150 - Marketing for Life Coaches Part 8: How to Make a Free Marketing Plan for Coaches
Do you ever feel like you’re putting in so much time and effort into your marketing but still not making any progress? Without a well-structured plan, it's easy to get bogged down in the details and lose sight of your goals. But the good news is marketing doesn't have to be a daunting task. I always ask my clients to tell me where they’re most comfortable and where they feel like they can do it consistently, and then we will create a marketing plan with those places in mind.
In the final installment of our eight-part marketing series, we’re bringing together all the strategies that I have taught you to develop a simple marketing plan that will enable you to create a profitable coaching business on your terms. I’ll be sharing a few tips and tricks to make the most of your time and resources in marketing and growing your business so much faster.
So tune in to the episode and don't miss out on all the valuable and actionable tips on how to make marketing a breeze!
-----------
👉 Watch the episode on YouTube or wherever you listen to podcasts!
👉 Book a free Coaching Business Assessment with me
Don’t forget to connect with me on social media:
Transcript
When you make a plan, you follow the plan. And do you know how you become a successful coach who grows your business so much faster? Consistent marketing you guys. And do you know how you can be more consistent in your marketing? It's if you don't have to think about what you're going to market. You just look at your calendar, you look at the topics that are already on your calendar, your monthly topic, your weekly topic, your daily social media sort of prompts, and then you just do that. And in the beginning, it's B minus work, right? You just get it done and then you get better and better and better.
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 today's podcast. We're wrapping up our marketing series. This is part eight of the eight-part series. I am so glad that you guys are here and I hope, hope, hope this has benefited you and that you have actually taken the steps and that you have implemented some of these marketing strategies that I have taught you.
To give you a recap, what I wanna tell you is that I believe organic marketing is the only way to build your business in the beginning until you have earned a hundred thousand dollars in revenue because I want you to learn how to speak to your client. I want you to get your marketing message really squared away and on point.
I want you to learn how to coach and get people the results that you're selling them. I want you to learn how to sell in a confident way. I want you to learn how to do all of those things before you turn on paid ads because you guys, the thing is, if you don't know how to do all those things and you turn on paid ads, you might as well be setting your money on fire, seriously. You have to have your business working well. You have to understand how to do your marketing, how to have conversations, how to have consultations, and how to close sales.
Before you do that, I also wanna mention to you guys that in full transparency, doing Facebook ads is difficult. It is never as easy as what people are presenting it. Yes, you guys probably are here listening to the podcast because you went to a paid ad and you clicked on it. Most of you guys have seen my Canva workshop and you loved it. I'm so grateful for that. I'm so glad you're here listening to me because of that.
But I can tell you, that little Canva workshop that you guys have seen, It took me three months to do the workshop, to write the Facebook ads, to write the emails, the pre-emails, and the after emails, three months. So it is no easy job putting that together. It takes a lot of time, a lot of effort, and a lot of mindset drama to get it done. Plus, I had my regular coaching client roster. I'm fully booked and so I had a lot of people that I was helping while I was trying to figure out how to create what I would call my million-dollar opt-in. If you're gonna run Facebook ads, you wanna think about having something that is really, really good, you know, just throw something up. You really take the time to do something great.
Alright. Today we're gonna talk about making a marketing plan. So I've talked about all the ways that you can market your business, and I'm gonna keep this super, super simple, you guys. If you are in a place where you can take notes, I want you to do that. If not, I want you to go back. There's a transcript that goes with this. I will tell you exactly how to create a marketing plan in just a couple of minutes time. You guys are gonna try to make this complicated and it's not.
So the first thing that you want to, this is it. Grab your pencils. The first thing you wanna do is you wanna decide where you're going to market your coaching services. And when you decide where that is, I want you to commit to do a year's worth of marketing in only those places. Now, I used to market in all kinds of places, and I still do a lot of marketing, but it wasn't until a few years ago that I decided to commit to just a few places. And then once I committed to it, I would not market my business anywhere else for an entire year. So I recommend that you decide what that is. That's the first step in creating your marketing plan is that you pick the places you wanna market. So you might say, I'm gonna do email list building through an opt-in. Then I'm going to do weekly newsletters. I'm gonna do a workshop cuz y'all know how I feel about that. I'm gonna do social media and I'm gonna do networking. Y'all know I love networking too. So that would be the five ways that you market your business for the next 12 months. All right, your email, opt-in, email marketing, a workshop, social media and networking. Those are the five ways that you might market your business.
Now this is just an example, so you guys want to decide what works for you. I always ask my clients, tell me where you're most comfortable, where you feel like you can do it consistently, and then we will create a marketing plan with those places in mind. So that might not be the list that you have, but whatever it is you do, pick a list and a list that you can commit to.
The next thing that you want to do is decide on your core content topics. Now when we work together, we do that early on in the business. We talk about writing your core marketing message where we talk about their pain points, we talk about what it is they want. We paint the picture of what it is they want, and then we create your offer.
And your offer is not the number of weeks or the price. Your offer is the path to getting them to the result that you are selling. When you create your offer, and we do that kind of in a step-by-step process, that also creates your content topics. I like to keep everything similar so that you are repeating the same things over and over and over, and I want you to be coaching on things that you know super well. And that also makes your marketing much easier. So if you would pick out your core topics from whatever your offer is, the steps that you have to take somebody through, the process that you have to take them through to get them to the result you sell, those would be your content pillars or your topics that you would be doing all of your marketing around.
