Maybe you’ve heard that to be a successful coach you need to have a compelling message. But what does that even mean? You’re talking about what you do and how you help people but something just feels missing and you can’t put your finger on it.

In this post I’m going to share how you can perfect and improve your marketing messaging so you can grow your coaching business and get more clients.

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What is messaging?

Messaging is about communication. It’s how we share what our coaching business is all about – how we help people, who we are, our values, what makes us different and so on.

It’s something that should be embedded in multiple places within your business such as your website, your content marketing, signature talks and your sales copy.

I could write a whole course on messaging because it covers such a huge part of business (and in fact I cover a lot of messaging in the Unboxed Guide to Niche and Messaging!) but I want to share a few key tips to help you here.

Key questions to define your message

To help us get some clarity around our messaging it can be helpful to know the answer to a few key questions:

• Who do I help?
• How do I help them?
• What problems do I help them solve?
• What aspirations am I helping them achieve?
• What is the transformation or shift I’m helping them achieve?
• How do I facilitate that shift or transformation?
• What is different about the way that I facilitate this transformation?
• What are the values that underpin my work as a coach?

A lot of these questions are very similar to what we’d be asking ourselves around our niche but it’s still really helpful to start here and make sure we feel good about our answers.

Clarity is useful but not essential

Having a clear niche is going to help make everything easier, but don’t worry if you’re struggling to nail that niche! This is something I struggled with in my business for years. I wanted to do a lot of things and niching down felt very restrictive.

The good news is, you can have a broader general niche as long as you get more specific the closer to the sale. This basically means you need to be clear when it comes to what your paid offers are about.

Sometimes our niche evolves itself over time and to get that clarity we simply need to start and allow it to grow from there.

The good thing about working on your messaging is that it will often help you get more focus around your niche as you hone in on what you want to communicate in your marketing.

Identifying your key marketing messages

At this stage, it can be incredibly helpful to identify several key marketing messages – we’ll talk about how you can use these in your marketing shortly. Look at your answers to the questions above, can you pull out 3-7 key messages that you feel are most important for your people to understand about you and your business?

Try and pick a range of things that also include what makes you different and your values as these things can really help make your message more compelling and interesting. You might also want to think about your own personal journey and how that comes into your work and whether or not that’s a key thing you’d like to communicate in your messaging.

For example, in my business (this is very much a work in progress and needs refinement!) it looks a bit like:

• I help health and life coaches (B2C coaches)
• I help you get more clients
• There’s a strong element of my work that is connected to content marketing that is not social media based
• I help people build a ‘cosy’ wholehearted business which isn’t just about hitting 6 or 7 figures as a marker of success
• I believe that growing a coaching business should be fun and experimental
• Part of my work is about helping you live a slower, more intentional and fulfilled life as a result of your business

I’m suggesting that you choose 3-7 key messages because less than 3 doesn’t give us enough to work with and more than 7 you might start and lose its punch, but go with what feels right for you and your business.

Where and how do we start and communicate our key messages?

Once we’ve identified our key messages we need to know how and where to communicate them. In most online coaching businesses, the key places these messages need to be shared is your website, sales copy for services and products, content marketing, email list, freebies etc

And here’s the thing that is going to make sure those messages get through – repetition!

It’s ok, and I’d actually encourage you to repeat these key messages often. It’s not about saying the exact same thing over and over again (although you can if it’s in different places) it’s more about returning to these key messages and talking about them in different ways on repeat.

How do we make our messaging more compelling?

When I talk about making your messaging more ‘compelling’ I’m thinking about how we can make it more interesting, more likely to resonate with your people and more likely to create deeper connection and ultimately – result in more clients and sales!

Here’s 4 things we can do to make our messaging more compelling:

Use in real life examples

When it comes to telling people how we can help them, using in real life examples that they can relate to, rather than more generic statements is going to help. For example, if you’re saying ‘I help Mums improve their pelvic floor health’ you could also say ‘I help mums be able to jump on the trampoline with their kids without wetting themselves!’

It doesn’t necessarily have to be either or, you can use more generic language and in real life examples, both will help communicate what it is that you do.

Use your own voice

Unless you left school and started a coaching business right away, it’s likely that you’ve never written copy or shared written or verbal information in a ‘voice’ that wasn’t edited to suit the situation or job you were in at the time. But as a coach, where people need to be able to genuinely connect with you to work with you, it’s actually really helpful if you can use your own tone of voice and a generally more conversational tone.

Obviously depending on your area of coaching this might differ (if you work with people in a corporate environment for example – although there could be something said for going against the usual grain there!) but using your own genuine tone of voice can be very powerful when it comes to messaging.

Focus on what you stand for and the shared ‘destination’

This is becoming a more important part of messaging, especially if you’re working on creating a community. What’s the shared destination you and your people are travelling to? What do you stand for?

In my business I feel like we’re all working towards a cosy, ethical coaching business and away from all the superficial shiny 6 and 7 figure marketing world.

What is the shared destination you’re helping people get to in your business?

Use brand words that make sense to your people

Finally, something else you can play with in your messaging is using some key brand words that communicate an element of what you’re about. In my business I use words such as ‘wholehearted’, ‘cosy’ and ‘aligned’ quite a bit, knowing that my people ‘get’ what I mean when I use these terms. Are there any terms or words that you use in your business in a similar way that you can use more intentionally in your messaging going forward?

Next steps

If this has been a useful post I’d love you to check out my free training, Aligned Client Attraction and Marketing Workshop which builds on a lot of what I’ve covered in this post.

You might also find my post on Simple Copywriting Tips for Coaches useful too!

Let me know in the comments what your key marketing messages are and any other tips from this post you’ve found helpful.

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