BIG Mistakes NEW Marketers STILL MAKE!

Welcome coaches and consultants to this crazy marketing journey!

The problem is you’re doing it all wrong, which is probably why you’re getting frustrated already.

So, let’s throw away some of those rookie marketing mistakes you’re making and point you in the right direction, which is getting more people to book calls with you.

One of the biggest challenges new coaches face in their marketing journey is getting enough traffic to the calendar booking page.

And to explain what I mean by this, let’s picture this:

Your coaching business as a sailing ship.

To reach your destination of many clients, you need a steady wind to fill your sails and propel you forward.

Your website and calendar booking page are like your sails, capturing the wind of potential client’s interest. But, here’s the catch – if there’s no wind, your ship won’t move, and you’ll be left adrift in a sea of missed opportunities.

Now, imagine that the wind represents traffic to your website and booking page. The more targeted traffic you have, the stronger the wind becomes, propelling your coaching ship toward its goals.

Unfortunately, many new coaches face the challenge of sailing in calm waters with little to no wind – minimal traffic means minimal progress.

So, at this stage, every single opportunity you have to get attention online and drive traffic is crucial for your marketing. And that, in very basic terms, starts with getting views and clicks.

So here’s what the journey should look like:

1. Post content online that thousands of people will see.
2. Some of them will click the link.
3. To book a call on your calendar.

Now, unfortunately, for you as a new coach or consultant, you have two challenges that you need to overcome.

Challenges to Overcome as a New Coach or Consultant

First Challenge: Visibility Problem

First of all, you’ve got nobody searching for you online. Meaning:

1. You have no followers on social media.
2. No traffic to your website.
3. Even when you post something online, nobody seems to pay attention to it.

I like to call this the visibility problem.

Second Challenge: Motivation Problem

Let’s say you do have some traffic coming to your website and you have a following on social media. But when you invite people to book a call on your calendar, nobody clicks the link or schedules a call.

So on one side, you have coaches and consultants who get no attention to their social media and website, and even if they do, no one clicks the booking link.

On the other side, there are digital coaches and consultants who attract thousands of views on anything they post online and their audience is genuinely interested in talking to them.

It is clear why the second situation makes it easy to get clients.

To change your situation for the better, the one thing you must absolutely focus on is growing your audience first.

Growing Your Audience

This is the very first common rookie mistake.

Many new marketers want to get traffic and make conversions without building an audience first. And I don’t want you to feel bad about this, because everybody does it.

You put your heart and soul into building your offer, and by the time you get to showing it to people, you’re so exhausted that you just post your links online and hope for the best.

So, going forward, when it comes to building your audience first, I want you to apply these two strategies (there’s a bonus strategy!):

1. Be consistent with creating and posting content online. This is your content routine.
2. Invest just as much time into interacting and engaging with other people on your chosen platform.
3. Study your content’s analytics every week and identify patterns of what worked and what didn’t.

You may think that the third strategy may be a step too far just now, but if you are willing to try, then give it a try. Ultimately, you want to find out what your audience likes the most. Looking at your best-performing content will give you useful clues.

You can learn more on how to grow your audience by checking out this blog that I wrote on how you can find clients online.

And to ensure I practice what I preach, here are my last month’s Twitter analytics where I tested something.

Test Run: Writing comments before posting a tweet.

As you can see in the analytics, the first half performed better than the second.

What was the difference?

In the first half, I commented on 30+ accounts every day either right before posting a tweet or immediately after.

In the second half, I commented on fewer accounts and I also commented at a much different time of the day.

As my Analytics shows, the pattern is very clear: Commenting on 30+ accounts, right around the time when I post a tweet, yields massively better results.

These are the types of insights you want to gather from your content metrics, too.

Game Time!

Alright then, I’ve got 2 fun little games to play with you.

Do you remember the sailboat analogy I made at the beginning of this blog?

I said that your sails are your website and calendar bookings page, and the wind is the traffic to those pages.

Now, what if you could install an engine and run the boat without the need for any wind? Is there an equivalent in marketing and business? Let me know in the comments below if you have an idea what that could be.

