Marketing Strategies that do not work for new coaches

 In this video, I'm gonna walk you through all the different things that are not gonna work for you when you are a new coach. And I'm creating this video because I'm very frustrated 'cause after 10 years coaching coaches, I am still coming across people who are being sold group programs and digital products.

That are not going to get them anywhere because they are not in the right stage of business. And unfortunately, all the so-called gurus out there are not gonna make it clear because they wanna make more money and they wanna be the guru that makes millions online. So listen up. I'm going to go through every strategy and I'm gonna explain in detail why it's not gonna work for you, and I'm gonna help you understand what you should be doing instead.

So for those of you who are back to my channel, welcome on back If you're new here. My name is Stephanie Ney. I have been coaching coaches for the last 10 years. I have an online business. Coaching coaches worldwide, mostly in the US but stretches all the way from Singapore to Dubai to most of the countries in Europe, and of course also the uk.

So I have a lot of experience working with coaches everywhere, and what I've learned over the last 10 years is that coaches face the same problems no matter where they are situated. So listen up today, we're gonna go through. The difficulties that you're gonna find with the different marketing strategies.

When I first became a coach myself and I went online, I already had quite a lot of experience in marketing because I had owned my own marketing agency for 12 years. So I was familiar with all the strategies. I had used them extensively, and I knew exactly what I was doing, but still, I started realizing that.

When I was trying to learn from other people online, they were misguiding me because there were certain things that did not quite work if you were still trying to get on the first rung of that letter. And today, what I wanna do is actually help you understand what most people didn't explain to me and what most people still don't understand today.

And this video is gonna help you really accelerate the success in your new coaching business because you're gonna know exactly what not to do, so you can immediately move towards the things that you need to do. So the first strategy you should absolutely not be considering yet is list building.

And I know this is one of those things everybody tells you, oh, you're starting an online business. You're starting a digital business. Of course you gotta grow your email list. And I'm telling you, of course you do not. The main reason is. In order to grow your email list, you need a couple of things. So you need a very good lead magnet.

You also need a lot of visibility for that lead magnet, and you also need a lot of knowledge about your ideal clients to get your lead magnets right. So what tends to happen is if you start immediately as you are setting up your online coaching business, you're probably gonna grow your email list with the wrong people.

And you are gonna need a budget, which you very likely do not have. Obviously that is debatable. Some people do have a budget for ads. But you are gonna spend a lot of money to grow an email list, which probably is not gonna be made exactly of your own ideal clients. So later on, after your first year of business, you're probably gonna look at your list and you're gonna say, I have spent so much money growing this list, and these are not the people I'm working with.

So you're gonna have to redo it all over again. The main reason is when you're starting off as a coaching, as a coaching business, as an online coach, the first thing is to get your foundations right and your foundations are your ideal client, your packages, your pricing also your offline strategy to support different, sources of leads and different sources of business, and unless you have those things already sorted, your list is not really going to help very much. Another thing is a lot of people think that people are gonna get on your list and they're gonna buy right away. They are not, because you need two things to get people to buy.

First of all, based on human nature, which is something you cannot absolutely change. They're gonna take approximately six to nine months to actually even consider buying anything from you. And also you're gonna have to get really good at email. You're gonna have to get really good at speaking to your ideal client, which you need to know pretty well to speak to them.

And also, you need to really hone in on your email writing skills. And these are usually things that are quite very difficult in the beginning. Of course there are ways of accelerating turning these nine months into maybe three months or even maybe less time, but you are going to need, what we call relationship accelerators for that relationship.

Accelerators are videos and podcasts usually that help people get to know you and trust you a little bit faster. Again, these are not strategies you can do in the beginning because in order to put together. A very good relationship accelerator that works. You need to really know your ideal clients, and chances are in the beginning you don't because you need to work with a minimum of 20 clients that are willing to pay you.

So your free coaching clients, the ones you use for your certification, are not very valid for this because you need to validate that these are people. That are not only getting results from what you do, but they are also willing to pay for those results. So again, we're going back to the foundations.

