4a - BONUS EPISODE - Marketing buzz words decoded for coaches

Today. Very excited to talk to you this morning. As well as being live on Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn, I am also going to record this one as a live podcast for the business of executive coaching. That's my podcast, so welcome to any podcast folks who are listening in. And today, what I want to talk about is marketing buzzwords and particularly translating marketing buzzwords for coaches. So there are probably some words that you've heard out there, but you may not have truly understood them and if you hadn't, if you know, you wouldn't be on your own. So we'll go through those. I'll talk about what they are and whether you should pay any attention to them. If you haven't heard, and I assume you have, the doors to the Impact Coach Collective are officially open. So you can find us at www.elliscarf.com. as you'll see on the screen, we have a webinar running next week that is being run by my friends at Bailey Balfour, which is an incredible global and virtual coach training company who have a really, a really fantastic program that I think is quite, quite deep, a little bit deeper than some of the others that I've seen and also has brilliant facilitators, brilliant mentor coaches and a really global cohort which I find very helpful and fabulous. So I'm running a webinar with them and it's open to everyone if you wanted to sign up. And that is on the eight foundations of a thriving executive coaching business. So I'll sort of talk through the basics of the platform and I've got a bit of a self assessment so you can kind of triage where your focus should be. So if you are interested in attending that you can have a look at the Bailey Balfour website in their events section section or feel free to drop me a message and I will send you a link. I don't think Jill is on this morning, so the link isn't live, but I will post it afterwards for sure. Similarly, you are welcome to book a call with me if you want to talk about the Impact Coach Collective or any other questions you have. And I will pop that link up after we finish today. So I also ran a webinar that I mentioned yesterday on how to build your corporate coaching offer and we got some great feedback. So hopefully people got a lot of value out of it. It was very practical and that was the feedback that I received. So if you are interested in catching that the webinar has happened. But if you register you will get a link to the recording and the Resources that were mentioned and used. So the slides and I've got a template in there for how to build your own coach bio. So you are welcome to download that and you can get that@elliscarf.com offers that sell. Okay, so every industry has buzzwords, they have acronyms, they have terminology that, that others don't necessarily understand. And marketing is in my opinion, one of the worst. So it's one we might tend to ignore because we think it's not relevant to us. But we are all marketers. If we are in business, we have to be in marketing. So we can't afford to ignore it. And there is some gold in there and I think there can be some really useful stuff for us. So I'd like to go through some of these ideas, some of these concepts and we can, you know, just, just play around with whether there's something that we should know and how we might use those in our coaching business.

Welcome to the business of executive coaching. I'm Ellie Scarf, an ex lawyer turned executive coach. Over the last 17 years I've coached in house, I've been an associate coach and I've run executive coaching businesses with teams of coaches around the world. My clients have ranged from global brand names to boutiques, startups and organizations doing good in the world. I now run the Impact Coach Collective, a community of executive coaches who want to level up their business skills and take action in a community of like minded peers. I'm a traveler, a reader, a mum, wife and dog parent and I know firsthand that our stories have a huge impact on our businesses. The executive coaching business is tough and I've learned all the lessons through plenty of mistakes and also with some great mentors. This podcast is all about growing a thriving executive coaching business. You can build a coaching business that is profitable, sustainable and that supports your personal goals, whatever they are. I'll be sharing tips and ideas translated for your context as well as stories from the field with brilliant coaches and mentors. If you want to level up your executive coaching business skills, then this is the place for you.