So for me, I have a 12-step roadmap. My 12 steps are the steps that anyone, whether they already have a good existing business or whether they're brand new, everybody can benefit from going through my 12 steps even if you already have some of the things that I teach in place because I want people to really understand things at a really deep level. So I want you to go through my 12 steps. You guys would have the same thing. So my content actually comes from my 12 steps. The topics that I teach about are part of my 12 steps. That's what I want for you too.
So once you identify your content pillars or your key content topics, whatever you wanna call 'em, then you're going to decide whether you're gonna pick one topic a week or one topic a month, or one topic a day. I'll tell you the easiest way to do this, you guys, is to pick one topic a month. So your core content is focused on one topic a month. So let me just use an example for you guys about my business. Let's say I decide my topic for the month is pricing for profit. That is one of the steps that you guys learn about and that we work on when we work together, pricing for profit. So my content topic for the month would be about pricing for profit. Then my workshop, if we're gonna talk about the five places, I'm going to mark up my business. For that particular month, all of 'em would have something to do with pricing.
So the topic for the month is pricing. The workshop is about pricing, and my opt-in could be something to do with like my pricing formula, which I have that. Maybe you have an opt-in for that. And then weekly emails that take a deeper dive into pricing. Now, that does not mean that you do not talk about the rest of your business because when I teach you guys about pricing, I'm also talking to you about your ideal client and what they want.
I'm also talking to you about designing your offer. I'm talking about a lot of other things, but the core piece of it is about pricing. Then you could do the same thing with your social media. Your topics could be geared around pricing as the theme for the month. That is one way to do your marketing plan.
So you pick a topic a month for 12 months. So just go look at your content bank. If there's four topics on there, then you're gonna do the same four topics three times a year. There's six topics on there. You guys understand where I'm going. You're gonna do it two times and then you will have, after 12 months time, you will have repeatable content that you can repurpose and use again. 12 topics become the topics for the month.
Now, if you would like to do this a little bit different and you wanna do a topic a week, and so again, if you had 12 topics, you do a topic a week, then you would repeat those topics four times a year. That's how simple it is, you guys. Do not overthink this.
So for me, it would be like personal branding would be week one. Business branding would be week two, writing your signature marketing message would be week three. What makes a website work would be week four, you know? and then within those four weeks, each week, I would break down a little bit further in a newsletter, like the things that make a website convert for coaches, or the branding that you need to have to attract your ideal clients.Those would be like my weekly emails.
And then again, for social media, I would have five days, let's say, of social media about that same topic. So that's another way you can do it. So we're talking about one topic a month with a theme or one topic a week, and you get those from your core content that you're going to repeat in your business.
Now if you guys would like to do kind of a plan for social media, you could decide you're gonna post five days a week. You can decide the same format. Monday is always going to be something about Monday Motivation. Something to motivate your particular niche to do something. Tuesday could be a tip. Wednesday could be a win. Thursday could be something that you teach. Friday could be something fun that you share. Those could be your five social media, sort of, things that direct the content. So you can take whatever your topic is, like pricing, and I could have them Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday based on those topics that I just shared with you about pricing.
So I could talk about motivation about pricing. I could talk about a tip on pricing. I could talk about a win that somebody had on pricing. I could talk about teaching pricing, and then I could do something fun on pricing and I could talk about how my pricing has worked or whatever it is. You guys fill in the blank for you of what works.
That is how you make a plan. Then what you do with the plan once you make it, is you actually add it to your calendar so that you never wake up on Monday morning or never turn the page on your calendar and say, what are we talking about this month? Or what am I gonna email about this week? It's literally already decided. You're gonna be emailing about that topic.
And you're not going to let yourself think of something else. When you make a plan, you follow the plan. And do you know how you become a successful coach who grows your business so much faster? Consistent marketing you guys. And do you know how you can be more consistent in your marketing? It's if you don't have to think about what you're going to market.
You just look at your calendar, you look at the topics that are already on your calendar, your monthly topic, your weekly topic, your daily social media sort of prompts, and then you just do that. And in the beginning it's B minus work, right? You just get it done and then you get better and better and better, and eventually, 12 months later, one quarter later, whatever it is timing you want to do, you guys will have content that then can be repurposed.
So I literally just recently, went through my entire, oh, I had hundreds of emails. I bet I had five, 600 emails that were marketing emails. I went through all of those and I picked out a full year of content of emails that I've used before. So I'll reread those emails, I'll freshen them up anywhere that need to be, you know, a tweak in the message, and then I scheduled 'em all. So I have an entire year's worth of workshops done, emails done, and we repurposed social media content too. That is how you market your life coaching business.
I hope that you guys have loved this series. We're gonna have a client interview next week. We're gonna be talking to some of my clients, just about marketing, their coaching business in general.
I love, love, love helping you guys with marketing. That really is what my business is built on. I teach you how to talk to people, what to talk to people about, how to figure out how to find the clients and how to quote, get the clients, how to sell the clients, and ultimately how to create a profitable coaching business on your terms.
If that sounds interesting, you guys, I wanna invite you to have consultation with me. I have very, very limited spaces every month because I actually have a capacity of how many clients that I help because I really get involved in your business. I write your marketing copy with you. I work on this marketing plan with you and so, so many other things.
I also have a new opportunity that's coming out very, very soon, and it's going to be an offer for some of you guys who want a little faster, quicker way to work with me and at lower price. I can tell you I've got something fun coming up, so I cannot wait to share those details.
Make sure that you are following me on Instagram or wherever it might be so that you can stay engaged and be able to know what I have coming up as far as free workshops, free trainings, and all of the other good stuff. Thanks guys for being a listener to this podcast. I really, really appreciate it. I hope you have an amazing day and that you go market your coaching business.
All right, you guys have an amazing week. 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.