company went nowhere.
I didn’t know how to talk about my services in a compelling way.
When people at networking events asked, “What do you do?” I used industry jargon.
I used generic, industry-speak like, “I’m a marketing consultant. I help small and mid-sized businesses develop marketing campaigns, product rollouts, and go-to-market strategies.”
You can imagine how many glazed over stares I got. Sadly, few folks said, “Tell me more.”
Who cannot be your client
You see, here was my biggest problem: I hadn’t yet defined my perfect, ideal client.
And, to make it worse, I mistakenly assumed that small businesses were tiny versions of the corporate America I’d inhabited for so long.
Sheesh, was I wrong!
If I had gotten clear on exactly who I served best, I would have understood (sooner) 3 undeniable facts:
- Every small business wasn’t my ideal client
- Each small business is led by an owner/entrepreneur/CEO with a different worldview, set of values, and priorities
- You can’t know what’s important to talk about on Zoom networking calls or in your marketing content, until you know who YOUR dream client is
My aha moment as a newbie entrepreneur came after a particularly painful networking event.
I sat down with a glass of pinot noir and replayed all of my networking-to-find-new-clients conversations.
Suddenly, the light came on! I was trying to engage with business owners by using marketing-speak. Here’s the thing, the business owners I wanted to serve spoke a completely different language than I did. And, it was up to me to shift my language, my marketing mindset, and talk about what marketing was important to my future clients.
Once I gained clarity on who my perfect client was, I dug deeper to learn to speak her language.
You can do it too.
Do this to grow your business
Why is speaking your perfect clients’ language vital to growing your business?
Because your clients are out there looking for help. Your ideal clients have problems that you’re the best expert to help them solve.
You want to make it easy for your ideal clients to recognize that you’re the expert to help them.
Your perfect clients need you. Please don’t forget this.
Think about your obligation to reach these clients who need YOU. Don’t avoid marketing your business.
Back to our mindset dilemma:
Women entrepreneurs, who are fabulous at what they do, tell me all the time, how they’d rather do ANYTHING than market themselves.
After all, won’t enough of your ideal clients just magically find your website and call you?
Sure!
If your website stories, messages, and problem explanations touch your ideal clients.
If you speak your perfect clients’ language so they think you’re reading their minds.
If you communicate,
“I get you.”
“I can help you fix longstanding pain points because I’ve been there.”
“I’ve helped others just like you resolve problems like yours.”
Would you like to have more of your ideal clients feel like you understand them, when they discover you online?Or meet you at business groups or industry and community events?
Imagine this, your dream clients feel like there’s a bond between the two of you because you understand what’s keeping them stuck.
- Do this: create a “backstory” for your perfect client.
- Get down everything you know about your perfect clients into a document.
- If you feel like you’re not a writer, no worries. This ‘perfect client story’ is a resource just for you. No one else sees it.
Your perfect client story can be a combination of rambling phrases, things they said to you, questions they asked you, thank you emails they sent you, problems they described.
Use anything and everything that inspires you when you’re ready to create content for your website and social media. When you want to talk so your perfect clients listen.
Refer to your perfect client backstory whenever you create content so you can capture their attention and interest with ease. You want to get into their mindset, so that your educational blogs, videos, articles, and social media posts resonate with your ideal audience.
Here’s the mindset shift: marketing your business isn’t about you.
Successful marketing is not about your services
Marketing isn’t about your coaching services. Marketing is ALL about your dream clients. Their pain points. Their dreams. Their aspirations. What’s got them stuck.
To shift your marketing mindset, focus on this: Educate your perfect clients about how to get unstuck.
Share your knowledge, expertise about baby steps they can take toward becoming the better version of themselves they want to be.
Bonus tip: educating potential clients boosts your credibility as selling-to-women expert, Bridget Brennan tells us on Forbes.
Brennan explains that giving insights, tips, and credibility-builders to potential clients that are valuable enough for them to share, benefits you. Clients who know-like-trust you will share with their like-minded friends. As a result, those friends will then find you. Win-win, right?
When marketing, talk about the fabulous opportunities that await your dream clients, after they complete your coaching program.
Explain how their life or business will be after you lead them out of their problems, frustrations, and struggles.
Isn’t it more inspiring to think of marketing as opening up possibilities for those clients you love working with?
Because that’s what marketing really is. Showing your perfect clients what’s waiting for them after they work with you.
Be Unstoppable!
~ Cynthia
What if you could finally create content consistently?
If creating your marketing content has felt like a chore, a time-suck, or a massive mystery, you may have given up on content entirely.
But the truth is:
Content is key to attracting ideal clients and filling your programs. So don’t give up!
If your content ideas are buried in your beautiful brain, you want a process to help your words flow.
You want specific actions to implement so that the content you create stands out to your dream clients.
When you schedule a free Clarity Call, together, we’ll uncover your personalized marketing content actions. That way you can impact more clients. Click below to set up your FREE Clarity Call.
