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Social Media Marketing for Coaches
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If you are a coach, there is no doubt you fully understand that your brand and reputation is everything when it comes to growing your business.
With that in mind, I find it amazing how many coaches are either not demonstrating their abilities, or even worse destroying their brand on social media with low grade or un-engaging content.
As a coach, connecting and resonating with people needs to be your absolute priority. No one is going to hire you unless they truly believe you will help them achieve their goals and aspirations in life or business.
Social media is still a relatively new technology, and the possibilities of what it can do are are ever changing and improving. It can sometimes feel hard to keep up, but to ignore it and let your competitors take advantage of its power is simply coaching suicide.
So I guess we’ve beaten the drum enough, you need to make your social media presence heard and start resonating with your audience so they start buying into you and your brand and lining up to become customers.
But how exactly do you build out a successful coaching brand on social media?
That is a questions we will answer in this post. If you apply this information properly I can absolutely guarantee your business will be in for significant growth is just a few months.
Is there a quick hack or fix you can just do once and succeed in this advice? No.
Will this require consistent effort? Absolutely.
So if you are looking for one magic social media ad or post that will get clients flooding in, you’re going to be in for a disappointment.
If you understand that to make sales on social media you will absolutely need to make it part of your weekly schedule and commit to it like you would any other communication tool (try not checking your emails for a week), you will be in for some astonishing results.
Customer Avatars
Before we even get to anything directly related to social media, you need to build at least one customer avatar. A customer avatar is basically your ‘true north’ for a client. It is a detailed profile of an imaginary person that would literally be your perfect client.
By building out a full profile of your ideal client and going into extreme detail about their interests, family life, problems and knowledge you make your job of building social media content an absolute breeze later down the line. We use the avatar as a guiding light for your social media strategy and content.
Digital Marketer has a great template for avatar creation, it is one we use ourselves. You can download it here.
Strategy
Before we launch into what you need to do, we first need a guide to work from. Writing a social media strategy will act as a plan that you can execute on without having to continually ‘think’ about what to post.
It ensures that you keep your posts aligned to each other and aimed at a common goal of attracting that perfect client you outlined as your avatar.
Aligning your products and services
How to sell on social media is covered in countless places online. . It’s often not so easy to find content that explains what you need to focus on selling.
Time and time again I talk to coaches that have been frustrated in the past because no one will buy their 10 grand coaching package through facebook, even though they've run ads, used video and cleverly optimised landing pages to ‘sell’ their product.
So why is it so hard to sell your coaching package on social media when there are literally million of people who need it?
It comes down to one simple thing, trust.
When was the last time you bought a 4 or 5 figure service from someone you’ve never heard of right off the bat?
Generally, it just doesn’t happen, and by focussing on only people that are ready to buy your products right now, you’ll almost never balance the effort vs return equation on social media.
The reason it doesn’t happen is because a lot of the people that come across your content are not ready to buy your products or services, yet.
So by stuffing your expensive services down their throat you don’t just get on peoples nerves, you fail to provide value and alienate people that may have purchased form you a few months down the line.
What you need to do in this instance is consider the different ‘decision phases’ people are at as they come across your content on social media.
You can really break these phases down into many small pieces but to keep things simple, lets stick with three.
The first phase is going to be completely cold, with a slight interest in your services. This is the phase most people will be at when they first discover you online.
They probably won’t be ready to buy anything just yet, which is fine, but they will still be ready to digest your content or make a very small, low cost purchase to ‘test drive’ your brand.
This phase is where you want to offer up what I call a low-barrier product. For a coach a low barrier product can be sold for a low fee, or even better, offered completely free.
Awesome examples of low barrier products that we have used with our coach clients include:
A free ‘discovery call’ to assist with setting goals and planning for success
Free facebook live or webinar events content on subjects specific to your audience
A free or low cost course covering skills in areas that are important to your audience
The important thing to consider with the above examples is that you always want to create something that makes your mid tier product a logical next step for your customers.
Offering a course on effective goal setting or planning could then lead up to you offering a mid tier accountability service to keep someone on track with their goals.
It’s all about making the transition from one decision level to the next as smooth and logical as possible for your audience.
So now it’s time to develop or design you mid tier product, this is often the one that you will sell in high volume, often your flagship coaching package. Examples that we have worked on with clients would include:
3 month accountability packages
Ongoing monthly subscription with weekly or monthly catch up calls.
In depth paid courses (4-12 weeks of content)
Paid event attendance
The price of this product is generally not something I can set, as each coach operates in different markets requiring different offers and pricing. But what I will say is consider what a reasonable amount for someone in your target audience would want and invest in to get a good idea of what to charge and offer. Go back to your avatar and the answer will always become clearer!
