Content Strategies for Coaches

As a coach looking to attract your ideal clients, how often do you apply different content strategies for coaches into your marketing?

There are different types of content that you need to create as a coach. There’s the content that you need to run your business. There’s the content that you create for courses or programs to support your coaching, and then there’s content for marketing to help people get to your website and discover you and figure out that you’re who they’ve been looking for.

Content is how you put yourself out there for potential clients to find and if it’s the wrong content, you’ll get the wrong clients.

In this video, we are going to share different content strategies for coaches that you can apply to make sure you attract the right clients. So, let’s dive right in and get started!

 

21 Content Strategies for Coaches

Why creating the right content is important

How many times have we put something out there and somebody comes into our funnel or into our world, and we realize that we’ve attracted somebody that is not aligned with what we do, with our coaching style, with our beliefs and how we can help them?

So creating the right content is super important.

A lot of coaches don’t like selling or sales. Most people get into business because they like the thing that they do, especially coaches and consultants.

Coaches get into coaching because they love connecting with people, and they love transformation, and they love helping people and seeing that journey that someone goes on from where they are, when they get started, to where they want to be and helping them get there, not because we like selling.

 

Share your expertise and success stories of clients and customers

One of the most straightforward methods to avoid the need for aggressive selling, the tiresome “dog and pony show,” and the effort of persuading others to invest in your services is by focusing on content creation.

Share your expertise, knowledge, advice, experiences, as well as success stories from your clients and customers. This is one of the content strategies for coaches that can naturally showcase your value and attract potential clients.

Every time you’re authentically putting yourself out there and you’re talking about your stories and your advice and your lived experiences and you’re helping other people, it’s giving them a little taste of what it would be like to interact with you or work with you.

It’s positioning you as being knowledgeable and being trustworthy, and it’s reinforcing your credibility. It’s keeping you top of mind.

It’s helping them get closer to that goal or helping them get ready for hiring you.

And there is this idea of preselling where I love that even before somebody gets on a call with me or on a webinar with me, they already saw me out there. They’ve seen and read or watched my content, and that makes selling so much easier.

Marketing, especially when you’re a coach or an expert, has a lot to do with content creation. And a lot of times, coaches are really worried about how to stand out when there’s so many coaches out there. Like, where are my clients?

When you engage in content creation, regardless of the format you choose, you are essentially crafting something that is distinctly your own. You tell your story, share your experience, and people resonate with certain coaches and don’t resonate with certain other coaches, and that’s how you attract your perfect clients.

 

The power of storytelling in attracting clients

I actually had just signed up for a coaching program myself and it was very unusual because the content was actually a story that a woman posted on her Facebook profile. I don’t know how I came across it. I was just in my news feed, and there was her story. And it was well told, and it was so relevant. I don’t think I ever remember signing up for a program from a Facebook post.

And there it was. I signed up. It was three hundred dollars, and I was in because I connected and related to her story.

So storytelling is also content and especially when you do it masterfully.

If you think about it, our stories often have a point of vulnerability in them. They have that moment of, “Oh my gosh.” So you have a story, usually, they’re overcoming something.

It’s a realization that something is wrong or something needs to change. Or you made a mistake and you fixed it or you had an embarrassing moment and so you did something different.

Like, most stories have a point of vulnerability. And when you aren’t afraid to be vulnerable, when you’re not afraid to not be perfect publicly and put on that facade of being the perfect professional.

The more relatable you are in your content, the easier it is for somebody to connect with it and say:

“You’re just like me.”

“I was in that spot or you were in that spot. I’m in that spot right now. You can help me get through it because you got through it.

Or “this is something I’m dealing with.”

So when you tell stories, it takes general boilerplate content that any coach could create. Because let’s face it. It’s not like most of us are saying something that’s groundbreaking or new.

So you can take content that’s fairly general and make it totally unique to you by working in those stories and those points of being vulnerable and those ahas and those light bulb moments and realizations because those are those tangible things that somebody is gonna grab onto, and they’re gonna say:

“This is my person. I wanna learn from you. I wanna coach with you. I wanna work with you. You’ve either done what I wanna do and overcome what I wanted to overcome, or you work with people like me and you share stories from somebody like me.”

