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Your Marketing Key – The Four Questions
By: Janet Slack
There is a lot of information available about how to market a coaching business and yet many coaches still struggle. How do you know which idea to follow and how to make it work for you? The answer is in what I call the “pre-marketing” work that needs to be done to build a successful coaching business. At the heart of your pre-marketing work are “The Four Questions”. This is the contemplative work that you must be willing to do as you begin your business and again periodically throughout the life of the business. The four questions lead you to know how to market what you do because they are at the core of your business.
First let’s address who you are as a person. This is the “Who Are You?” question. It is a tremendous help to know yourself inside and out in order to succeed in the coaching business. If you know yourself well there is less chance that “your stuff” will get in the way of the client so you will be a better coach. As an entrepreneur, knowing yourself well allows you to get the most out of your abilities and compensate where needed. What are ways to describe your own uniqueness? What is the combination of experiences, personality traits, history and values that makes you who you are? “Who Are You” is the vital piece that makes YOUR coaching business different than the other thousands that exist.
“What do you do?” is the second question. This addresses having the ability to talk about coaching and what it is. If you can describe your work in a genuine, impactful way, you will be seen as attractive by those people who you are trying to reach. The more practice the better in terms of learning to talk about coaching. Make sure to talk about coaching with anyone who will listen, research what others say about coaching, read widely about coaching and get your own coach so you truly understand its impact. What you are doing is collecting knowledge so that you can express the results that your potential clients can expect to get from coaching.
“What do you have to offer?” is the third question. This question delves into who you are as a coach - what are your skills and strengths as a coach? Begin to answer this question by asking for lots of feedback about your coaching. Your clients will have some insights into your style and what is most helpful for them. Remember to ask your coaching partners, supervisor, or peers for feedback on your coaching. Spend time thinking about how your personal beliefs and values impact the work you do as a coach. In particular, consider what you believe about motivation and personal change. Think about how your belief system affects your presence with your coaching clients.
The final question is “What is your passion, purpose, and path?”. The driving force that makes your coaching come authentically from your soul is your passion. This is some of the contemplating you must do in order to find your niche. Your purpose is the spark within you that makes you want to be a coach. Spend time considering all the things that you think are great about coaching. The way that you put all the elements together in a business that is unique to you is your path. This includes knowing what the essential elements are for the business to be authentically yours and how you will measure success. Consider how these two factors will impact the way you run the business.
The pre-marketing work of The Four Questions will build a solid foundation for your business. Make sure to revisit this periodically in order to ensure you’re your business continues to flourish. Spending time on The Four Questions will make your marketing easier, give you a foundation for attracting clients, increase your income and keep you motivated.
About the Author
Janet Slack of Life Adventure Coaching is a specialist in helping new coaches, therapists and consultants create the thriving business of their dreams. Find more business building ideas and learn all the details that you need to know as a coaching entrepreneur at www.biztipsforcoaches.com/blog/. She recently released Mind Your Own Biz: Discover the Secrets to Creating a Successful Coaching Business a step by step guide to starting your coaching business right.
Blog and Website Must Haves
The first step to sales and inquiries when potential clients or customers visit your site is that they see the services or products they were originally looking for. Unfortunately search engine optimization and better rankings can’t keep your customer on your site or make them buy. The potential client or customer having visited your site, must be interested in your products or services in order to stay and browse. Motivate them to purchase the service or product by providing clear and unambiguous information. If you happen to sell more than one product or service, provide all necessary information about this. Consider having numerous pages which have a singular focus for each of your services or products. By providing suitable and easily visible links, the customer can navigate to these pages and get the details.
Understand Your Target Market
If you design a website you think will attract clients, but you don’t really know who your potential clients are and what they want to buy, it is unlikely that anyone will choose to work with you. Online business is an extension or replacement for a standard brick and mortar storefront. If you’re just not sure about your target market what can you do? Start by sending an email to your existing clients and ask them to complete a survey. You could even direct your potential clients and customers to an online survey on your website. Ask them about their choices:
Why do they like your services or products?
Do you offer retainer discounts or discounts/coupons codes for products?
Do you practice excellent customer service and respond faster to client questions?
Are your product descriptions better?
Don’t be afraid to ask.
Be generous with your contact information.
When you sell online your customers can buy your products 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Your customers can be across town or across the globe. Always provide contact information, preferably on every page of your website, complete with mailing address, telephone number and an email address that reaches you. People may need to contact you about sales, general information or technical problems on your site. Also have your email forwarded to another email address if you do not check your website mailbox often. Nothing turns off potential clients and customers faster than lack of contact information. In an impersonal, online world, your customers want to know where you are and how they can contact you if need be. Don’t disappoint. Strive to be as credible as possible when operating online.
About the Author
Becki Noles, Visionary of Virtual Accuracy Companies has been at the forefront of stream-lining coaching and entrepreneurial businesses since 1998. Utilizing her background in marketing, publicity, corporate training, advertising and media, Becki custom tailors and implements individualized action plans for taking coaching businesses to the next level. As a Virtual Assistant her business partners with top business and executive coaches in the United States, Canada, Switzerland and the world over.
Pay Per Click Bid Management Pt. 2
Bid gaps occur when there is a significant price increase to move up one spot in the PPC rankings. It is best if you take advantage of the bid gaps by filling them in so you can save up your cents for other bidding opportunities. Often there are keywords worthy of lesser bids to get the appropriate ranking on the list and produce a good number of clicks and higher conversion rate rather than bidding higher but having a poor conversion rate. You have to keep in mind that overbidding too is not good but rather the best position for the most effective bid.
Using pay per click bid management in promoting your website will only be successful if you take time building many lists across many engines and studying the performance of every listing. In this way, you can make the most value from what you spend in the bidding process. The key is to take the necessary precautions to stay ahead of the competition.
Bid Management Tools
To insure the best results, you may want to use bid management tools. There are many accepted and approved management tools that will help you in your bidding. They are categorized into two different types:
• Web based (services by monthly subscription)
• PC based (a purchased software)
Monitoring tools too may help in the tracking down of your keywords/phrases and search engines. This will help you determine which generate the most sales overall and in relation to your cost per click. This is what you call return of investment (ROI) monitoring.
These bid management tools may include additional functions that you may not get from online marketing tools that are readily available. Other tools can monitor competitor’s bids, produce reports for different parties and offer the ability to interface with multiple PPC engines. This is particularly helpful to those who manage more than a hundred keywords across several PPC engines to boost productivity and save time.
Pay per click bid management is ideal for the effective promotion of your business online. It is now possible to market your goods and services quickly to many.
About the Author
Becki Noles, Visionary of Virtual Accuracy has been at the forefront of stream-lining coaching and entrepreneurial businesses since 1998. Utilizing her background in marketing, publicity, corporate training, advertising and media, Becki custom tailors and implements individualized action plans for taking coaching businesses to the next level. As a Virtual Assistant her business partners with top business and executive coaches in the United States, Canada, Switzerland and the world over.
kO′ch VA adj. 1. a highly specialized and niched virtual
assistant who is in tune with their coaching clients and customizes solutions based upon their individual needs and goals 2. differs from a general virtual assistant as they only partner with members of the coaching industry [syn: 
