If you’re honest with yourself, you know this. . . When most people prioritize where to put their hard-earned money, coaching is not high on the list. So why are you trying to convince people to buy it?
There’s a better way to get clients. I’ll lay out the four steps below, but it all starts with finding out what people will put their money into. And in order to find out what people will pay a coach for, you have to know which people you are talking about.
Trust me, there are plenty of people out there who are eager to invest in professional services for a specific purpose. Finding them, and finding out what they are after, is the art of target marketing.
I’ve seen over and over how the clients start flowing in when coaches target a viable coaching market. And the kicker is, targeting a viable market significantly reduces the amount of marketing your business needs. Why?
- It’s quick and easy to learn about the people in a narrow market — what makes them tick, what they want in life, what’s missing for them. And suddenly, you have the keys to the most powerful and effective marketing.
- Your business becomes client centric. The more you build everything in your business around what you know about your prospects, the more your business connects with them where they live.
Have you ever come across a service that seems like it’s designed for you? The service provider is speaking your language, understands what you want so well that it’s a no brainer. You’ll invest, right? And you’ll tell other people about it, too. That’s what target marketing does for you as a coach.
Will Your Coaching Niche Go the Distance?
When you try to sell a coaching specialty (transition coaching, career coaching, relationship coaching) or you target a market that’s too broad, it’s very difficult to generate sustainable demand for your services. Your specialty may be valuable, and exciting to you, but attracting paying clients will be an uphill battle.
If you target women in transition, for example, you’re trying to appeal to too many diverse situations and populations. Consider the values, interests and challenges of women graduating from college, versus women entering retirement. Trying to cover all those angles won’t engender credibility or trust. And it leaves you competing with anyone who markets to women at any stage of life. That’s fierce competition!
You can tell your coaching niche is too broad when:
- You’re working extremely hard, unable to leverage your efforts and struggling to meet your financial goals.
- Each time you market, it feels like starting over.
- It’s hard to think of something new to say in ezines or blog posts.
- You quickly run out of ways to connect with groups of people in your market.
But when you choose a viable coaching market:
- It’s easy to get in front of 100 or more people in your market every month.
- You can quickly become an expert in your market.
- You’ll get pre-qualified referral business from your current clients.
- You’ll be able to charge high prices for your coaching.
Build a Client Centric Coaching Business
Here’s one of the top reasons I have so much juice for helping coaches succeed — because the most successful coaches are the ones who do the most good. They are the ones who are working at their full potential and reaching the most people.
Building any successful business is hard work. It takes loads of talent and grit. So don’t make it harder than it needs to be. The best way I know to give your coaching business every advantage, is to make it client centric. That means:
- Choose a viable coaching market.
- Find out what matters most to those people — the goals they really care about and the obstacles that keep tripping them up.
- Design your coaching programs around what your market is motivated to invest in.
- When you market — when you communicate what you are offering — use language your market will understand.
None of this is rocket science, but it does help to walk through it with someone who has been there before. That’s exactly what my workshop on target marketing for coaches is designed to do. That’s why I call it Champion Your Ideal Coaching Market.
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