 

The connection between marketing, sales, and branding

Marketing and sales are very tied together.

Marketing, which includes effective content strategies for coaches, is getting somebody to take action. Marketing is getting a conversion.

Branding is building your authority and your expertise and your reputation to the point where it’s totally undeniable that you are the best for the person that needs what you do. That you are the best fit, the only choice.

I would rather somebody come to a sales call saying, “I’ve read every single thing on your website, and I’m so glad I found you. How do I start? How do I pay? I’m ready to do this right now.”

Than me having to go through the whole shebang of selling somebody. So because that’s not how I define marketing, running, and sales.

In my perspective, marketing has always been centered around establishing fresh authority, creating awareness about your offerings, and highlighting what sets you apart from others. On the other hand, sales marks the pivotal moment when you secure the deal.

 

Connecting with potential clients on a personal level

I often find myself thinking whether my content is sometimes too cold and too methodical because I create a lot of how-to content and while it serves its purpose, I also aim to touch your heart, to truly connect with you on a personal level.

So, I intentionally challenge myself to ask, “Have I genuinely connected with someone’s heart as I wrote this?” If not, is there a story or an example that I could share or something vulnerable that I could mention?

But finding your person is critical when you are especially in the coaching world because you want to work with coaches who feel like that’s your person. They get you. They understand you.

They sympathize with your experience, and you have something in common.

So I think that that is really important.

 

Utilize the power of Chat GPT for content creation ideas

The other part of content creation is that a lot of times, people don’t know what kind of content to create.

Thanks to Chat GPT, this issue should become a thing of the past, never to be a problem again. However, I believe it’s still valuable to maintain a list of preferred topics and themes that represent the core of my discussions.

So I think that not knowing or having this blank page, metaphorically speaking, maybe you’re recording a video, you’re doing an audio, or you’re writing a blog post, but not starting from scratch is the biggest challenge for people who need to create content.

No good copywriter, no content creator worth their salt starts from scratch. Yet business owners and coaches who need to create content for marketing sit down and they’re like:

“Alright. I opened up this Google Doc or I opened up WordPress. What should I talk about today?”

And you’re staring at a blank screen. There’s this disconnect that people think:

“Oh, okay. I’m gonna start from scratch. Ideas magically appear.”

But the pros know that’s not how it works, and this leads us to our next point.

 

Define your core brand messaging first

Implementing targeted content strategies for coaches begins with defining your brand’s core messaging.

You identify your core topics that you’re going to focus on building your brand reputation around first, and then you use frameworks and outline some things to help you create content fast.

So before you can get really good at creating content, you have to define your core brand messaging for who you are as a coach.

When you’re creating content, start by creating a plan for your content, a strategy for your content. First look at the following:

• What’s your coaching specialty or your niche?
• What problems are you solving?
• What obstacles are you overcoming?
• What mindsets are you shifting?
• What outcomes are you coaching to?

And those are the things that you want to create content around because those are the things that reinforce all of your coaching and build up your authority on those things.

You want the content that you create to support your revenue generating offers, the coaching packages and programs and courses and things that you sell.

So you want all your content to support the way that you make a living and the opportunities that people have to engage with you.

You don’t need to create content for the sake of content. It needs to all connect and tie back into what you’re offering.

It actually makes me think as somebody who sells software. I I looked at Coaching Genie, and I said, what are the benefits of my platform?

And that’s what I should be creating content around, like the things that it can allow you to do and the benefits around it. So now I can create content specific to the benefits of the software.

 

Express your unique perspective on a topic and ask questions

The other thing is when I get on in the content creation mode, I first need to have an opinion.

Like, I can’t just talk about something. I need to have a point of view.

That’s the thing that reels people in. Nobody just wants to listen to you blather on about something that anybody could say. People are attracted to people with a point of view. They want to hear your take on it.

Otherwise, it’s just passing on information.

One of the angles that I learned about forming your own opinion is asking yourself this question:

“What drives you crazy?”

Because that’s a good way to do it. What drives you crazy makes you great.

What drives me crazy about coaching programs? What drives me crazy about marketing or running virtual summits?