So the first concept is leads and leads is sort of a salesy marketing concept and it's a bit of a hybrid and you may, you may know this one, right? So it's really important. This is probably the most important one. So a lead is a person or a business that you can connect with that you have a way of contacting and that you can contact them directly. So a warm lead is where you have a way of contacting them and you've had a previous engagement with that person somehow, which means that engaging with them again will be more natural and will be easier. So that that could be someone that you have spoken with. It could just be that you're a LinkedIn connection. So someone's accepted your connection. Could be someone that you know from the past. A warm lead is. Yeah, just, just. It's a. It's a whole different proposition than a cold lead. So a cold lead being someone where you may have their details, you can get in contact with them, but they're not necessarily open to that. You've got no idea what their response will be. A warm lead has responded in some sort of positive way in the past. Even if it's a very passive positive, an engaged lead is even better. So an engaged lead is someone who has taken an action step to engage with you. So everyone that you eventually work with is going to start out as a lead and there is a funneling effect. And I'll talk about funnels in a moment. But what happens is that your leads come in at the top of your funnel and the more you have at the top of the funnel, the more that come out the bottom of the funnel. And the bottom of the funnel is a sale, right? Is. Is a client or an engagement. And there is sort of a predictive dropping off as people as they flow through this lead process, from cold lead to warm lead to engaged lead, to a sales engagement to a sale. And what we want to do is we want to get more people in at the top and we want to get like a better conversion. So we have sort of more people funneling out the bottom, the more engaged a lead. So, you know, we, whether they have engaged with you in multiple ways or they've engaged with you really intensely, the more likely they are to buy from you. So as coaches, we need to think about where do we get leads, right? Where do our warm leads come from, where do our cold leads come from? And which of our leads, what types of engagement with leads is most likely to convert to clients. So, you know, one type of engagement might be a referral. So a referral is a really strong engaged lead because. Because they've got social proof that what you do and that you're good at what you do. But equally, someone who has reached out to you to talk about some content that you've posted either in a newsletter or in social media is also very engaged and very interested. So, you know, all of those. We want to know what types of engagement work in terms of, you know, what converts to A sale. So it's really important to actually think about capturing some data around this. So when you do have an engagement, just make a note somewhere. Ideally in a spreadsheet. I don't know why. Ideally in a spreadsheet, it just makes it easier to play with the data when we get to a certain scale. And just where did they come from? Right. When did they first come into your world and what engagement points did you have with them? So, you know, you might find, well, my best leads, my best engaged leads are people that I have worked with in the past. Right. So people that you reach out who know your professional credibility in your other professional capacity and then therefore believe that you. Your coaching credibility can sort of piggyback off that. Or you might find it that it's the people who read your content on social media, or it's the people who are referred to you by this one particular connection. Whatever it is, capture it because you want to be able to replicate it. So a funnel. A funnel is interesting. So if you think about the whole sales and marketing process, what, what we're creating is a big funnel which takes cold leads and ends up with clients. But there's also a specific way in marketing that we refer to a funnel, which is that it is a series of emails or actions that aim to funnel someone towards a certain action or outcome. So, for example, someone might click on an ad or they might read a piece of content, then they will. Or they might like a post on LinkedIn, then they might receive an email that delivers a free resource that they have expressed interest in. Then they'll receive a series of emails that might offer more value, cover certain topics in a way that makes them more likely to buy. Is this relevant to coaches? Yes, but it is quite an advanced strategy. So I think there are other things that you need to have in place before you might implement a funneling strategy. But if you do use lead magnets or free resources as a tool to bring someone into your orbit, then you need to have a funnel or a nurture sequence, which I'll talk about next. Otherwise you're wasting your opportunity because you're not going to get the greatest conversion rate that you could on that piece of work that you've done. So a nurture sequence then is. It sounds so funny. A nurture sequence is like child rearing, but actually what a nurture sequence is, and you will have received this from anyone you've signed up to online probably has sent you a nurture sequence. It's a series of emails that automatically go out on a predictable rhythm to a new contact. Once they join your mailing list or sign up for any of your resources, these are all about them getting to know you and what you do and developing the contacts, the new, the leads, understanding of their issues that you could solve, or developing their awareness of a pain point that they might have that your solution could solve. So if you have a mailing list and you want people to sign up for things, you have to have a nurture sequence. But it's also a good idea, I think, to think about nurture sequences beyond this. So if you think about, as coaches, how people come into our world, often it's that we meet them at event, we add them on LinkedIn, then we might send them an email. That is actually a nurture sequence, isn't it? So I've met someone then part of my nurture sequence then could be I will reconnect with them on LinkedIn and I'll send them a message and I'll say, hey, it was great to meet you, I'd love to know this about you, or I'd love to have a chat or something like that, because so we're taking the relationship and we're making sort of steps to get closer, to get more engaged and to learn more about them. Right? We want to build the relationship in a meaningful