You absolutely need the foundations first. The same thing goes for social media. So a lot of people say, I started posting on social media, but my following is not growing. I did get maybe a bit of interest in the beginning, but now it's all died out. This is perfectly normal. The reason why this happens is that most people actually do have some low hanging fruit.

And this low hanging fruit are friends and friends of friends who already know and trust you. So you don't have to build that trust with them. And of course this is stuff that you should be using in the beginning to start getting your first clients, but you cannot base your long-term marketing strategy on the success you're gonna have from the low hanging fruit 'cause it's soon gonna dry out.

You will start wondering what the hell's going on? My strategy was working and now it's not. And the truth is no, your strategy was never really working because very likely you are still not super clear about your strategy. You're not super clear about who you're attracting, why you're attracting them, and what they're willing to pay for.

Again, social media is very much like list building. Human beings are gonna take six to nine months of actually watching your content online before they start understanding whether they really wanna work with you or not. So trust, unfortunately, is one of those things you can't really speed up. It's one of those things sometimes you might get people who are impulsive and they work with you more impulsively, and that's perfectly fine, but most people actually need quite a bit of time to be able to generate that trust that's gonna make them buy from you.

So again, social media by itself, probably not the best place to go. Another thing, that I see a lot of new coaches. Talking about that they really wanna do is selling digital courses and doing evergreen webinars. And, you know, having like an ads funnel on their site.

I know there are three completely different things, but they do have one thing in common. You are gonna need a lot of, and a lot of testing. And if you don't know who you're trying to attract. You are just throwing money out of the window. So if you don't know your ideal client really well, if you don't know exactly what appeals to them about your packages, if you don't know what your strongest selling point is, it's really gonna be difficult to make all these three things work.

Now you saying, well, what can I do if there are all these things I cannot do? Well, here's what I suggest, and this is something actually I recommend to my clients quite a lot and I actually support them with doing and creating all of these things. So one of the first things you can do is actually going to webinars.

Again, the word webinar is a bit of a dirty word since the pandemic because we so many boring people from corporate. Just boring people to death online and during the pandemic. But you can also call it free training. You can call it a masterclass. You can call it, anything else. Just don't call it a webinar.

But basically what you can do is you can create a webinar. You can find ways of getting people to your webinar organically in the beginning. Again, you need to be clear about your ideal clients, but you are also in a place where maybe you can test a little bit. So by doing your webinars and trying to fill them organically, you are not going to have as many people, of course, as when you run ads.

But what it's gonna do is it's gonna help you because doing things organically, you know, by doing outreach or looking at groups, or actually talking to people in person, it's going to really help you because you're going to start talking to people and understanding what is interesting and what is not interesting to them.

So the more conversations you have. The better it's going to be. And that's exactly what you want to do, so that you start getting to know your ideal client, especially if you haven't worked with too many people yet. So you wanna get these people on your webinar, you're gonna say, okay, you know, if I run ads, I could get a hundred people to come to my webinar.

Usually you're gonna get about 30% of the people who register. So, you know, if you get maybe 40 people interested you can create an event on Facebook. You can create an event on LinkedIn. You can invite all your contacts, you can do all of these things organically. Maybe you're gonna get 20 people on the webinar, maybe 25 organically.

These are numbers that are very doable, and what tends to happen is that. If you're selling one-to-one. So this is something I highly recommend. Don't think of selling to groups because you need a large volume and it's a lot of pressure to sell 10 to 15 spots in one webinar

so focus on selling one-to-one first so that you can have a small number of people coming to your webinar, and it's a skill that you're going to develop. It's a skill that. Is gonna come in very useful later to sell groups, but you should definitely start by selling one-to-one in the beginning.

And it's as simple as giving a webinar about, one of the pain points you resolve, and then letting people know that they can book a discovery call with you. Do not try to sell your programs on the webinar itself unless you have maybe. A small limited time offer may be on, say, a three session package or a four session package, which is not very expensive.

