142 - Marketing for Life Coaches, Part 2: Mastering Your Marketing Message

In my 24 years of business consulting and coaching, I can truly say that mastering your marketing message is probably the most important thing you can do for your business. It’s the foundation of all of your marketing which is how people connect with you.

In today’s episode of the Life Coach Business Building Podcast, I’m talking about the second “pre-marketing” activity that will help you sell your coaching. In the previous episode, I discussed the importance of narrowing and understanding your niche. This week, we are focusing on mastering your marketing message so you can better communicate who you help and why they should hire you. Clients buy when you have explained their problem better than they can and when you show them why they need and want the transformation you offer with your coaching. I’ll walk you through my 6 steps to help you craft the perfect message, one that is clear and concise. 

Mastering your marketing message is critical for your business's success. When people connect with your message, they engage with you; when they don’t, they scroll right past you. 

So, if you want to know how to get better results with your marketing, be sure to tune in to the episode.

Watch the episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/G1AO2UlDgDs

Transcript

I want you to have a message that is repeatable. Look, you guys don't have to reinvent what you say. When my clients figure out their marketing message, I help 'em write it. When we do that, we don't change the marketing message. We have to stick with that marketing message for months because first you have to get good at saying it. you have to get good at using that same repeatable marketing message on social media, in your email, in your workshops, you know, on your podcast, wherever it is, you want to become known for what it is you do.

Hello, I'm Debbie Shadid, the host of the Life Coach Business Building podcast. If you are ready to have more clients in your life coach business, then you're in the right spot. Each week I'm gonna teach you super simple strategies to grow your business without feeling overwhelmed and without spending money on paid ads. If that sounds interesting. Stick around and let's get started.

Welcome to the podcast. Hope you guys are doing great. I'm excited to continue in the series that we're working on. This is the eight part series with a step-by-step explanation of how to market your coaching business. We're focusing on organic marketing.

In the first part, we talked about the pre-marketing kind of assessment.We're gonna continue that today. 

Last week we talked about understanding your niche client. Make sure you go back and listen if you haven't done that. And also make sure you subscribe because there's gonna be six more parts to this. Plus I'm gonna have four interviews with clients where we're gonna be talking about how we've applied these same principles and the results that they've gotten. I know that you guys love those. 

All right, so let's talk about mastering your message. Again, this is part of getting prepared to be effective with your marketing. You wanna learn how to tell somebody what you do in your coaching business. This is critical. This is probably the most important thing that I help anyone do. In my 24 years of coaching, and actually we called it consulting, in writing articles, writing advertising, writing websites, all the things that I did while I had my wedding magazine for 18 years and I had a kids and family magazine for seven years, plus I've helped hundreds and hundreds, literally probably several thousand people all around the world with their marketing. What I can say for sure is that for coaches, this mastering your message is the most important thing. It's going to be what will help you be successful or not successful. 

Now, once you master your message, of course you have to go market your business. We'll talk about that too.

Alright. I bet you never imagined when you sat down to write your website copy when you first started your coaching business, that it was gonna be this hard. You sat down and you started to write down who it is you helped. And I'm gonna guess the first thought was, I'm a life coach, and guess what? That is not a marketing message. Many people don't have a clear explanation of what a life coach does. 

So your website copy is the key piece of copy that typically most coaches start with. And what I find is that they hire somebody to build their website. And in the sales process, the website designer says, well, yeah, I can help you with your copy. I can make some suggestions. And then before you know it, they're helping you write your copy and they're writing a message that you haven't thought through. And so I have people that come work with me that have spent a lot of money on a website.

And their copy is all done, and the website's like designed around that marketing message, and the marketing message doesn't make sense. It doesn't clearly speak to anyone about anything specific. It says, I'm a coach. Here's who I am. Here's what my name, here's what's special about me. One thing I can tell you for sure about marketing is it's not about you, it's about them. All the marketing that you do needs to speak to them. 

So if you have a business, you have to learn how to write effectively, not only your key marketing message, but this will carry over into all of your social media posts. It will carry over into the email marketing that you do and I know that this is a challenge for, gosh, virtually all of you. It's a different way of writing than you've ever written before. And I think that when it comes to some of the programs that you hear about, Amy Porterfield, some of the ones that talk about email list building and all that, they're not talking about the very basics of learning how to write. And that is one of the places that we start in the coaching that I do. Like, you have to learn how to tell somebody what you do. 

If you are talking to enough people, then maybe you'll get some results in your business without having clarity on this, but I can tell you for sure if we get clear on this, you'll convert at a much higher rate. so I want you to start talking to people about the way that you think you would market your business.

That would begin with you telling people, as an experiment, who you help and what you do. That would be good for you to be able to try, and then let's just see what people's expression on their face is. And I wanna say, please go beyond friends, because what I find is that friends are very encouraging. We love 'em all, but they're very encouraging and they'll say to you like, oh my gosh, you should do this. Like, you're so good at that. You're so good at helping people. Yes, what you do, oh, you're, this is gonna be great for you. Everybody's gonna wanna work with you, but your friends are not the ones who are buying coaching from you. And they're probably not gonna be the ones to buy coaching from you. So just know that.

