November 10, 2020 8 min read
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When you rely on social media to find, prospect and gain new clients, organic marketing can be highly effective, especially if you are a coach, consultant or course creator. The Coaching industry is one of the fastest growing in the world, and a lot of it relies heavily on building relationships with the audience. This makes platforms like Facebook a haven for lead-generation.
But if you are a coach with no experience in marketing on social media, you may find yourself in a confusing situation. On one hand, you see a lot of successful influencers in your industry as proof that is can work. But you lose the track of time scrolling mindlessly and with little clarity trying to guess your way through the mysterious client-attraction maze. Your posts seem to drown in the sea of other content, you get very little engagement, and by the end of the day this leaves you frustrated and disheartened. Does this sound familiar?
I have been there. In fact, even after cracking the code of successful time management, I can confess that unless I make it a priority, there is always a danger of falling back into “zombie scroll” mode. There are just too many attention-grabbing features that are constantly tempting us to wander off track, just in case something spectacular awaits behind that one click. And then it never does.
So let’s change that pattern, starting today.
Everything depends on the environment we are in and the conditions that allow us to focus, uninterrupted, on a particular task. I am about to help you create both with a few secret hacks and tips that you can apply immediately. This is the stuff I teach my clients inside my lead-generation coaching program, and I am about to let you in for a sneak peek. The only condition is that you turn my advice into action, or it will never work.
Related: Want More Clients? Focus On Your Personal Brand
Secret #1: Clean Up Your Account
When overwhelmed, doing some housekeeping can often helps us feel better. Let’s apply this to our Facebook account. Go into your newsfeed and start unfollowing or unfriending people who are too loud, too angry or too “offended” about everything in their posts or comments. They have a right to free speech, but we also have a right not to listen. These are toxic users that create unnecessary overwhelm and negative energy that we do not need and can avoid.
I personally unfriend and even block some people without much hesitation. If you have been trying to grow your audience for networking and client attraction, you will find that most of the people on your friends list are complete strangers. They do not even notice that you are no longer connected. Protecting your environment from toxic people and energy is crucial for your productivity.
It doesn’t need to be done all at once, so just start somewhere. Forget people-pleasing or feeling obliged to stay connected to an old classmate you have not even spoken to in 30 years. Just remove them from your list. It will feel great, I guarantee. That said, you may get addicted to removing non-essential people, but don’t get too carried away. Only focus on removing 10-15 people at a time, or you may send Facebook a suspicious signal and your account may get temporarily suspended.
When you clean up your friends list, you don’t just create a calmer, pleasant environment. You also start getting more clear-eyed about filling it with people who are more interested in what you do, as they know that they have a problem that your solutions can take away. And some of them will be more open to working with you.
Secret #2: Define Your Preferred Audience
This is not just about knowing who your ideal client is. Yes, it is vital we know who we target in our marketing, as well as their pains and aspirations, but how can we gain that knowledge from just looking at someone else’s Facebook profile?
This is when we need to step back and just look at the obvious attributes of our ideal clients, i.e. gender, age group, marital status, some obvious interests that they may post about, their profession or occupation. If you can jot down a general outline of your preferred audience, you’re off to an impressive start.
Now you can slowly, but consistently, assess everyone on your current list and any new people that you find on Facebook against this list. If they fit it, you keep them. If they don’t, you unfriend them or decline their friend request.
You can spend just a few minutes a day on this task, and over a few months your immediate Facebook audience will become much more targeted, which means more engagement on your content and far more raised hands when you talk about your programs.
Related: Determining Your Ideal Customer
Secret #3: Use Time-Blocking
The best way to approach social-media marketing is by blocking off time to focus on one task at a time. For your daily output on Facebook to be productive and bring results over time, you must focus daily on two areas: networking and content creation.
Use a timer to limit your efforts. You can even use a kitchen egg timer or an app on your phone. I put my phone into “do not disturb” mode while I am focusing on these tasks. This time is crucial, and nothing should interrupt you while you are focusing on it — even that cute abandoned-kitten video. It will surprise you how effective creating that space for your marketing will become.
Start by spending 15-20 minutes on networking. Go into your profile page and check the interaction on your recent posts. Reply to any new comments. Note people who are engaging, especially if they fit your defined target audience. Go to their profiles and engage one of their recent posts. A nice, meaningful comment is all it takes.
You can take it a step further and send them a private message thanking them for a comment they left on your posts, or mentioning something that they posted. This does not need to lead to a sales conversation, but it will get you noticed and appreciated, and it will also engage the algorithm to boost your visibility.
Also, check out the Upcoming Birthdays section. Use this to either unfriend those who are complete strangers and do not fit your target audience description, or to engage with one of their recent posts to increase your visibility to them and reengage your relationships.
Your next time-block will focus on creating a piece of content to post, be it written or video. You may do it daily if you like to be inspired to create, or spend half a day creating content for the week ahead. This depends on your preference, but by ensuring you’ve created a quality post every day, you are exercising consistency and creating a habit of being visible to your warm leads. Social media is such a noisy space that the only way for us to get seen and heard it to play the frequency game.
Just bear in mind: Once a week is not enough, but several times a day is often unnecessary, unless you are posting on different areas. Posting too much creates a competition for space in the newsfeed between your own posts, so it will negatively affect the reach of all of them. If you want to post more often, use Stories as the space for multiple statuses and photos. It’s fun and does not affect the reach of your main post of the day in the newsfeed.
It works best when you use part of your program for topics you post around. This creates an association between your face and the topics are that directly related to the solution to the problems your leads are experiencing.
Related: 5 Types of Content You Should Create to Grow a High-End Coaching Business
The most important component here is not to expect overnight successes. Rather, focus on the long-term strategy. Similarly to physical exercises, we need more than a handful of workouts to get the tone and definition we desire.
It will take time, but if you stick to the plan and implement it consistently, all these small activities create a confident, simple and consistent marketing strategy that gets you noticed and nets more clients without overwhelm. Now how would that make you feel?
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This article is from Entrepreneur.com