way, not just sort of step by step to make a sale. So the idea is that we nurture the relationships with people who want to hear from us and who we connect with. So we do that by reaching out. And it could be helpful to say, okay, well, if someone comes into my orbit by meeting me in person at an event, this is what I'm going to do just to make sure that I get the most out of that connection or that networking. If someone sends me a message, this is what I'm going to do as a series of predictable steps. If someone contacts me on my website, this is what I'm going to do as a series of predictable steps. And that will save you a bit of time and energy, because instead of every time having to think about a strategy, you can say, oh, okay, someone's lodged a query on my website. Which, in case you're waiting for queries to rush in on your website, that won't happen. So if you're not getting lots of website queries, it's not you, that's just normal. But if someone does put a query in on your website, you want to have a process that you will go through which will be to thank them, give them a Bit of information, invite them to have a conversation. Then if you've got those template messages written, then you save yourself time, you save yourself angst. So nurture sequences, I think are really helpful for coaches, but not necessarily just in terms of when people join your mailing list, but more in terms of when they come into your world. Now, what is a lead magnet? Now, the first time I saw lead magnet, I thought it said lead magnet and I was like a lead magnet. Well, okay, is that some sort of, you know, high powered magnet? No, it's got nothing to do with magnets. It is a magnet insofar as it draws and attracts people to you. So a lead magnet is generally a written resource or a video or a document or a checklist or some sort of resource that is of value. And it's of value. It's generally free. But it can sometimes be a low cost offer and it offers value to somebody and it can use. It's usually something that might solve a very small, a very small problem that represents what you do, right? That gives them a taste of what you do. And so in exchange for you giving them that value, the person agrees to give you their contact information and permission to contact them, generally by joining a mailing list. So you then get to provide lots of value through your mailing list. And occasionally you make an offer and that person can choose to accept that offer if it makes sense to them. Right? So your lead magnet is a way of bringing people into your world. You really want to make sure though, that if you are developing a lot of resources like this, you've got the backend to be able to support. And so in that way, it's a bit of an advanced strategy because you probably would want to have an email, newsletter and a system that will allow you to do that because you don't want to waste that opportunity to capture engaged leads and their details. But I would say a lead magnet can, you know, really do double duty with a lot of your content development because it's generally really rich content. And if you write it, then you might find that it can then be repurposed or broken down into like a number of different posts or newsletters or blogs. So don't waste anything you write. Think about how else you can use it. Another concept that I've heard a bit recently is evergreen and limited launch. And when I heard evergreen, I was like, it's a tree. But actually it makes a lot of sense. So an evergreen offer is an offer that is always available and that someone can buy at any time. So if you think about our coaching offer, typically that is an Evergreen offer, right? So anyone can connect with us and we will be willing to sell that to them at any time. So it's Evergreen, it's always there. A limited launch, which is sort of the contrast to Evergreen. A limited launch is something that is only available for a limited time. So it might be a course that you can only enroll in at certain times. It might be a program that will only be available to buy for a certain window. It may be that you are only. Oh look, I've done. I keep automatically. Sorry, this is really not going to work for people on the podcast. But for, for those watching the video, there are automations now where if you do certain hand gestures like things like a little thumbs up will pop up or balloons or various things like that and I keep doing thumbs up by accident because I wave my hands around a lot. But anyway, so. So then we have limited launch. The reason limited launch works is because there is a sense of urgency. And that sense of urgency is more likely to make people buy. That's the theory. And also, I mean if you're running a program that has a start and an end point, then by nature your launch of that will be limited because you have a time deadline. So there is a sense of urgency. It's interesting to consider whether a limited launch could be useful for you in terms of any of your programs or offers. It could be a tool that you adapt to coaching or facilitation offers if you are going to run a group program, if you wanted to offer like a monthly special or something like that. So I think, I think it's interesting idea to consider what a limited launch would look like. The next topic is organic content strategy. So you might have heard about content and you might have heard about organic content. And so what does that actually mean? So organic content. An organic content strategy means that we bring people into our orbit, into our world by sharing value through our written, video or spoken content that relates to what we do and is relevant to our audience. The organic piece means that you build your audience by putting it out there consistently, doing a lot of content, a lot of activity. And it's in contrast to a strategy like paid ads, right? So organic means we just do it and we let our audience grow organically, whereas a paid strategy means we grow our audience by bringing them in through paid strategies. I've done both, I think both work well. And I think actually you need to have an organic content strategy before you can have a paid strategy. And it works well. An organic content strategy is necessary if you want to do cold outreach, because when you do cold outreach, people are going to come back and they're going to want to see that you have credibility, that you offer value, and they're going to do that by benchmarking it against the content that they can see on your page or your website or in your newsletter. So generally, you always will want to have an organic content strategy, whatever else you do, because that's