Gain Exposure! How to Create Brilliant Online Promotional Strategy for Your Coaching Practice
A good sports coach inspires and educates players with the end goal of a team win. The same applies when working as a professional coach.
The tricky part is proving to potential clients you have what it takes to help them achieve their goals. You don’t have the national press coverage of professional sports highlighting your every career move.
Follow this guide to create a brilliant online promotional strategy for your coaching practice to build credibility and attract paid customers.
Face Biggest Challenges First
It’s very important to understand your motivation for outreach. All businesses need money, but knowing exactly how a post on social media will cure this problem is important.
Save yourself time by creating a list of your biggest challenges before taking any action. This list helps you identify your goals and ignore the many distractions available online promising you instant customers.
If you are currently marketing online, divide your list between what works for you and what has not produced any success.
Research Your Audience
Once you understand your challenges and needs, analyze the needs of your customer. Marketers can’t read the minds of customers, so they use data to prove any assumptions made.
Start with social media analytics tools to get demographic data on your ideal client. Each social media platform has a different type of user and can help you avoid wasting time with demographics that don’t match your audience.
With enough data, you can create a buyer persona. A buyer persona outlines details about a person like where they work, education level, family status, salary, gender, and fears.
By creating a buyer persona, you know your ideal client and can make ads or posts that resonate with them directly.
Promotional Strategy vs. Ideas
A brilliant online marketing plan is a strategy, not a list of ideas. Ideas are great for coming up with targeted design schemes but ineffective when it comes to creating a plan of action.
Armed with research your ideal client and business needs, your next step is to use your research to decide the most effective tools. Consider the amount of time it takes to execute each tool and whether you have the budget set aside to cover the expense.
Starting a campaign and abruptly ending it is one way to become discouraged. Choose online marketing tools that allow you to maximize time, money, your business goals, and your customer’s buyer persona.
When you factor in each of these categories, it helps you weed through dozens of irrelevant marketing options online.
Web Design
Design a professional website that speaks to the needs of your clients. A well-designed website means capturing the attention of visitors and keeping them on each page longer.
The average visitor’s attention span is 8 seconds which is 1 second less than a goldfish. Pages that are clean and easy to read allow customers to navigate your website, learning more faster.
If you don’t know how to design pages yourself, hire help. Web designers study user experience to learn layouts that attract more clicks to areas you want. If you can’t afford a web designer, there are alternatives.
Templates exist that allow you to use proven design styles that attract customers. The site helps you capture user data learning stats like which pages visitors click on most.
Remember buyer personas when choosing page content. If your ideal client is a parent, it may be beneficial to add a family photo with your bio on the About Us page to connect with potential customers.
Get Press
Hiring a public relations professional can mean getting access to media contacts who can include you in a story. While you may not get an article specifically about your business, contributing a quote to an existing story builds your credibility.
News coverage means getting exposure to a much broader audience than you might have access to on your own. Add any press you receive to your website to show off your position as a trusted expert.
Start a Blog
Starting a blog is a great way to attract repeat visitors to your website and optimize your site for search engines. Blogs are an overwhelming idea for some. The responsibility of constantly adding new ideas weekly or monthly seems like hard work.
Automate a series of blog posts through a publishing service to simplify the process. Instead of coming up with new ideas over and over, write several posts when you feel inspired. Schedule the posts over a period of time to keep your blog active.
Remember to keep your posts engaging. Be personable. Tell a story. This blog is a good example of how to capture your audience with memorable posts.
Learn from Competitors
Competitors who are successful can show you a paved road to getting the results you want. Do an audit of a competitor’s website to determine why customers spend time there.
Look at the way coaching services are described. There may be keywords or customer needs you are overlooking with your marketing materials.
The same applies to marketing strategies. Consider advertising where competitor ads are present to gain market share.
Research tools like Buzzusmo help you learn the types of content that receive the most shares. This is helpful because it can tell you what content is valuable by topic. Review the top content posted to see where you can improve in your messaging.
When to Bring in Help
Online marketing can seem like an endless set of tasks. Without direction, it’s easy to simply move forward with what’s easy instead of what’s an effective promotional strategy.
New online marketers need to keep things simple but not at the expense of business goals. Consider hiring a professional if you are not tech savvy or find yourself adding more strategies than you can manage on your own.
Your goal as a coach is to help clients succeed. Know when to find your own coach who can help you in areas where your expertise falls short.
Doing so allows you to focus on your craft instead of learning a whole new job. For more information on content marketing, visit our website.