Ep 218 - Marketing Made Simple: Tips for Life Coaches to Grow Your Business
Episode 218 of the Life Coach Business Building Podcast
Marketing is the backbone of any successful coaching business. And in this episode, I’m going to help you tackle common challenges, like not knowing where to start or fearing you'll get it wrong.
We'll discuss the importance of consistent marketing efforts, the power of a simple, actionable plan, and why organic marketing is your best friend, especially if you're not ready for paid ads. We'll also explore different marketing strategies, from social media to book clubs, and I'll share personal experiences and success stories to keep you motivated. My goal is to equip you with the tools to create a repeatable process that saves you time and effort while keeping your business thriving.
So be sure to tune in until the end and let's make your marketing efforts more effective and your business more successful!
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Transcript:
Preview: If you are not doing things in your business, maybe your why is not big enough. Maybe your goal is not big enough. Maybe you don't actually need to earn a living. Or you would be willing to do the marketing no matter what.
Intro: 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.
Episode 218: Hello. Hello. I hope you guys are having an amazing summer. I know it's getting really hot here. I don't know where you live, but hopefully you're enjoying the weather. So let's talk about what's happening in your business this summer. Let's talk about what you can build and create. Before we get to the fall.
Now I want to invite you to our upcoming workshop where we're going to be talking about creating a life coach marketing plan. Now maybe your weight loss coach, your career coach, or you fill in the blank. It'll work for all of you. Our next workshop is on the 23rd of July. It's a Tuesday. It's at 2 PM central time.
Make sure you do the conversion to your time zone. Make sure you join us live because we'll have a workbook. We will also be answering any questions. I want to make sure that you leave our workshop with complete clarity so you can implement what it is I teach you. Head over to debbieshadid.com/workshop and save your spot.
All right, so let's talk about marketing. That's what I'm going to talk to you about today to set the stage for this upcoming workshop. I think you know by now that marketing is the root of everything you do in your business. You literally cannot have clients. Unless you market your certification, your coaching practice, all of that.
Maybe it's your years of experience in your career. None of it matters unless you have marketing where you are explaining that to people. It is the way that you communicate about your services and about your offers. For those of you who've been around a few years, kind of like me, you might call it advertising.
That's really what it is. It's telling people what you do. It's inviting them to connect with you. And I want to tell you, give yourself a break if you don't know how to do this, because how could you know how to do this? This is why I always encourage people come work with us so we can teach you how to do this.
So let me ask you a couple of questions. Number one, Why aren't you marketing? Do you know what the problem is? I could guess that maybe you don't know how to talk about your business. I could guess that you run out of ideas of what to say. Maybe it's that you don't know how to use the technology. You're probably worried about getting it wrong.
Does this sound familiar? If you are, what is the worst that could happen? If you guys are following me on Instagram, then you know that I am doing our walk and talk series with Debbie. And guess what? I get some of those wrong and you know, I don't always look my best when I do those or sound my best, but I record something.
I rerecord it if I need to. And then I just publish it because the only way I will get better at walk and talk with Debbie is by doing more of it. So what is it that you need to do? What worry do you need to get over to do more marketing? Also, let's be honest and assess what marketing have you actually done?
Do you have something that you're tracking about this? Are you being honest with yourself? A lot of times clients will say, Oh, I'm on social media all the time. And you might be on social media all the time. But are you actually posting on social media or are you just scrolling along? Like let's have a truth telling moment and be honest about what you're doing.
You want to be actively marketing your business, advertising, talking about your business on social media, connecting with people. That is how you utilize social media for your business. So I want to talk to you guys about a plan and why do you need a plan? And I'll just tell you, simply put, when you have a plan, it will keep you much more accountable to yourself.
If you plan and this does not take a bunch of time, when you come to our workshop, I'm actually going to talk to you about how to make a very simple plan that you literally can plan for the month. For the quarter or for the year in like an hour's time. This is not complicating. So this is not complicated.
So keep your plan simple and do it so that you can be accountable to yourself. And by the way, if you are not doing things in your business, maybe your why is not big enough. Maybe your goal is not big enough. Maybe you don't actually need to earn a living or you would be willing to do the marketing no matter what.
