It is marketing 101 to write your copy and content focusing on your client’s perspective. We have talked a lot in the past about writing copy in the second person rather than the first person to help address your clients’ needs. But that doesn’t mean you should never speak about yourself when you’re promoting your coaching courses.
Your clients are signing up to work with YOU. They need to believe that you have the expertise to help them achieve the results they desire. They also need to know if you are the kind of person they would enjoy working with. So you do need to talk about yourself a little bit. Here’s how.
Understand the Purpose of Each Piece of Copy or Content
The most important part of the equation is knowing what purpose it serves in your coaching business. A sales page will serve a very different function than a piece of social media content. Your social media page may also have multiple types of content to serve different purposes. For example, your social media content may fall into three categories:
- Fun content designed to expand your reach and allow prospective coaching clients to connect with your personality
- Expert content designed to showcase your expertise and provide a taste of what you do
- Promotional content designed to sell your coaching programs and courses
Each type of content will require different levels of talking about you. Fun content will often be about you. You show prospective coaching clients behind the scenes of what you do and engage in a little bit of silliness. Do the latest TikTok dances, talk about your obsession with Harry Potter, and share your opinions as much as you want. You can show behind the scenes as you are creating a new coaching program and talk about what you are trying to do here. This insight is not appropriate on a sales page but is absolute gold for social media content.
Expert content needs to be centred around helping prospective coaching clients. You can use yourself as an example to share how you would approach a problem or how you overcame an issue. When you are creating expert content, go through every sentence and ask yourself, “does this piece of information help a coaching client to solve their problem or is it fluff?” You don’t have to eliminate all fluff; anecdotes and personality should be used in expert content, but make sure the majority of the content is actionable advice.
Promotional content and sales copy are all about selling your coaching courses and programs. Any talk about you should be focused on providing prospective coaching clients with the information they need to make a buying decision. This could be information about your process, accreditations, or notable clients you have worked with.
Know What Prospective Coaching Clients Need to Hear
Getting inside your ideal client’s brain is key to the success of your coaching business. This will help you to know when, how, and where to market your coaching services. It will also tell you what your clients need to hear from you at each stage of their customer journey.
Think about how coaching clients find you. For most coaching businesses, their first touchpoint with their customers is their social media platforms. Prospective coaching clients will find you through your content. At this stage of the customer journey, your clients want to get to know you a little better. They will be looking at your personality and overall content to see if you are someone they want in their social media feeds.
Once they know they like you and what you do, your customer will be looking at what value you can provide them. They’ll be looking at the free titbits you provide on social media and through your other free content to see if your advice is helpful for them. You can provide personal anecdotes here, but they must be done through the lens of giving potential clients actionable advice.
When it comes to selling your products, your clients expect you to provide them with all the information they need to make a decision. They want to know:
Effective selling is focused on the clients’ needs and desires. The only time you should talk about yourself is to prove why you’re the right person to get them the results they want.
At different stages of the customer journey and in different mediums, clients will have expectations for what they will learn about you. They won’t want to hear your accreditations in every social media post (it would actually be quite off-putting.) And they certainly won’t care what your Starbucks order is when they’re reading a landing page. Know what is appropriate to share in different contexts.
Keep a “Cut File “
Not everything you ever write or create will make it through editing. But just because something doesn’t work for that piece of content doesn’t mean you should delete it entirely. It could be repurposed as other content or even used as inspiration for future content ideas.
A cut file is where you put things that didn’t make it through the editing process but have potential for other uses. What you put on your cut document is completely up to you; some people decide to have multiple cut files categorised by potential future uses.
Let’s say you’re writing a piece of email copy, and you go off on a bit of a tangent about that one time when you thought you deleted your website but it turns out you made a typo when writing the URL. As you’re editing the email, you decide that actually, it’s not that relevant and could be either completely cut or shortened to a sentence. Just because it doesn’t work here doesn’t mean it couldn’t be a humorous and relatable story for your social media. By putting it in a cut file, you can come back to it and create content when you’re ready to use it. It also saves you coming up with content ideas.
When coaches show themselves deleting whole chapters of their book, we have a moment of silence for all the possible content that was just lost. If it doesn’t fit in one context, save it, you’ll find somewhere it does fit in the future.