But your first goal should be to get comfortable with the webinars, to get the conversation going with the people who are actually coming to your webinars. These are people who have the pain points you resolve, and you need to get to know the different people who have this pain point so that you can actually really understand who's gonna benefit the most and who really wants and is very willing to pay to make that struggle go away, to make that pain go away. So webinars are really going to help you, but you have to do it organically first, and the whole thing ties into everything else. A lot of people like to, have been sold. This idea that you can record a video and then send ads traffic to it, or you can record a webinar and then send ads, traffic to it and get people on your list and then convert it.

When it comes to coaching, especially if you haven't worked with too many people yet, it's going to be very difficult for you to actually get these things to work. The main reason is as soon as you make something automatic, so you are not there live. The conversion rate is going to drop.

Without actually testing it before, chances are it's going to convert at around one to 3%. As soon as people notice that this is prerecorded and they're basically being processed, your conversion rate is going to drop. So what you wanna do is you want to actually come to a place where you have done your one-to-one webinars, you have learned how to sell.

Then maybe you want to add some ads so that you get more people into your funnel. You wanna work on all the conversion points. So you wanna work on your emails to get more people to come to the webinar. You wanna work on your pitch to get more people to actually book that call with you so that they can then close them.

If you're selling directly, you wanna really improve the quality of the webinar to make sure that your conversion rate can go up to 10, 15%. It's absolutely possible with webinars, you can really push your conversion rate. But then you have to be aware that as soon as you make that same webinar evergreen, the conversion rate is going to drop.

And that is why it's important to hone in on your webinar skills. First, it's important to understand which emails are making people turn up the webinars, what's important to push up, every conversion points that you have. In the flow. Again, keep it as simple as possible because the more complicated the strategy becomes, the more conversion points you have, the more impossible the task is going to seem.

So in the beginning, keep things simple, do things organically, and have as many conversations as possible with the people you want to attract. Another of my favorite strategies. SEO and SEO basically just means that you're going to optimize your site. You're going to create regular content like this.

You're gonna have written content, video content, and you're gonna get more traffic to your site, and then allow people to actually get to know you and move on and book a discovery call. This is out of all the strategies I've used, the one that's worked the best for me, it's helped me build a six figure coaching business purely from this one lead source.

Everything else is, cream on the cake really because it's the SEO that has brought the best converting traffic. People who come to your site because they're already looking for someone like you. They already have the struggles that you help with are going to land on your content.

They're going to make a decision very quickly about whether they want to talk to you or not. And in fact, getting people to your site and getting them to book a discovery call is the easiest way of getting clients. Now, of course, that is not something, again, that's gonna happen too fast, and you do need to know your ideal clients but it's something that you can actually work on.

So if you're still in the beginning stage of your coaching business, I highly recommend, working with a coach, not necessarily myself, but this is something I actually work with with my clients. If you're interested in a discovery call, I'll put the link under this video, and the first thing is to work with your coach on really getting your ideal client clear.

There are exercises you can do. There are of course things you can actively do in your marketing to listen and to gather information. You need to also get your packages right because the ideal client needs to be well aligned with the package so that you can put literally these people in front of your package and they will automatically buy.

I do not believe in. Pushing coaching because people have to be ready in order to do the work. It doesn't help the coach and it doesn't help the client if you're do pushy sales. But it's important that there is a process, that there is alignment and that you know, how to speak to people to help them understand if what you're selling is what they need and if they are ready to go ahead with it.

And if they really value the result of what you offer. So definitely aligning those two things and taking it into keyword research and taking that further into the other strategies to start building an ecosystem where you have consistent leads coming into your business so that you can really enjoy and you can make the impact that you dreamed of making when you actually started your coaching certification.

If you have any questions about the different strategies, I didn't go too deep, but I hope it's gonna help you to really understand what strategies can work for you at this stage in your business. If you have questions, pop them under this video or jump on a discovery call and you can ask them face to face if you want some personal advice.

If you found this video interesting. Follow and subscribe and I hope to see you in the next video. Thank you for watching.