If your why makes you want to cry. Then you will be doing the marketing, you'll make the plan, and you will be accountable to the why, to the goal, and to the why. Alright? So, my goal is to make a living, number one, because I need to. I'm just like you, I have bills to pay. And number two, is because I want to help people like you really be able to understand how to grow your coaching business, so you can do What you know you want to do and what you know you're meant to do.
Also, when you have a plan, you are less likely to overthink things. When you have a plan and you know how to manage your mindset, you'll be like, nope, I'm just doing it. This is what's planned for Monday. If I want to change my plan, I'll do it for next week. Right now, I want you to pay with time. Now I'll talk about this in the workshop too, but you're not in a position to run paid ads.
And that is very misrepresented in the online space. Ads are not the answer unless you know how to effectively write follow up emails, unless you know how to set up the very complicated ads, and I can attest to that, unless you know how to do sales conversations that convert. Ads are not the answer. You want to have marketing that you have paid for with your time because you're not full of clients so that you can get better at that.
So you can learn how to do that. You also want to explore what your marketing might look like. Maybe you don't want to be on social media. Okay, I always say, why not? Because it's free, you should be there. But if you don't want to be there, then we have to figure out what will you do? Let me tell you, marketing is sometimes things that you're not even expecting.
We have several clients right now that are doing book clubs. Did you know book club is marketing? It is because you're with people going through the book talking about your coaching, building know, like, and trust. That is what you do with marketing and with advertising so that you can then further connect with people, have opportunities for conversations, connection, and paid consults.
and paid clients. So, if you do your marketing and if you make a plan, and I will be talking to you about that at the workshop, six months from now, you know what would happen to your business? You would have a business. You would. Most of our clients during the six months that we work together, they are either bringing on their first clients if they've literally had nothing in their business.
I'm talking about they don't have a website, they don't have a niche, they have nothing. They're bringing on their first clients in the six months. Or are people who already have clients. They're launching group programs or selling out their private coaching because they've got like 15 private clients.
So that is what happens in six months of consistent marketing. You know what happens in a year? You are finally on your way. And by the way, the marketing never ends. It doesn't matter how successful you are. You cannot stop marketing. You know why? Because There's always somebody new coming in the market.
There's always somebody who is willing to do what you won't do when it comes to marketing. But in the workshop, I'm going to teach you how to repurpose your marketing so it can be easier. Let me just tell you five years from now, if you start doing what you promise yourself you're going to do, I can speak from experience.
Your business will be. Unbelievable. It will be bigger than you ever expected, but that only happens if you are disciplined enough to make a plan, follow the plan, and really honestly put yourself out there and get it wrong a lot before you get it right. My personal goal for you is to really know how to market your business to have marketed enough different ways that you can say, Hey, this works or this doesn't work.
Then when it doesn't work, you can say, What should I do differently? How do I want to approach this? What are people interested in? Maybe you have to go back to the drawing board and ask questions at that point when you do assessing and you find out nobody is interested in my stuff when our clients come to us and they tell us that I'm like, All right, that means we need to go back to the drawing board because you're not communicating effectively, right?
Maybe you're not clear on your niche. Maybe you haven't narrowed your niche enough. All of that has to do with creating more effective marketing. For me, when I make a plan, my personal goal is to have months of marketing figured out. And I have that in my mind and on my own map, even though my team is not prepared to do our marketing through the end of the year, I know what the big picture is.
I know where I'm going. I know every month of the year. What it is I want to accomplish through our marketing. And guess what you guys, it doesn't matter if you have zero clients, you still make a plan. You still envision what it is you're going to be doing in the future. That's how you build a business.
You make the plan for the future and then you follow the plan. I'll tell you, here's the truth about marketing. When you decide to slow down on it after you've been consistently marketing, this is exactly what happens because it happened to us just recently. So about halfway through May for about a 30 day period, we slowed down on our marketing.
Cause y'all know, I keep talking about me making some changes in our business. And so we stopped focusing so much on our marketing. Because we're doing some brand updates. We're doing a new opportunity for you to work with us. We're making changes in our pricing. You guys know all the things you've been hearing about it.