You wanna be talking to people outside of that that don't know you. Meet somebody at a networking event or meet somebody at the grocery store or at the hair salon or nail salon, wherever it's at, and tell 'em what it is you do and how you help people. And then just wait to see if they are connecting with your message. Look at their face. And if you can't comfortably get them to understand, then you have a problem with your message.

Also, just wait to see what questions they have for you after you tell them what it is you do, how you can help 'em, and who you help. If you are already marketing your business and you're just hearing like nothing, as we like to say, if you hear crickets you hear no response back, then I guarantee you your marketing message is the problem.

So it's time to rethink that. If you're already out there, if you've already got your website done, if you're on social media, like nothing's happening, nobody's like anything, nobody's booking any consultations. Your marketing message is probably where you should start. 

So let's talk about the steps to tie this together with your niche. I'm gonna go through six steps that will help you write a clear marketing message. First thing is that you have to define who you help. You wanna make this statement about, I help. You'll see a lot of coaches now that I'm bringing this to your attention. They'll say, I help midlife women, are struggling with anxiety go from this to this, something along that lines. You'll, that first I help statement or are you X, Y, and Z? Like you want to have that first identifying statement, naming who they are, what the problem is, defining it for them so that they can raise their hand and say, oh, she's talking to me right off the bat. One sentence. It's a one sentence statement.

The second thing is you wanna name their problems better than they can even define 'em. They haven't even been able to really articulate their problems. And maybe they're saying like, I can't lose weight, but like really what is the problem? There's many problems underneath that. Anybody could lose weight. What they can't do is control the urges to eat. They can't stick to a plan. They can't create a plan that makes sense, like you see what I'm saying? There would be layers of problems underneath that that are deeper than that I can't lose weight statement. So first you have to define who you help. Second, you have to name the problem better than they do, and I want you to name the problem that really is kind of messy, right?

Get to the depth of what it really looks like or what they're really thinking. The clearer that you get on their problems and really revealing the problems to them, making a statement. So they say, wow, like this lady had to have been in my head, how does she know what I'm thinking? The better opportunity you'll have for getting people to have consultations with you.

The third thing is to be able to name their desires. You wanna have a list of things like, I know you want, or Wouldn't it be great to have a life that looks like, right? This is that painting the picture that I talked about. So how do we name their desires? You start out with like, the truth is it doesn't have to be this hard. You could have and you start telling them what it could look like. That's the third step. Name the outcome, name the desires, paint that picture in a couple of sentences. 

The fourth part of your marketing message then flows into some relatable stories. Some of you guys are gonna be talking about yourself. Like, I understand what it's like to feel what it is you feel. So maybe you rename the problem and then you restate what it's like to get the desire that you're selling then the story is what connects the two together. So I can say to you guys about business, look, I know what it's like to be overwhelmed, frustrated by technology to not know what to say in your marketing message. Why? Because I've been in business for 24 years and early in my career I worked seven days a week until two or three o'clock in the morning. I mean, I never, never stopped trying to figure out and if somebody could have just helped me. I know what it's like to be that overwhelmed, to have that much doubt because I was just like that. So that would be a small, short version of what my story might be. That's how I can have a relatable story to you. Or I could share a story about a client that was not selling any coaching. They were having lots of consultations, but they could not close one single sale. And I could talk about the message that they had on their consultation call and about how kind of soft it was and about how uncompelling it was.And then I can talk about a transformation that happened when they shifted their marketing message just slightly to really reveal the pain and then to highlight their deepest desires and how that moved the consultation to somebody that buys coaching. That could be a story that I could tell. So that's a relatable story. I recommend that you have at least three key stories that you share that really tie all of what you do together. 

The fifth part is to explain why coaching is the answer. This typically is when you are saying, here's what happened for me, and I had looked for all the answers in many different ways. Many of you guys are self-help junkies. So you've read all the books, you've been to counseling, maybe you've been to therapy, and it wasn't until you were introduced to the concepts of coaching. And you experienced coaching yourself. Did you really have the opportunity to get the result, the change, the transformation? And because of that, you know that other women need to know about this. You know that parents need to know how to talk to their teens. Whatever your niche is, this is where you tie together why coaching is the answer. You explain that it's been the missing piece. I mentioned this last week when it comes to weight loss. Everybody's done every diet under the sun, but the one missing part is the mindset part that you guys, as coaches have. So that's what you wanna explain. This is why coaching was the answer. This was the one thing that nobody had talked to you about. Why are you overeating to begin with? Why are you buffering with food? Why are you over drinking? Why are you overspending? All of those overindulging activities.

The sixth part of this marketing message is to explain what happens when they take action now. This is that, not scarcity, but it's authentic sort of, prodding to get them to see, like, don't wait on this. Your life matters more than this. Your time management, like being able to get things all done so that you can come home and sit down and enjoy your children. That matters. Being able to go in and speak your truth to your boss to get a raise, that matters. So you wanna explain what happens when they have coaching right now versus not taking the coaching?