how people are going to validate that you, you know, you are who you say you are and that you walk the talk is another marketing term that I heard that was quite interesting. And I really didn't know what it was, but what I discovered is that it generally relates to your content. And it is where you take content that you have developed and you use it in different ways by, you know, maybe creating a long form piece of content, whether that's a podcast or something written, and then breaking it into shorter pieces and, you know, then deploying it to different, different formats. So you might write a blog and then you make posts, or then you make, you know, an Instagram reel, or you might film a video and then you cut snippets out of it, or you create a transcript and that becomes a blog. Repurposing means that you, everything you do does double duty, right? So you don't want anything you write to be a one off. You want to make sure that you get mileage. And one of the concerns I had when I heard about this, I'm like, well, isn't that kind of boring for people, that they're seeing the same thing again and again? But what I learned was that in fact, a very small percentage of your audience sees your content at any time. So you actually need to have repetition and, you know, you don't have to write the same thing, but you might have an article, might have then four chunks of four different but related concepts and, you know, quote for one and a picture for another and a poll for another. And so, so that means that more people are going to see your ideas, not necessarily that the same people will see them all. So that is the theory. And I think this is important because we want to make sure that we're being efficient with the time and energy that we invest in developing our content. Another concept is traffic. People talk about traffic, and I think traffic is a funny one. But what we really mean when we say traffic is who are the people who are seeing your content, who are the people who are going to your website or Your landing page. It's really the people that come into your orbit. And in fact, if we go back to that idea of what is it, a cold lead, a warm lead, an engaged lead. Traffic is sort of that bridge between a cold lead and a warm lead. So people might come in as cold traffic. They see what you're putting out there, remember that organic content, and then they'll go to your website or your landing page or go and look at some piece of what you've put out there. And so traffic is just another word for the flow of people through your orbit and ideally the flow from cold to warm to engaged lead. Another buzzword that I thought was very funny, and this is the last one actually the buzzword was container. And I remember when I sort of was in the building my digital course, the Corporate coach Blueprint, I kept hearing people talk about their containers and I was like, container with your lunch. What are we talking about? But actually what people in the course industry mean, this is, maybe this is more course development rather than marketing, but it is the container that you put your IP in. And what that usually means is the structure of the program. You have the content and the way you let people engage with you in it. So the container might be a mastermind group. The container might be a group coaching program. There might be something that I'm missing. But for me, this is a really bizarre word and is one of the ones where I don't think we really need to spend too much time thinking about it as coaches. But if anyone did say, what containers do you have? You could say, well, I have a coaching program that is a one on one coaching program. So that's your container. And the container might be, you know, I offer six sessions, nine hours, two alignment sessions and that's all within my container. Or you might say, I have a facilitated group program for new leaders. So that is my container. They have access to, you know, community and monthly mentoring. That's your container. So that one really is relevant. I think only if you are starting to talk to people who are deeply in the course building world. Okay. So I hope some of those helped. I do think really important for you to think about leads as a coach and be strategic. I think it's important to think about what your nurture sequence is, even if it's outside of a newsletter. But how do you bring people into your world to deliberately and strategically. I think it could be useful to think about lead magnets, but that might be a bit of an advanced step. I think it's important to Think about your organic content strategy. I think that has a lot of relevance for us as coaches, as does repurposing. So look, there's a lot of concepts I know that I've introduced. Hopefully that helps you understand some. If you might have heard those words, I hope they make a bit more sense to you now. And yeah, please drop me a line if you have any questions about them or how they might apply to you. In the Impact Coach Collective, what we do is we take a lot of these concepts and we actually translate them and we go from concept, what does it mean for you? And how might we actually build a strategy and let's do it and let's take some action. So you know we're really action oriented. I want to introduce cool concepts like some of the ones I've shared today, but more importantly than that, I want to make sure you do something with it and that we see some tangible actions in your business. So that is what we do in the Impact Coach Collective. We help you get unstuck, we help you talk about your deals and your pricing strategies and all of those things. And of course, sales and marketing are a really big part of that. So yeah, reach out. Let's have a chat. If you have been listening to this on the podcast, thanks for listening and I will talk to you all again soon. See you later.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Business of Executive Coaching. If you found it helpful, please share it with a colleague or friend on LinkedIn. And don't forget to tag me so I can say thanks. I would be tremendously grateful also if you would leave a review on Apple Podcasts. More reviews means more people can find us. This episode was brought to you by the Impact Coach Collective, where executive coaches grow their businesses in a community of peers with business education, mentoring, deal clinics and more. If you'd like to contact me or.

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Resources, courses and more info on the Impact Coach Collective can be found@elliscarf.com have a brilliant week and I look forward to talking to you again soon.