What drives me crazy about those things?

It leads me to creating awesome content because now I get to express my opinion and offer a better way in my opinion.

So having that question in front of you, what drives you crazy around XYZ, whatever the subject or the area of expertise. What do other coaches say to your clients that drives you crazy?

What do you see other coaches do that drives you crazy?

To all of your thank you pages, add a single question form that asks them a question:

“What’s the biggest challenging challenge you’re facing to do with X today?”

Whatever it is you coach on.

If you are a fitness coach, you can ask questions like:

“What is the number one thing in the way of your fitness goals?”

“What’s the number one thing? Or what’s something that is in your way to get to this goal?”

“What brought you to this site today?”

“Why did you sign up? What are you hoping to get out of this? What are you hoping to learn?”

Ask them a question, and you can even make it anonymous so somebody doesn’t even have to put in their email because they already signed up if it’s on a thank you page.

But gather that information, and people joining your list or joining your programs, they will tell you what they want to hear about, and they’ll give you ideas. They will be relevant to what you do because they’re in that mindset of opting in for that free offer that you have or signing up for that webinar that you’re offering or joining a Facebook group.

 

Gather content ideas from your one-on-one clients

With any kind of coaching I do, it has to do with me training customers and getting them to create programs. But anytime I work with clients one on one, I get content ideas from our coaching sessions. It’s crazy.

I never expected because they’ll ask me a question. They will see something as an obstacle or a mindset that I need to address that immediately becomes great for my next piece of content.

And so when you coach clients, a lot of content ideas can come from the questions they ask, from the obstacles you see them face, from the mind shifts that they need to make.

 

Assess your content’s alignment with your potential client’s needs

As someone who believes in content strategies for coaches, you might have faced some roadblocks.

Suppose you’ve been diligently producing content for a year—sending out weekly newsletters, updating your blog, and managing a YouTube channel, yet you’re not attracting as many clients as expected or filling your programs.

If you are consistently creating content but struggling to connect with potential clients, there are a couple different ways to look at this.

So the first is the assumption that it is great content. It’s a tough pill to swallow, but sometimes it isn’t that the content is great, but it’s great to you and it’s not great to your audience.

It’s not great to the people that you’re trying to attract because where you’re at and what resonates with you and what you like talking about might not be the content that meets your prospective clients where they’re at.

So the quality might be great, but it not might not be great for them. It might not be a great match.

So we have to be careful not to make the assumption that we’re creating great content and everything is great. So one, we have to take a look at that.

 

Determine where your ideal clients are hanging out online

The other is you might have the perfect content for your prospective clients, but your clients might be on LinkedIn. Or you might hate Instagram, and you’re on LinkedIn, but all your clients are hanging out on Instagram.

Or you might think, “No way am I adding another social media platform to my site. I’m not ever looking at TikTok.”

But who you’re coaching, they may be hanging out on TikTok. Or you might be leaning really hard into an email newsletter, and your clients don’t check email very often.

So sometimes you have great content, but it’s not showing up where they are or where they need to see it.

So as much as creating content is important, distribution and promotion and marketing of that content is just as important.

 

It’s not always about creating new content

And the other thing is that successful content marketing isn’t always about creating new content.

Most people who are creating a lot of content could get even better results by creating fifty percent of the content that they create. And instead, using that time to go back to their content they’ve already created and make it better.

It’s gained maybe backlinks. So going back in, looking at your analytics or your data and saying, wow. These posts are ranking really well. Can I add some stories or testimonials or some more information to make them even better? And then you’re like, boom! Done.

Check this out. Or you go back in and you say, hey this content here, it’s not ranking bad, but it’s also not ranking well. It’s kinda sitting on page five, six.

Could I add more to it and bump it up even higher so it gets found more often.

So using content marketing to get clients, you create some new content but you also want to go and improve your existing content to get even better results out of all the hard work you’ve already put in. And that likely will yield just as good a result.

Creating content feels safe because it’s in our control. Now marketing your content is so unpredictable.

There are so many black holes that it can pull you into. And you could do a lot of work with distribution and still not get your content where you want it to be, so that doesn’t feel safe.

