How to be a successful coach?
In this article on how to be a successful coach, I will share some key principles that will help you build visibility for your coaching practice.
Here are briefly my 9 tips on how to succeed in your coaching career:
1 – Identify your strengths
2 – Target potential clients who have needs that match your strengths
3 – Dominate at least one market niche
4 – Attract the clients you are interested in
5 – Create quality content
6 – Create diversified content
7 – Use the power of video
8 – Innovate
9 – Focus on what is important
Now let’s move on to the first tip.
1- Identify your strengths
To succeed in your coaching career, you must first become aware of your strengths.
You can also call them innate talents or skills.
They are your trademark, your genetic imprint.
They are the skills you were born with.
I am not talking about what you have learned in your professional or personal life.
No, it’s not that at all.
I am talking about what you know without having learned it, what you can do easily, effortlessly, with pleasure, and better than most people you know.
Understanding these aspects of your uniqueness is essential to differentiate yourself sufficiently from other coaches out there.
Without this knowledge, you will go nowhere and your coaching practice will continue to stagnate.
If you want to develop these skills, you can take advantage of our marketing for coaches’ expertise.
However, I want to give you a hint.
Your innate skills are often below your level of awareness and it is often other people who can help you become aware of them.
Before I move on to the next tip, I’ll give you another tip.
Your innate skills are often hidden behind something that is part of your routine and to which you attribute little or no importance.
Now, I suggest you move on to the second tip, which is to target potential customers whose needs match your strengths.
2 – Target potential clients who have needs that match your strengths
Coaches who fail at their job make many mistakes.
Among these mistakes, the most common marketing mistakes are either not targeting anyone or targeting the wrong people.
If you have identified your strengths, you will be on the right track to targeting the people who really need you.
You can start with a specific need that one of your strengths is able to satisfy.
Then, you can test your marketing hypothesis by highlighting that strength as the solution to their problem.
Even if your assumption is confirmed, you still have to verify if your potential customers are willing to pay for the solution you propose.
Basically, the fact that your target audience perceives a problem, does not guarantee that they are willing to invest money to solve it.
If your audience is willing to pay, then you will need to create a product or service that solves that problem.
On the other hand, you will need to create something unique or different in order to sufficiently differentiate yourself from your competitors and target a portion of your target audience.
It is through a combination of excellent knowledge of:
- yourself
- your target
- your competitors’ strategies
That you will be able to acquire market share in the niche of your choice.
Now let’s see how to dominate your first market niche.
3 – Dominate at least one market niche
After testing several targets and several solutions to solve people’s problems, you will realize that you can’t have good marketing and sales efficiency by having too many targets to manage.
It becomes essential to prioritize and focus most of your resources on one niche.
Ideally, you should choose a niche where there is a strong match between your target’s needs and your innate skills.
More specifically, I suggest you spend 70% of your resources (money, time, people, etc.) on your main niche.
You can use the remaining 30% to continue testing other market niches.
You are probably wondering what is the best way to dominate a market niche.
Assuming that you are able to compete with other players in your market for your main niche, to dominate that market niche you will need to produce content:
- of higher quality
- with a different point of view than your competitors
- in greater quantity, variety, and frequency
The time it will take you to dominate this market niche will depend on the level of competition you face, but also on your entrepreneurial skills, your intuition, and your creativity.
Now, let’s find out how to attract the clients you are interested in.
4 – Attract the clients you are interested in
Most of the time, in order to get customers, you will first need to have prospects.
Building a lead base is essential to avoid relying on a single source of traffic for your website.
A very effective way to build this list of prospects is to create something free, such as an ebook, that addresses a topic important to your potential customers. This is called a lead magnet.
The effectiveness of this method is based on the psychological principle of reciprocity because, in exchange for this lead magnet, you ask for an email that will allow you to continue to keep in touch with this person over time.
Several tools exist to implement this strategy, after having tested several, the one I recommend is GetResponse. If you wish, you can test GetResponse for free for 30 days.
Regardless of the tool you use, the most important factor is to know the needs, difficulties, and frustrations of your target audience in order to create and offer a product with real added value.
This means that you have to invest enough time to create good quality content to deliver to these people.
Now, let’s see how to create quality content.
5 – Create quality content
The quality and relevance of your content are essential to building and developing your expertise.
If you put yourself in the shoes of your potential customers for a moment, you understand that they have to make a decision every time they land on a website.
