How to Build an Audience That Craves Your Coaching If you are getting no results from your social media marketing, we may have the answer to your problems.
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Coaches and other experts, let's talk straight — if your audience is not highly targeted, you are wasting a lot of time and money to get very little in return.
The biggest issue is when you connect with too many who are irrelevant to your business people — personal friends, family, too many peers or even worse, you have built your audience with completely random folks.
If this is the case, even when your messaging is on point, it can become pointless simply because people who are listening are not interested.
The problem
Have you ever spoken on a topic you are passionate about in front of a group of people who were clearly bored out of their minds?
I think everyone has had this experience at least once in their lives. School reports, work presentations, or trying to engage people at a networking event or a party come to mind.
Do you remember those blank faces staring at you with dull eyes? This is what happens when we talk to the wrong audience, and this is what happens to thousands of coaches and experts trying to attract more clients using Facebook or LinkedIn but are overlooking the most prominent element of their success: Who they are talking to.
The absolute devastation comes because it makes us drop out of a particular strategy mid-way without completing the trial or text stage (where not getting massive results is pretty typical). This means we constantly pick on our offers, our sales pitches and our pricing, making it impossible to achieve any kind of success or even learn what actual mistakes we are making so that we can tweak and adjust our course.
Doesn't it make more sense to tweak our offers and wording on our sales pages when we know that people who read our posts and watch our videos have, at the very least, the potential to find them relevant?
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Impostor syndrome
You may have too many peer coaches in your audience. Some may even be much more successful than you are. In fact, it feels like everyone else is doing better than you as all you see are the positives — new sales, sold-out launches and making millions. Plus, if you are connected to business coaches, everyone is promoting their way as the only way to achieving that dream.
This means every time you open your newsfeed, you see these posts and start either doubting your own path or worse — comparing yourself to these coaches. Naturally, this leads to feeling inadequate and like an impostor.
Impostor syndrome is the most crippling condition an expert can suffer from. Especially when it comes to consistently creating content and promoting their offers and their expertise. How can you communicate your value with conviction when you don't feel you deserve success because you are probably not good enough?
This is where we need to limit our exposure to irrelevant outside influences, and in terms of our audience, this means being very protective about what other experts and influencers we follow. We should choose those who inspire us and don't leave us feeling inadequate.
The strategy
Let's fix it. I want to share a good recipe for an audience full of highly targeted potential leads while on a personal level creates a space that keeps you motivated and in the flow so you can trust your own journey.
Here is the formula:
- 10% friends and family (but remove, unfriend or even block anyone that makes you feel insecure)
- 20% of peers and influences you follow
- 70% highly targeted audience according to your set criteria.
This way, you have some people who support you in your endeavour on a personal level (friends and family), those who inspire you (peers, influencers), and the majority of your connections are people who have the potential to want to experience your coaching.
When I work with clients on their audiences, we start with clearing out their immediate connections, creating space or void to be filled with potential leads. The total number of connections you have is irrelevant if they are irrelevant to your business people in the first place.
Related: Six Benefits Of Working With A Business Coach
Try to ignore the urge to be validated as an authority by a large number of followers in favour of being connected to the right people in the first place. At the end of the day, you want to attract paying clients as fast as possible.
On a personal profile on Facebook (a great place for coaches to attract clients in the growth stage of their businesses), you can switch off the friends list visibility in your settings so nobody except you knows how many friends you have. LinkedIn doesn't really show the exact total number of connections after you reach 500.
Go into your friends or connections list and start removing people from your past that are irrelevant to your current goals, anyone who you feel insecure about watching you promote your business. They won't be notified, and if you want, you can completely block them so they cannot even find you at all. Don't remove hundreds of people at one time or you can trigger the anti-hacking algorithm. Just start with 10 per day and build that number up gradually to about 50 per day.
This will give you more confidence to follow your dreams and show up without resistance. The sad reality is that we hold ourselves back in fear of judgement of people we personally know, even if they genuinely have no relevance to our lives at all.
If you come across an influencer you used to follow, try to overcome the fear of missing out. If they are not someone you are actively following right now, disconnect as they are only taking a valuable space that could be filled with a potential client.
Finally, you need criteria to judge who to keep and later who to look for and add to your audience. Here is a tremendous insight that I want to share with you. This is what changed everything for my organic marketing.
The target audience criteria is not based on what your usual ideal client avatar is built on.
Let me explain. The ideal client avatar often looks much deeper into the pains, frustrations, desires and aspirations of people we attract. It is essential knowledge for having a clear and compelling messaging in our marketing, but it is pretty useless when it comes to staring at someone's profile on Facebook, trying to guess if they have those pains and desires or not.
When we are building our audience on our profiles, we need to focus on the attributes we can see at a glance.
I give my clients an exercise called "the red flags" exercise. We take any apparent elements from the ideal client avatar — age group, gender, location, language and, if relevant, their professional or marital status. We are looking for the elements we can see from simply looking at someone's profile — their profile picture and any bio information they have filled in.
And then, we also have a set of red flags that will indicate that this is not a suitable member for our highly targeted audience. It can be a particular industry they work in. For example, I work with people in business, specifically coaches, but I do not do the same work with traders, retailers or investors.
When I look at someone's profile and see any information indicating that the person is not a coach or a coach at a much higher level of success than those I help, I do not need to send them a friend request. Those are red flags for me — no overthinking.
There are also personal red flags. For example, if a person posts information that is overly religious, political, or if their opinions are too one-sided — they're not the kind of people I like working with. This also makes it clear that I do not need to add them to my audience.
We look for red flags because it is easier for the human brain to know and focus on what we do not want.
And here is the secret: Know where to look for the right type of clients. Facebook groups are perfect because they already target people with specific interests, taking some level of the guesswork out of the equation. But the best Facebook groups are not the ones that our direct competitors host. In my experience, more effective groups are those which promote complimentary services to those that we offer.
If you focus on adding just 15 to 20 people that fit your targeting criteria per day, gradually increasing the number to about 40 to 50 friend requests per day, you can completely transform your audience in a matter of a couple of months.
Then, when you are sure you have plenty of the right people, you can start focusing on your messaging and nurture the proper people with your content to connect with them emotionally and get them to crave experiencing the transformations that your coaching promises. The best news is that when that happens, creating offers, sharing your value in posts and videos, and connecting and chatting to people becomes easy. It makes us feel in our purpose.
And clients? Give it three to six months and you will start seeing an increasing number of enquiries and signups because you are talking to those who share the same passion for success.
