149 -Marketing for Life Coaches Part 7: Host a Workshop to Get More Coaching Clients
As a coach myself, I've found that creating successful workshops is one of the most effective ways to market my business. Holding workshops offers an incredibly immersive learning experience for your clients and enables you to showcase your expertise, build strong relationships, and open up opportunities for upselling and greater success. In today's episode, we'll dive deep into the basics of workshops. We'll cover everything from preparations to delivering engaging content and finally creating a compelling call to action that drives results.
Welcome to the Life Coach Business Building Podcast! Join me as I teach you simple (organic) strategies to gain more paid clients in your life coaching business. From design, price, and selling your coaching offers, I have it all covered. My goal is to inspire you to take simple, consistent action to grow your coaching business. So, if you're ready to be a well-respected life coach with paid clients, this podcast is for you!
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Transcript
What is the advantage of training? Obviously, as I said, it's going to be you getting in front of people, you teaching people. And I always say coaching is something that people really need to understand, and this gives you an opportunity to really showcase your expertise and to teach a core principle or to teach on a topic that they really need to understand. Also gives you an opportunity at the end to do some open coaching or Q&A and even make an offer for your services.
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.
Hello. Hello. I'm so glad you're here. We are in part seven of our eight-part marketing series, so if you have not listened to all of those pieces about marketing your coaching business, I wanna encourage you to go back and listen to those. We also have interviews with some of my clients that have applied. Some of the things that we're talking about in the eight parts, and so you're gonna wanna listen to those. They're really awesome.
Today I'm gonna be talking to you about my number one most favorite way to market my business. And let me just tell you, it's not just my favorite way, it is also the most converting, the favorite thing for my clients, the most engaging, and I get when I say the most converting, I get more clients and more consults out of our workshop, one single workshop than I do anything else.
I've been doing workshops in my business since 2016. This is one of the key marketing steps that I teach my clients. And look, when you have no audience, I still want you to do workshops. So really think hard about what I'm talking about because I'm telling you, even when you start doing these workshops and your audience is so small, your email list is so small, and even when nobody comes to the workshops, guess what? Eventually, people will still buy from those recordings. It happens every time.
When I tell my clients, look, we're gonna do workshops. I want you to prepare a workshop, and I teach 'em how to do it. I'm gonna give you an overview of details today, but I have a very specific format they follow. We have the email funnel that they follow. All of it's pre-prepared, so nobody has to work too hard to put their workshop together. But once they put that workshop together and then they actually do it as scheduled, even if nobody has signed up, or even if a few people have signed up and nobody attends, I have them do the workshop as if people are on there. And then you have created a piece of content that you can use later. You can send it out in a replay, and then people can still connect with. So that's what we're gonna talk about is doing a workshop.
Now, let me just start out by saying there are lots of opinions about the word workshop and webinar. For me, I think a workshop is educational. It's where you're gonna really train somebody. It's interactive. And a webinar is more of somebody speaking at you. So I think of a webinar as somebody who does some teaching, but they don't tell you the whole solution. You guys have signed up for those webinars like that where they just give you enough information that you're very excited and you're thinking, all right, this is so great, but they don't tell you enough to solve anything. That to me doesn't feel fantastic.
I actually like to do a workshop where I imagine that I want somebody to learn everything on one topic from me because I want you, if you attend my workshop, to really see the value of what I teach. I want you to get to know me. I want you to have an opportunity to know me, to like me, and to trust me. And that is what I want you guys doing workshops for as well.
So what is the advantage of training? Obviously, as I said, it's going to be you getting in front of people, you teaching people. And I always say coaching is something that people really need to understand, and this gives you an opportunity to really showcase your expertise and to teach a core principle or to teach on a topic that they really need to understand. Also gives you an opportunity at the end to do some open coaching or Q&A and even make an offer for your services.
Now, in the beginning, I did not tell my whole entire offer. Today I do because I want you guys to know everything, including the price. I still have a consultation call cause I have to make sure we're a fit, but I go through all of it.
To me, I like to be able to share it all in a group format so that you have really everything ahead of schedule before you get on a consultation. But in the beginning, like for many years, really up until this last year, I did not share all the details. I just invited you to connect with me.
When you have a workshop, the attendees just get to listen to you, and they get to figure out what it is you do as a coach, and in some cases, you guys will actually be able to really coach people. I typically have the Q&A, but you guys know me. My coaching style is more telling people what to do in their business instead of doing really that open coaching.