All right. Then you would have a specific call to action. What is your call to action? Your call to action, most of you guys would say is to have a consultation call, but it's like, let's have a conversation about the anxiety you're experiencing or meet with me to share with me what's happening in your life and tell me more about the struggles you're having with your teenager. So your call to action doesn't have to be schedule here. That is a call to action. That's a button on your website. But what is the call? Calling them to action to invest in themselves is really what it is. I call you guys into action in many different ways.

One might be saying like, stop wasting time, right? You've tried all the things you've been to you know, getting all the freebies, downloading all the things, watching all the YouTubes, listening to the podcast, but you still have unanswered questions. This is why you need to take action now. All the time that you're waiting and not getting the help from me that you need, you're losing your coaching skill.

Right. Your dream is getting further and further away from you. That's explaining why to take action now. 

Then you wanna talk about your offer. If there's an opportunity, when you talk about your offer, your offer is not six weeks for $1,800. Your offer is to solve the problem. You can name their problem and you can name the result.

That's your offer. Work with me to learn how to build your coaching business, so that you can get more clients. Work with me to learn how to market your coaching business so that you can comfortably show up on social media. Work with me to learn the technology that you need to be able to simply operate your coaching business.

So work with me, right? I'm explaining in my offer. I'm making an offer to you. Work with me cuz I'm gonna help you solve a specific problem.

 you wanna keep your message really short and simple. We talk about having a message that you know, a young person could understand. Caveman language is what Donald Miller of Building A StoryBrand talks about. You want it to be past the grunt test. He says like, make sure that anyone can figure out what you're talking about, which means that you have to skip the coach speak, which means you cannot use words like, your thought, the result, the circumstance, you can't use anything to do with buffering, for example. That would be a word that not everybody understands. Narcissistic behavior, gaslighting, even those, you guys are such big themes right now, and I wanna tell you that right now, I am seeing on Instagram and on Facebook all kinds of things about narcissistic behavior and about gaslighting, and do you know why I'm seeing those?

It's because I'm a coach and all the other things that I look at have to do with things like that. And so Instagram and Facebook keeps showing me those things. So if I was a person that was affected by gaslighting and I didn't even know what that was, I wouldn't be looking at stuff like that. So I wouldn't be informed.

So you would have to inform them about gaslighting again, for example, in a way that they understand, or they'll just scroll on by, or they won't read your email or they'll get to your website and they'll be like, I don't know what she's talking about. Because we don't want the brain to have to think very hard or very long.

You know, when you are on social media, you guys just watch yourself. The words, the messages that are super clear and super concise, you might scroll by, but you know what was on that slide. You know what was that person was saying? If you have a message that's difficult, challenging too many words, too much you're not gonna get the whole picture. You just scroll on by because it's too much to read. 

So I want your message to be very specific. I want it to be short, and I want you to have a message that is repeatable. Look, you guys don't have to reinvent what you say. When my clients figure out their marketing message, I help 'em write it. When we do that, we don't change the marketing message. We have to stick with that marketing message for months because first you have to get good at saying it. you have to get good at using that same repeatable marketing message on social media, in your email, in your workshops, you know, on your podcast, wherever it is, you want to become known for what it is you do. The only way you become known and you become memorable is you have a message that you have repeated over and over and over again. 

All right. Let me repeat the six steps very quickly again in case you missed them the first time. To mastering your marketing message. First one, define who you help. That is the initial I help statement. The second part is to name their problems better than they can state their problems. The third part is to really be able to talk about their desire, the outcome of your coaching, what it is they want. The fourth part is to have those relatable stories where you tie the pieces together.

You're able to talk about how you helped this woman, or how you helped yourself. What was changed for you. What your pain points were, what it looked like for you to have a transformation. The story is how you paint the picture to tie it together. Three stories that you will be known for. The fifth part is to explain that coaching is the answer. and the last part was to explain to take action now. 

All right. I'd love to know what questions you guys have. Be sure to send me an email, shoot me a message, a DM on Instagram, wherever it is that you're following me. Tell me what you wanna know about marketing. Tell me what you need to know about this marketing message and about your niche. Those are the two pre-marketing podcasts that are part of this series. 

Join me next week as I interview some clients. We're gonna talk about creating their master marketing message. We're gonna talk about their niche and about how they have put all of the marketing that I helped them with into their business and create a really super successful business. So I'm excited for you to hear them.

Then we'll follow that with talking to people where you find the people, right? You gotta talk to people. You gotta be able to tell 'em about your coaching, and you gotta be able to find the people that would be networking, right? And then we'll talk about building an email opt-in that people want to sign up for.

We're gonna talk about email marketing, social media, workshops, and making a simple marketing plan. You guys, this is going to be so, so good. So stick around. Thanks for listening, you guys. Hope you have an amazing week. Until next time, bye-bye.

Okay ladies, that is it for today. Before we go, I want to invite you to head over to debbieshadid.com. I have this incredible Canva training, specifically designed for life coaches where I'm gonna teach you how to use Canva to create beautiful graphics to market your life coaching. All right. Have an amazing week.

I'll talk to you very soon. Bye bye.