So we slowed down our emphasis on our marketing. You know what happened for about 30 days, we marketed less than normal and our revenue decreased by more than 50%. Now you guys, are you hearing me on this? There is a direct impact. Correlation between how much you're marketing and how much, I don't know, exposure, interest, activity you will have in your business that will then result in paying clients.
So, that's how important marketing is. You have got to get consistent with your marketing so that you will not have something like that happen in your business. We learned a really big lesson there and that's why I'm here to talk to you about creating a plan and having consistency with your plan. Let me tell you ultimately the end goal.
for you is that I want you to have a marketing plan that will allow you to have repeatable options. We do that now. We repeat our Monday emails, which again, you guys don't know all this. How would you know this? Right? I'm not so important that you can remember what my emails are. I can repeat the same social media posts.
I can talk about the same topics. We can host the same workshops. Do you know why? Because every time I do a workshop, It comes out differently because I am teaching and talking and telling where I'm at today versus six months ago. So this marketing workshop that I am inviting you to, we did the same workshop six months ago, and I can promise you that where I am today with what I know about AI and what I know about so many other things.
This workshop will be completely different than it was six months ago. But the really incredible thing is the slides are already done. The form where you sign up is already done. The emails to invite you to come. The emails to remind you to be there. They're already done. The follow up emails that go after.
They are already done. This is how you create a repeatable process. So yeah, initially it's a lot of work getting that done, but I can host this same workshop a couple times a year and nobody will Remember that I did it and if they do a lot of times people want to come back to the same workshop So we'll talk more about this repeatable process.
Plus i'm going to give you access to our marketing workbook So sign up at debbiechow. com forward slash work shop. Okay. That'll be on July 23rd at 2 p. m. central time. You're going to learn how to reuse posts, emails, again, your trainings, whatever your training might be. Mine are workshops, but yours could be something completely different.
You could offer like open coaching. You could offer community support. You could offer some kind of mindfulness, session. You want to offer sessions that make sense to your audience. All of you guys, the workshops are a home run because you want to learn how to build your business. That might not actually be what your clients want to do.
So what is it that your people want to do together? We would figure out what that is. And then we would do the marketing that is appropriate for you and your niche. Ultimately what you will do when you get done reusing, you know, your posts, your emails, those kinds of things. And we have this plan in place and everything is scheduled.
You know what you do then is you will layer on new marketing. You'll add new things that are of interest to you or that will impact the market differently. And that's how you will grow your business because you'll have your baseline marketing and you'll be adding new things on top of it. Now, why do you need to add new things on top of it?
It's because the algorithm expects us to do it, right? If we want to be seen, then we have to really show up a lot. That's just the reality and the truth about where we're at in the market right now. So if you want your emails to be read, you have to send a lot of emails. And again, we see. start with one a week.
We start with however many posts you can do a week, let's say three, but then we build from there. And as you build from there, your business will change. The more marketing you do, the more revenue you will generate. So that's why we want to add on additional marketing beyond the initial base plan that we have.
So I want to encourage you to join us because our clients Honestly, they will come work with us and they will put together social media for an entire quarter. We had a client that did it for eight months and they can do that because they know what their topics are. They know how to do it. They know how to use the Canva graphics, right?
It is very easy to do that. You do that in an afternoon. No kidding. We have lots of clients that will do that on a Sunday afternoon. They'll generate social media. for 90 days. And then guess what? You just reuse the same social media. So come join us on the 23rd. I'm just scratching the surface of what we're going to talk about, but I will talk to you about up leveling your online presence.
I'll talk to you about how you should market, how you make this simple plan that you can do week after week, quarter after quarter, or year after year to maximize and grow your business along with your revenue. All right. I'll see you guys on the 23rd where we talk about how to build your life coach marketing plan.
Until next time, have an amazing week and you guys enjoy the summer. Get out, get some fresh air, get some inspiration and enjoy it while we've got it. I'll talk to y'all very soon. 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 going to teach you how to use Canva to create beautiful graphics to market your life coaching business. All right, have an amazing week.
I'll talk to you very soon. Bye bye.
Outro: 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.