Let’s be real about this one thing: your content will make or break your online coaching business. We’re all aware of the basics: choose simple fonts, maintain brand guidelines, social images sizes, but there is more. There are 3 main ways I see coaches across industries ruin their social media content daily.
It doesn’t matter what type of coach you are; the content you put out on social media sets the tone for your Dream Client’s interaction with you. Get it right and you have a warm lead that converts to a client easily. Get it wrong and you end up trying to convince a cold lead that your solution is worth their time.
This is how you end up with an email list full of people only interested in your free content. This means you as the coach spend more time warming them up before you can offer your services. I’ll lay out the 3 ways I think coaches ruin their social media content below.
Speaking from Experience
I’m speaking from experience, both my own and that of my clients over the years. All the coaches that I worked with recommended building an email list. You provide value in your social media content, offer a free resource and promote it. Then, you send out an email sequence to ‘nurture’ your audience so you can make some sales at the end.
There are 3 things wrong with this type of marketing. First, it’s way too time consuming. It is a huge investment of time required that you may or may not see a profitable return on. That’s time you could be using elsewhere in your business, or in prayer or spending time with your kids!
Here’s my list of 3 ways coaches ruin their social media content. These are the things I think hurt businesses, use up valuable time, lower productivity and hinder brand and business development.
Way Coaches Ruin Their Content #1 – Trying to Serve an Audience Instead of a Specific Person
As a content coach I can work with
Women, 27-48, who are struggling to show up confidently in their online business while juggling ‘the new normal’ OR
Shenique, a 38 year old mother of two living in Baltimore, is struggling to reconcile her faith with her financial dreams. She recently completed her life coaching certification. She was so excited to start signing clients but her social media accounts are dry, like the Sahara Desert. Shenique doesn’t know how to attract those she wants to work with, and its making her doubt her ability to serve.
I don’t know about you, but I feel much closer to, more confident in my ability to serve and more excited to get to work for Shenique in the second example. That’s the power of SPECIFICITY.
When you get specific on who it is that you serve, creating content to help them becomes so much easier. The more you drill down and focus on your specific dream client, the more magnetic your niche, and your content, will become.
A note about niching:
When I got started, I thought ‘finding your niche’ was figuring out who you can best serve with your business. And that’s right, but it’s also incomplete.
Your niche has more to do with your experience than the ‘right’ audience. Who do you have experience serving well? Who have you successfully moved from point A to point B? This is the strength of your niche: your experience. Don’t cut it out.
Which leads me to my next point.
Way Coaches Ruin Their Content #2 – Not Using Their Story/Journey
When I first started out online I spent so much time researching what the other ebook cover designers were doing and trying to mimic that, but that didn’t build my business. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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It wasn’t until I started to own my story a bit in my marketing that my business really took off. I booked more design clients in the last few months as an ebook cover designer than in the 11 months previous.
Bring all aspects of your story and your journey to where you are to the table when you are deciding who you will work with and how you can most help them. Coaches ruin the impact their content has by ignoring their story or trying to ‘clean it up’ so its more presentable to the general public.
Which is why my first point was that you don’t serve the general public.
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Did you think you went through what you went through for nothing? You think you have all that personality for nothing? You think you have a unique view of your industry for nothing?⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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YOU ARE UNIQUE FOR A REASON. O W N. I T.
Way Coaches Ruin Their Content #3 – Teaching without Context
For years I created what I thought was valuable content that actually hurt my business but got me lots of followers. Crazy right? The two actually aren’t the same thing!
Not all content is created equal, and not everything you think is valuable is the kind of ‘valuable’ you want to focus on. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
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The value you want to focus on is the context. Perspective and perception are two things most coaches struggle to shift in their Dream Client, not the least because they often aren’t thinking of a single Dream Client.
Giving valuable tips, hacks, free tools and resources is great for attracting those who want to know more about your specialty. However, when it comes to attracting those who actually want to make an investment, you must provide the context of what you are giving them.
To be honest, those who are truly ready to invest come to you asking for context. They come with questions of mindset and perception and remain intent on finding the answer. It is a disservice to both them and yourself to ignore that need and create content that doesn’t prime a deeper investment with you.
And this is why I say these are 3 ways coaches ruin their content. This type of stance sabotages all your pretty graphics and devalues the demonstration of your expertise.
3 Things Coaches Can Do Instead
Now that I’ve laid out the 3 ways coaches ruin their social media content, here’s a note on what you can do instead.
1 – Focus on serving ONE specific person. Identify the customer you got the most results for, who had the best or most transformative experience with you. Take a sheet of paper and decide what kind of person you most want to work with but also CAN HAVE THE MOST IMPACT ON. Stick this sheet somewhere you can see it and refer to it often.
2 – Own your story and synthesize your journey. There is wisdom in the road that you’ve walked that can supercharge your client’s progress with you. Stop holding back on them!
3 – Sell before your sell. Dive deep into the what and why around the transformation you facilitate. Talk about the mindset shifts and thought patterns they need to have and be aware of. Talk about the power of their perception and lean into the prep work that needs to happen before they work with you. This is the selling your content should be doing before you present your offer. This is the way you educate with context.
Coaches who include these points don’t ruin their content. If your content isn’t doing at least 2 of these, are you really creating content to support your business goals or are you chasing followers and empty likes?