The next and final product in this example is one that many people don’t consider or offer. This is the product for people who are 100% bought into you and your brand and want as much as they can get, regardless of price. Examples of a high tier product would be:
One to one video weekly coaching
In person private training
VIP event packages
Extended coaching packages
Luxury coaching retreats
Creating and scheduling content
So, now you have your products it’s time to think about the all important content. This is the stuff you are going to post to social media on a daily basis.
If you have created your avatar and written your strategy this bit should really be a breeze.
With any piece of content you want to focus on one key goal. Providing incredible value to your audience.
Video content is your friend here. The more video content you can put out there for people to engage with the better.
It’s easy to feel a bit bogged down when it comes to creating and posting content, it’s often a key factor for creating overwhelm. But it doesn’t have to be.
This is where we bring in the social media content trick that will appear to give you superpowers... Batch processing.
When it comes to creating daily or weekly video content the through of getting your phone out each day to crack out a high value video for a few minutes can see daunting. By batch processing you can film a great deal of your content in advance, in a single day.
Spending a day filming a big batch of video content will mean you instantly have enough video to often last you for months.
Now all you need to do is schedule that content! Systems like Hootsuite or Buffer have you covered here. Once you have designed your content you can simply hook your social media page up to one of these scheduling tools, set it up to go out on your chosen days and forget about it for the next few weeks, or months.
With all this scheduling and batch processing though, it can be easy to forget the importance of live, in the moment documentation of your life. This is where you give your audience candid insight into your life.
What you share in your documentation posts is really down to what you are comfortable sharing and being clear about what people will be interested in.
Generally people are endlessly nosey and love to see behind the scenes in people's lives, the more you let them in, the more they will trust you and as we’ve said earlier trust makes sales!
From food you’re eating, to wins you have with clients, social or buiness events you attend, or giving your thoughts for the day, getting used to sharing these daily occurrences on social media is a sure fire way to build that trust and connection with your audience that will lead them into buying from you or recommending you, rapidly.
Generating traffic with a successful Facebook ad campaign
If you are just starting out on social media or you do not have the luxury of 10k engaged followers you’re going to need some kind of traffic source to get people discovering your page.
A traffic source can come from anywhere, from events you speak at where you ask your audience to connect with you on Facebook, to guest blog posts you do on other websites where you send people to your social pages at the end of the post.
If you already have a solid traffic source that keeps a consistent flow of your target audience discovering your page, you may not even need to consider this part of the post but if you don’t then using Facebook or Instagram ads will have you covered.
Many people have ‘tried’ facebook ads, but few have succeeded with them. That’s often because they have been advertising the wrong thing at the wrong time.
It’s important to go back and consider the ‘decision phases’ people go through and set your ads up around that.
Firstly you want to start by simply introducing people to your page and encouraging engagement with them. This can consist of a like campaign or a well thought out question designed to generate comments.
As you build up your followers and engaged audience members, you can now target these people with an ad that offers your low barrier product or offer.
Notice what we are doing here, as this is important. We start by introducing a cold audience to your page very innocently, we’re not selling to them, just getting a simple like or comment by offering value.
We then upsell your initial low barrier product only to people who have already engaged on your page or followed you.
Why do we do this? We do this because by asking people who have already heard of you or engaged with you in some way we know there is already an initial level of trust. They don’t need to look you up before they sign up, they don’t question ‘who’s this guy or gal?’, they already know you. It makes signing up a logical step and brings down the cost per sign up dramatically.
You can also take a similar approach to moving people onto your higher tier offers once they take on your low barrier offer. The same approach applies here, only advertise to people who have reached the previous conversion goal.
By taking this stage by stage approach and splitting your budget accordingly you will create a super efficient sales machine that will be focussed on making consistent sales whilst also increasing your brand awareness and organic growth over time.
So what now?
Now it’s time to take some kind of action! Reading about how to create a successful lead generation strategy is fine but you need to actually do something with this information. If you are still of unsure exactly where to start you can book a free strategy development call with me where I will help you build a strategy and plan you can execute on. Best of all, for now, this one on one call is absolutely free. Sign up for your free coaches strategy call here (https://www.sortmysocial.com/coach-marketing-review) and lets get you on the road to success now! Now it’s time to take some kind of action! Reading about how to create a successful lead generation strategy is fine but you need to actually do something with this information. If you are still of unsure exactly where to start you can book a free strategy development call with me where I will help you build a strategy and plan you can execute on. Best of all, for now, this one on one call is absolutely free. Sign up for your free coaches strategy call here and lets get you on the road to success now!
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