Now, again, a webinar, I think more people expect to be sold. When I do my workshops, I say in the beginning, Look, I'm gonna tell you about how we can work together at the end, and I'm gonna tell you the price, and you're welcome to stay if you want to. When you do a webinar, you're typically not just announcing that in the beginning, you're just going through it. And then you sort of present at the end.
I like to do workshops. So what do you want to attend? A workshop or a webinar? Again, you need to know that people call workshops and webinars or define them in different ways. So you need to know and not forget that you might come to a webinar for somebody and they, they're actually really teaching, maybe just a workshop. So there are a lot of different ways that people define it. But again, I've explained to you a workshop for me is education. A webinar is more like giving him a little taste of it, not telling them the whole story, and then selling them something.
Either way, whether you do a workshop or a webinar, the title is very important, so you wanna get an intriguing title. You know, a lot of my titles for my workshops are like four steps to or how to, right? Learn from, something like that. People want to know what it is that you're going to teach 'em. Like the complete process of counting macros. I told somebody that worked with me that that would be a great idea for a workshop title. And actually, I think it really is.
So you can go and find on Pinterest or Google ways to formulate a title that you know will be something that will help you. Cracking the code for business Planning for Life Coaches. It's easier than you think. See, that's a really compelling title. it ends with that. It's easier than you think.
Alright, when it comes to the presentation part, you can either do it with no slides. You can do it on your flip chart that some of you guys do with your coaching business, or you can do it presentation style. I happen to really like presentation style. First of all, I think for the person watching the webinar or the workshop, I think it's better for them to see and engage in the slides and to be able to follow along. We all have ADHD, these distracted brains. Now, we don't all have ADHD, but you know what I'm saying. We're all very distracted. So when you follow the slides, it actually really helps you to stay engaged. And for me, I get distracted too, guys. It helps me to follow what it is I have planned to talk about.
All right. There's a question about the number of slides sometimes. I think it depends on the topic and what it is you're talking about and how you're presenting it. Some people will have like one line and then the slide will change and it'll add another line to the same line from before. You guys have seen those where they stack lines on top of each other.
Mine aren't that fancy. But I do have bullet points. Sometimes I have a little bit more content on each slide. some of the slides have maybe just one big sentence, so it's a little bit of variety. I don't have a lot of pictures on my slides because I want people to pay attention to the content, so you're gonna have to decide what's best for you. Again, I know for sure for me, if I have more content on the presentation slides, I actually have a better opportunity for staying on track.
Now, you can present with presenter notes in Canva. I think it's more complicated. You can also do something like, keynote or PowerPoint, and you can have presenter notes. But I think that if you just know your content well enough and you skip reading the notes, you're actually gonna do a much better presentation. When you start your workshop, if you will converse just slightly with your attendees to find out kind of where they're from, what their problems are. You know, for me, I like to find out who you're coaching, how long you've been in business, because then I'll tailor my talk to the people that are actually attending the workshop, and that's something you will want to do as well.
When you think about preparing and yes, I'm talking about practicing. You want to do that. You want to time yourself. I like to kind of think when it's a really important presentation that I'm doing, or when I know I have a lot of attendees, then I'll go through and I kind of time myself and I think, okay, I have to get this far in the presentation by this many minutes in. That also ensures that I don't go too fast. Because too fast is just about as bad a deal is too slow. I typically love to have my weekly workshops about 30 minutes, 45 minutes of content and about 15, 20 minutes of Q&A.
Now, I do workshops throughout the year that are two hours long, and it always blows my mind because people will attend those. Now those workshops are actually working workshops where they have something, we're stopping, we're answering questions, and people are actually working on their business. So there's many, many different ways that you can do this.
Let's talk for a minute about preparing as far as your internet strength. If you do not have an ethernet cable, which means it plugs right into your computer, you need to tell your kids to keep off of the internet while you're in a presentation. Look, if you spend the time doing social media posts, inviting people to come, doing email marketing, inviting people to come, preparing and practicing and writing your talk. The last thing you want is your internet to be all wonky and to have like glitches in the speech so that you cannot actually really get people to enjoy the workshop. So tell your kids to stay off of their devices.
Most of the time, you guys, you don't actually know when your internet speed slows down because I have an ethernet cable on mine. My internet speed does not slow down. It's either out completely in the neighborhood, which thank God is not very often, or it's your internet that slows down.