And so we, as coaches and content creators, tend to create more, focus more on creation than marketing and distribution.

That is your marketing and distribution is where imposter syndrome always shows up. That’s where the confidence piece always shows up because creating content, writing a blog post on your own blog, and then just hitting publish, that’s safe.

Posting it on Facebook, posting it around, posting it and putting it in front of everybody, it’s like, “Oh, I don’t know. I might be posting too much. What are they gonna say?”

That’s wrong over here. These people don’t want to see that. All the negative stuff starts to show up when you start doing that.

And is it the right content? Am I publishing the right content? That also comes into play.

 

Always add a call-to-action

You need to have a call to action of some kind, especially if it’s something like a newsletter where you publish your content to your audience that you are already attracted.

Now you are communicating with them, but maybe you’re not asking for them to take action. You’re not making any offers.

So basically, what you’re doing is you’re training people to receive free content for as long as they live.

And what I found is that whenever somebody’s promoting my program or my offer, their conversion rate will be lower if they have never made an offer to their audience.

And if you train your readers or your audience to receive offers to see a call to action, the conversion rate will always be higher.

 

Your content has to be helpful to your audience

There are tons of checklists on how to create good content. But the bottom line is it has to help somebody either learn something or achieve something.

Because if you think about it, people go to search engines and they search for something. They’re looking for content when they have a problem, when they have a challenge, when they need something.

When they’re looking to learn something, they want to learn, they want to get something done, they want to tackle something, they want to change something.

They have a specific need, and they are actively seeking the most relevant content to fulfill that requirement. Therefore, when you embark on content creation, it’s crucial to consider the purpose behind it and why it needs to exist. This is one of the most important content strategies for coaches to keep in mind.

 

Consider the underlying reasons behind your content

What do I want someone to do or achieve or know or learn or feel as a result of watching or listening or reading this content?

How can I ensure that after they’ve finished listening, reading, or watching, they possess the knowledge, skills, or tools necessary to successfully implement the topic we’ve discussed or take the next crucial step?

It doesn’t need to provide a complete solution, but rather take the next step. One of the most common issues people encounter is selecting a topic that’s overly broad. They might decide to write a blog post on this expansive subject, and then they wonder, “How on earth am I gonna cover this well?”

The more narrow and tight, the more specific you get, the easier it is to create something super helpful and actionable.

After someone has finished listening to your podcast, reading your article, or watching your video, your goal is for them to say, “Now I can go do X or now I can I feel confident about this or that changed the way that I thought?”

Consider the underlying reasons behind your content creation: What is your primary objective? What do you hope your audience will do, learn, feel, believe, or change as a result of consuming your content? By defining these aspects upfront and ensuring your content aligns with them, you can confidently ascertain that you’re heading in the right direction.

A really good starting point is asking yourself, “Where do I want this content to lead? What’s my goal?” So that’s really important. And I also think that there may be different content creation styles based on your personality.

Good content is when you experience some type of a mind shift. You have some moments that make you think deeper. You experience a paradigm shift.

 

Explore other mediums that suit your communication style

Not everybody likes writing, and some people hate it, and some people aren’t good at it. They have deep expertise, but they’re like, “I’m not good at writing. I don’t like it. I don’t wanna do it. I feel stuck.”

Every time I sit down to write, I feel icky, but I can talk. So if you share this sentiment, you might be better on video or you might be better on a podcast.

I typically initiate with a solo video conversation. I record the conversation and send it to my team for editing.

They transcribe it, and it undergoes a transformation into various content formats, such as newsletter articles, blog posts, and social media updates. This initial video conversation serves as my comfort zone, allowing me to vocalize my expertise. It then evolves into diverse forms of content.

 

You need to create content for your coaching program

When you create a coaching program, you also need content. And many times people think that they need more content than they actually do.

But most importantly, the component of your coaching program that you need is content. And this is the reason why I even created Coaching Genie, because I had a ton of content from different coaching programs, different tools, resources, worksheets, videos, audios, training, interviews to programs, but I didn’t have anywhere to put them.

And so I needed a place, and that’s where Coaching Genie became this content coaching content library that now I get to bundle all those pieces into programs and courses.