Secondly, and more importantly, we’re gonna do a quick test.

I’m going to show you two screenshots from SocialBlade. SocialBlade is a website that tracks social media activity for public accounts.

Just look at the two screenshots below and tell me the winner.

Ready? Go.

It was easy to pick the good one now, right?

Here is a report from Adobe that confirms what you already guessed.

Consistency is crucial for your content routine and for growing your audience.

Here is a list of factors that make people inconsistent:

• Only working in waves of motivation
• Time management issues
• Lack of planning content
• Regularly changing social media platforms

In order to demonstrate what I mean, I searched for an empirical study to further illustrate what consistency means.

This chart is taken from ResearchBerg and was published by Juan Salazar who is a telecommunications engineer.

The shape of this chart is called an inverse u-shape. What that means is that there is a sweet spot where you get the best result for a level of frequency.

We learn from this chart that: You don’t even have to post an insane amount of content. You just have to be consistent for the algorithm to show you to more people.

Based on the report by Adobe, these are the optimal frequencies for best results:

I am going through an experiment right now.

I’m testing how big of an impact posting more Shorts has on my YouTube channel.

That’s another content routine mistake that so many new marketers make: They are afraid to show their faces and be personal with their audience.

I used to be like that, too, and it wasn’t easy for me to be in front of the camera every day.

But based on my experiment, it is clear that the more Shorts I post, the more views and subscribers I get. And I’m not the only one who experiences this.

I did a case study with Steven Hyatt, who grew his channel to 500 subscribers in less than 60 days, and he specifically mentioned Shorts as a winning factor, too.

How To Do Outreach?

Let’s carry on because we need to know what happens next beyond having a content routine for your marketing.

It’s pretty obvious, actually: It’s reaching out to potential clients. And the key word in that sentence is Outreach.

Let’s be honest, none of us want to spend weeks and weeks posting on social media and on our website with no leads and client bookings coming in.

It’s pretty demoralizing when this happens, right?

But that’s not what you should be worrying about until you fix this issue: Having a list of potential clients.

When you don’t have a list of potential clients:

1. You can’t grow your business network.
2. Which means you’ll forever stay invisible in the marketplace.

You want people to know your name and book on your calendar, right?

Now, there are three main rookie mistake reasons as to why this happens.

Rookie Mistake #1: Speaking Coaching Language and Not Client Language

Let’s look at this elevator pitch: “I coach and support people through a difficult phase in their life.”

For any coach, this message is crystal clear because it’s in coaching language. But for anyone who doesn’t work as a coach, this message is vague and unclear.

Client language is the language of results. Speak in results and your potential clients will understand your message.

Rookie Mistake #2: Not Tracking Down Potential Clients

If you are starting from scratch and you want to get clients fast, you have to make the first move. That means you reach out to people, instead of waiting for them to reach out to you.

This can be done by:

1. Reaching out to those people who are already engaging with your content, whether that’s a like, comment, or follow. Clearly, these people have an interest in what you do and know.
2. Dedicate some time each week to look at other people’s social media profiles and websites. If they look like a great person for your business network, research as much as you can about them and then send them an email or message, asking them to connect.

Rookie Mistake #3: Confusing Client Outreach with Pitching

Your outreach messages aren’t pitches. They are an invitation to connect, first and foremost.

Your goal is to book a call with them and understand their situation better than anyone. That’s when you can offer them your coaching or consulting services if it is a great match.

Now, I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but there has been a theme throughout these rookie mistakes to encourage you to do something, and that is to spend more time each day on marketing.

We all have a finite amount of time, energy, and resources, so let me explain it like this.

Investing time each day into your content routine and in your outreach routine is the best investment you can make to get clients fast.

Once you are done investing on your content, you will:

1. Get people’s interest.
2. If things turn out fine, people will organically share your content.
3. They will look up your name online.
4. Book calls on your calendar.

As for other rookie mistakes, well, there is one monumental marketing funnel error that almost every single new coach or consultant commits.

And if you want to know what that is, start reading this next blog right now.

And don’t forget to subscribe on my YouTube channel, @creategrowprofit.