You wanna make sure that your background looks nice, that you have really good lighting, that you have, you know, great microphone. You wanna make sure that your keyboards and your mouse and all those things have batteries in it. Over the years, I've been doing workshops since 2016, and I can tell you all those things have happened to me where my, mouse ran outta battery, where my keyboard went outta battery, where my internet's gone off.
You wanna be able to, when you're doing a workshop, you wanna be able to have your hotspot on your phone available so you can hop on to a hotspot if for some reason you guys get kicked off. And you wanna make sure your phone's off. Make sure you have no distractions. I have some barking dogs too, just like the rest of you, but I do my very best to try to make sure that my dogs are occupied so that you guys are not distracted.
You also want to make sure that your attendees, if they are attending in regular Zoom format, where people can come on camera, that you ask them to stay on mute. And look, every time I put people on mute, sometimes they unmute themselves by accident and you want to continue to mute them because you don't wanna have a bunch of noise on the workshop that other people are listening to. So make sure you've got that taken care of.
Couple of questions are, do you wanna have your chat open? Do you wanna have a Q&A? Are you gonna do close captioning? You get to decide all those things before you start. I really like you guys to have engagement in the chat.
Now, sometimes it can go crazy and people are over there chatting about all kinds of things, but I typically don't find that to be a problem. I like to find out who you coach. You know, I coach coaches. I'm like, tell me who you coach, what your niche is, you know what your biggest problem is. You can do the same thing with any of the topics that you guys coach on, whether it be overeating, you know, anxiety. Specifically ask 'em what it is, drop it in the chat. Tell me what you're thinking about. I think that that also is another way to keep people engaged.
I like to set the scene of what they're going to expect. So I'll start out by saying, all right, everybody grab your notebook. I wanna tell you two or three things that you can expect today. You're gonna wanna take some notes. And this is what you can expect at the end.
Now again, I like to sell. Now at the end of my workshops, I did not always do that. In fact, really many of the workshops I did, I didn't do it at all. Last year, I did 23 workshops. Again, I told you they are the number one thing I do in my business that gets me the most consultations and the most clients because people get to like me, they get to see how I work, and they just get to see how passionate I am about helping them.
And people love it when they get to see me coaching somebody. And my coaching is more like, let me tell you what to do. Let me answer your question. But the same would be true for you when you coach somebody. People will really enjoy that. So again, I like to set the scene and tell 'em what to expect. Then you wanna introduce yourself.
Now, don't go crazy. At this point, if they're following you, they've signed up for you. Chances are they know you. And so you don't have to do a big introduction. Some of the webinars that I talk about that are maybe more of, um, something that's driven by like a Facebook ad, you might wanna actually take more time to introduce yourself there because that is a cold audience coming to you.
So do a quick introduction. Talk to them about why you decided to talk about this. What's in it for them? As you listen, you can talk about, well background about your business, sort of set the stage. That's always helpful.
All right then when you get into teaching, I recommend that you go step by step. Really try to keep things easy. So that people can understand it, and you wanna give examples that help really explain what it is you're talking about. You would have some key stories that you can share, and you wanna prepare those stories as it applies to each point.
Also, if you've been working with clients, You guys will hear me. I talk about clients all the time. I'm like, oh yes. I had a client not necessarily by name, I don't P list people's names, but I'll say like A client that I worked with last week did a workshop and this was what happened for them. And by the way, for practically everybody that I work with that does workshops and they're just starting out, most of the time their workshops start out with very few attendees. And often zero attendees. And that's okay because that's how you get started. You practice, you learn, you get a replay that you can send out to people, and you start building up a training library that you can use for other things. It actually is really amazing. It becomes an evergreen piece of content that people can opt into later. So you'll always be able to market that one workshop that you did.
Another piece to sort of wrapping up your workshop is talking about transformations that people have through this one step. Now, remember, I like to teach one complete solution. So if it's pricing, I'm gonna teach you how to price your offers.
And then if I'm gonna talk about a client, a transformation, a testimonial, something like that at the end, I make sure that it ties back into what it is we're talking about specifically in the training. When I wrap up a workshop, I'd love to do a recap, like, let me give you a recap of exactly what we talked about.
Again, I'm gonna hit the high points to help you really be able to tie it all together. And then when you close, whether you do a pitch for your offer, whether you do an invitation to a consultation, whatever it is, you definitely want to share their next step. Their next step could be to take an action in their business.