The decision is whether to continue to stay on your site or move to one of your competitors’ sites.
With this in mind, you understand that the quality of what you produce becomes the key element on which you must focus all your attention and energies.
But how do you know if your content is of quality for your prospects and customers?
You can see this by using Google Analytics which provides you with your website statistics with the time each person stays on the site and also the pages that drive away your prospects.
But in a more simple way, the quality of your content depends on your ability to:
- meet the conscious and unconscious expectations of your potential customers
- exceed the expectations of these people
- produce better content than your competitors
Another way to measure the interest of your website for your audience is to measure how many people subscribe or unsubscribe to your newsletter if you have one and how many people decide to leave your leads magnet database.
It is vital to have a quality web host to have a site that loads quickly. This is especially true nowadays because most people use smartphones to surf the internet. If your site loads too slowly, you lose customers.
After several tests, I recommend infomaniak because it is a very high-level host.
Now I’m going to talk about the importance of creating diverse content.
6 – Create diversified content
The variety of your content is another important factor if you want to succeed in your coaching career.
If you are part of the majority of coaches, you have a preference for one form of content.
Even if you feel comfortable with writing, video, or infographics, understand that limiting yourself to just one of these tools means limiting the effectiveness and impact of your marketing strategy.
It becomes important to step out of your comfort zone as a coach and challenge yourself to create new forms of content.
For example, if you are comfortable with writing, start creating videos.
But be careful not to become a perfectionist!
It’s obvious that you won’t be able to become an expert in creating a new form of content when you’re just starting out.
But it’s important to stop being a perfectionist or being afraid of the judgment of others, especially your fellow coaches.
If you don’t overcome these obstacles, you won’t be able to create a truly effective marketing campaign and build visibility for your coaching practice.
Now I’m going to talk about the importance of using the power of videos.
7 – Use the power of video
Even though written content remains essential to an effective marketing and sales strategy, no one can deny the effectiveness of video.
Using video as a coach remains a great asset for several reasons:
- firstly, because relatively few coaches produce videos and this represents a great opportunity to be ahead of your competitors
- secondly, associating video with written content allows you to reinforce the visibility of your company and improve the positioning of your website for the most strategic search expressions for your business
- finally, video creates a stronger sense of connection with the people who watch it
By watching your videos, people start to know you even if they have never met you in person.
You quickly become a familiar person and if they appreciate you and the quality of your content, they will either become customers or they will help you dominate your market niche because they will talk about you and interact positively with your content.
If you want to increase the impact of your videos and find relevant topics for your audience, I recommend you install the TubeBuddy extension.
Now I’m going to talk about the importance of innovating in your market.
8 – Innovate
Innovating is essential in an evolving market like coaching.
Again, this requires stepping outside your comfort zone.
There are several alternatives available to you if you want to innovate the coaching market.
You can innovate:
- by starting with the knowledge you have developed from the analysis of your client’s needs. Without this knowledge, you will not be able to offer coaching solutions adapted to your clients
- from the understanding you have acquired about your competitors’ marketing strategies
- by setting up a strategic watch to understand what is being done internationally in your field
- through marketing research that you carry out in sectors different from yours
- through exchanges with your prospects, clients, and other professionals
Finally, give yourself time to think creatively.
Intuition and creativity are abilities that require discipline, patience, and time.
Now I will discuss the importance of focusing on what is important to the success of your coaching practice.
9 – Focus on what is important
Coaches who get results are more efficient in managing their time because they focus on the actions that provide the most results.
To maximize your effectiveness, I recommend that you first identify the actions that contribute positively to your business.
Among these positive actions there are:
- selling the services you offer
- content creation
- developing your prospect base
- strengthening your knowledge and skills
Your task will be to allocate at least 80% of your time to the accomplishment of these actions. The remaining 20% can be invested in the research and development of your coaching business.
Then, you will make a second list of actions that do not contribute to the success of your business.
Your goal will be to eliminate as many of these as possible.
By focusing more on important activities and saving time by eliminating unimportant ones, you will be able to increase the revenue of your coaching business.
To take advantage of the expertise of a business coach to grow your business, write to us now by using our contact form.
Read this article in other languages
Français : Comment réussir sa carrière de coach ? Futurs coachs et coachs en activité
Italiano: Come diventare un coach di successo: 9 consigli per prosperare nel coaching