 

Create content depending on the style of your program

How much content does a coaching program need? It depends on the style of program that you’re selling and what the objective is.

I have a couple programs that are very heavy in content because it is business training with coaching. So that is very, very heavy in content, and it’s workbooks and videos and worksheets and resources and downloads and all kinds of things like that.

But then I have a different program that is more about accountability. And it is about mapping out a ninety day or a 12-week plan. We map out the plan and then it’s accountability and getting work done over those twelve weeks.

For that one, the content is much less because it’s coaching people through.

The thing that you want to think about when you’re developing content for your coaching program is what do you say repeatedly? What do you do repeatedly? What is gonna be the same for each person that goes through this experience?

Because part of coaching is very unique to each person that goes through that program. The questions they have, the obstacles they run through, the things that you’re going to coach them on.

Those will be done live, and they’re unique. But there’s also an element that’s the same for everyone. For example, when they are onboarded in the beginning and they come in, what information do they need to know? What do they need to learn? What do they need to experience?

So everybody’s on the same page at the beginning. So you’re not repeating yourself a hundred times. And then when you get into your program, if you have modules or you have less like, lessons or you’ve got different phases, you want to think about, at each time what does everybody need?

And ask yourself, what do they need to know?

What do they need to learn? And how do I want them to feel?

And how can I make sure that that experience is consistent for everyone no matter how busy I get in my business?

And most of the time, that’s through content and that’s why Coaching Genie is so amazing because you can load all that content in and you can have it drip out, or you can have it show up at just the right time to meet those people where they’re at as they experience it.

And you can show up brilliantly and do your thing as a coach without having to worry about the minutiae all the way along. That’s leveraging your time and expertise.

 

Customize your content based on your client’s individual journey

There’s one other thing that you can do in Coaching Genie that makes it unique is that you can take that content, and you can customize it for each individual client, even if you are delivering a group program.

Because every client is different, and they are maybe at different points in their coaching journey. And so even though they join the program and they’re all in the same program, some people might be too advanced for everybody else, and they need something extra or something else, something different.

So that is something that I always needed. Like, well, I have these clients. It’s a group of twenty people, and three clients have done this before, so they don’t need the basics.

So I just went ahead and removed the foundational pieces, just the basic pieces out of their curriculum. And everybody else was receiving them, and they were not. So that piece to me allows me to treat each client as an individual even in a group.

What the course contains is usually set in stone with coaching. With Coaching Genie, that personalized experience makes those people feel more special. They feel seen. They feel recognized.

They don’t feel like, “Oh, I’m just treated like every other person.”

It’s like, “Oh, my experience is a little bit different because I’ve been here before.”

And that little shift has a big ripple effect. You honor that as a coach. You honor that they are in a different place.

 

Offer your unique perspective on topics already discussed by others

Never hold yourself back because somebody else already said it. Too many times, people don’t create content because someone else already wrote that article or somebody else already recorded that video.

But the people that know you and follow you and want to hear from you, they don’t know those other people even exist.

So the likelihood is they’ve never seen any of their content. So it doesn’t matter if anybody has ever said any of the things that you want to say.

The people that are right for you and the people that need you and the people that know you want to hear from you, and they need to hear your voice and your opinion.

 

Record your expertise once and repurpose it across your programs at any time

My final thought on content is that the secret to scaling your coaching business is appreciating your content.

You want to capture it, gather it, organize it, bundle it and put it into Coaching Genie.

But the point is you really want to appreciate the content that comes out of you because that’s where you can transfer your knowledge without your presence, without you being there personally.

And as you do that, that means you’re saving time. You are leveraging your expertise and time. And you can do it over and over again, you know, rinse and repeat.

So there are moments in time where I would say to myself, I never want to teach this topic again, ever ever again. I am sick and tired of teaching, for example, a topic of niche discovery. Right? This is something that I’ve beaten down to death on this topic. I don’t want to teach it anymore.

So let me report my expertise on how to do this once and for all, and I will never have to teach it again.

And now I have a little training that I can give to my clients in any program that I run.

So appreciate content, capture it, organize it, make it shareable, make it easy to share and turn it into programs, and then you are going to be able to scale your coaching business with much more ease.