Their next step could be to, you know, join you for your next workshop or follow you on Instagram or to email you and tell you what they thought. For me, the next step is a call to action to schedule a consultation call. So my intention is to teach you something and then move you to know, like, and trust me, and then talk about my offer, and then move you into having a consultation call with me.
You can also share a freebie at the end, a guide at the end, a download, something like that. A lot of times I'll have something that is a supporting piece of material that actually helps people learn from the workshop. I'll say like, you don't have to write down those four steps, because at the end, if you stay till the end, you're gonna get a download of what it is I talked about today. So just be present with me, stay here with me. And that helps people become engaged too.
All right. If you talk about your offer very, very briefly, I really wanna make sure that you are clear and concise. This is about doing a workshop today, but if you're gonna do an offer in your workshop, you better make sure that you know how to offer, and I will tell you if you are really good at your offer and if you believe in your offer, and if you believe in your price, you will get people to the next step.
If your offer is not presented very well. If you're confusing, if, gosh, you've shared not enough information, too much information, you'll not get people to take the step that you want, which is either purchase or have a consultation.
Alright, that is the basics of a workshop. I wanna talk briefly about what you need when it comes to setting up and preparing for the workshop. Now, I recommend Flow Desk. That's what I teach my clients. But you guys might have Convert Kit or MailChimp or some of you have Kartra, but I want you to be thinking about the workshop. How much time do you need to market the workshop?
That's gonna be email marketing. I typically do two emails of marketing before. So two invitations for people to sign up. So the first two emails will go to a form where they register, they give you their name and email address. Then they get the confirmation email, and you're also going to be utilizing that same sign up form link and you're gonna put it as a link in the bio on your Instagram or on your Facebook, wherever else you can put it.
You could might do Eventbrite. You wanna think of all the places that you could add that link to encourage people to sign up. So I would say, A minimum of a week, maybe more like two weeks of marketing. It's gonna depend on how often you do workshops. If I do a workshop every week, I'm obviously only marketing that week, but I will tell you, when you finish one workshop, you can tell 'em what the next workshop is and how people sign up for the next one.
Then after you get your signup done, you do need to have a reminder workflow. Now don't get too stressed out about this. The deal is, is you have to give 'em the zoom link and tell 'em, Hey, don't forget the workshops today. That can be as complex or as simple as you want to. It could be one email that is just prepared that you actually hit send on 10 minutes before where you provide 'em the zoom link and the reminder, so you could send one email.
I like to send an email in the morning of the workshop that says, Hey, today's the day, and I resell 'em on attending the workshop. So in case they have forgotten what they signed up for, I again, tell 'em why they want to be there. I remind them I don't do a replay. You guys in the beginning stages of your business are gonna do replays.
I don't wanna do replays because I am teaching people and answering questions and coaching on people's businesses. And so if I'm coaching somebody on their weight loss business, I don't want everybody else who did not attend to hear me coaching that person on their business. So I don't do a replay.
Alright? Then after the workshop is over, if you do a replay, you're gonna wanna have an email prepared so that you can drop the link. You're gonna take the Zoom webinar workshop and you're gonna put it into YouTube, let's say, and you're gonna have that link from YouTube and send it in your replay email.
Then you wanna think about any other emails that you wanna have that would follow that. So that's kind of a bigger picture. But just know that in everything I teach you, all you have to ask yourself is, is there an easier way? And of course there is. You can do an entire workshop by making notes on your own legal pad and by reading your own notes, you can do one email or no emails.
You could literally text people and invite 'em. There are so many simple ways to grow your business. I don't want you to get hung up on those. I've just given you a basic overview of how you would do a workshop. And what it would look like to do it really in the way that I teach. All right. Again, wanna tell you guys, workshops are my number one most converting thing.
If you are not engaged with me, if you are not on my newsletter, you need to go to my social media. You need to go anywhere you can find me and sign up so that you can start getting emails from me because the workshops that I do, they are good, you guys. I teach all kinds of things in workshops, a complete solution, and you have an opportunity to get coached.And of course, you get to hear all the details about how you can work with me, and then you can schedule a consultation call if you would like.
Alright. I do have my workshops lined up through the middle of summer, and I can tell you I have a great lineup.
All right, you guys have a wonderful week. I cannot wait to have you do workshop after workshop after workshop if you do not have clients and a fully booked schedule, you know what you have time for to do workshops. Educate people on the value of coaching, and then invite 'em to connect with you. Have an amazing week. I'll talk to you guys later. 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.