5 Steps to Create a Winning Content Strategy to Grow Your Audience & Supercharge Your Coaching Business
If you’re ready to grow your life coaching business, developing a content strategy will help you grow your audience and reach more potential clients. But, if you’ve never designed a digital content strategy, you might feel lost as to how to start!
A good coaching content strategy can come with a lot of confusion, questions, and overwhelm…
But, together, we can change that right now!
Most coaches tend to make a few, avoidable mistakes when they start exploring content for their business:
- Trying “cookie-cutter” content strategies that don’t reflect the soul of their business
- Jumping in without a strategy and trying to grow their business on a whims
- Creating content that appeals to everyone instead of speaking directly to potential customers
- Forgetting to set goals and track what’s working and what isn’t
If you want to avoid these mistakes without losing your unique brand voice, skip the trial and error by downloading our Content Marketing Strategy PDF
Now, let’s talk about how you – as a busy life coach – can create a content strategy that attracts more clients without feeling salesy or stressed.
I’m going to share proven steps to develop an aligned strategy that generates amazing results. These are the same strategies I used to grow my own audience into the millions!
Before you know it, you’ll actually enjoy creating content that will serve your audience and help you make the impact you’d love!
What is a Content Strategy for Coaches & Why Do You Need One?
A quick Google search on the definition of “content strategy” will give you a ton of jargon and marketing babble.
But here’s what a content strategy really means for a transformational life coach:
A content marketing strategy is a system used to plan, deliver, and evaluate content tailored to your target audience (dream clients) on a long-term, consistent basis. This plan empowers you to give value, build relationships (rapport), and inspire potential clients to participate in your programs, events, and services.
The Benefits of a Content Strategy for Coaches
A Roadmap to Success: A content strategy is your compass, ensuring every piece of content aligns with your mission. It helps you navigate the content creation process with ease, keeping you focused on your goals and the needs of your audience.
Audience Engagement: Your content strategy helps you craft messages that resonate on a deep level with your ideal clients. With a consistent, effective strategy, you can grow a strong, supportive community and an audience of raving fans.
Save Time, Amplify Impact: A strategic approach allows you to batch-create content and maintain a consistent presence without sacrificing quality. You’ll save time by having a go-to reference for what to create and when to engage your audience.
Sustainable, Sure-fire Growth: With a strategy in place, you’re not just throwing content into the void. You’re tracking engagement and tweaking your approach, ensuring your content evolves to meet your audience’s needs.
Stand Out as the Go-To Expert: Great content marketing sets you apart from other coaches by highlighting your unique voice, approach, and values. It’s a reliable way to position yourself as the go-to coach for the people who need your support the most.
By developing a content strategy, you’re laying the foundation to not only attract, but nurture and convert your ideal clients. A thoughtfully planned content strategy is your first step towards making a lasting impact.
The good news is that implementing a good content strategy can be fun, simple, and intuitive. All it takes is a few basic ingredients, which we’ll be covering in the next section!
Content Strategy Checklist: Core Elements of a Great Content Strategy
1) Set Goals
The only way to maximize your time and know what content works (and what doesn’t) is to attach goals to the content you create. These might include growing your email list, increasing conversion rates, attracting new clients, gaining followers, and so on.
Your content goals should always be specific to moving your business forward.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Once you’ve identified the goals of your content, you need to figure out how to measure success.
Qualitative Metrics
When you think of qualitative metrics, look for indicators that people are positively responding to your brand. For example:
- Are influencers or authorities in your niche reaching out to you for more collaborative opportunities? (These might include speaking events, podcast interviews, guest posts, etc.)
- Have your discovery calls felt easier because potential clients have a better understanding of who you are and why they want to work with you?
Qualitative metrics aren’t usually strictly numerical. They focus on gauging the improved ‘quality’ of user experiences as a result of your content.
Quantitative Metrics
Quantitative measures give you a direct way to gauge the success of your efforts through numbers. For example:
- How much is your audience growing each month, and how have the number of visits to your website increased as a result?
- How many people click on your video content, visit your website, and sign up for a discovery call? How much has your revenue from new clients increased from your content?
Strong, measurable data can empower you to make adjustments to your content to increase its effectiveness.
2) Understand Your Audience
To plan a content strategy that grows your coaching business, understanding your ideal client is a must. Before you can guide someone on a journey of personal growth, you need to know who they are, what they desire, and the unique challenges they face.
This understanding informs the type of content you create, how you share your message, and the social media platforms you choose. It ensures that every piece of content engages, inspires, and converts the people you’re meant to serve.
Without this foundational knowledge, even the most well-crafted content can fail to connect with those who need your coaching most.
To get your target audience, imagine the person most likely to benefit from working with you. Then, explore these questions:
- What are their biggest challenges? What do they struggle most with that falls under the scope of your practice? Understanding their struggles helps tailor your content to offer solutions and relief.
- What goals do they have? What do they desire? This insight allows you to align your content with their aspirations, making your coaching services more appealing.
- Where do they spend their time online? Knowing the platforms your ideal clients are already using allows you to meet them where they are. (And saves you the hassle of having to master every social media platform!)
- What type of content do they consume the most? This question helps determine not just what to create but how to present it—be it through blogs, videos, podcasts, or infographics.
- What objections might they have about working with a coach? Addressing these concerns can make it easier for potential clients to take the first step towards working with you.
By answering these questions, you’re not just preparing to create content; you’re preparing to make an impact!
Your content becomes a bridge between you and those you want to help. Your content can create the deeper understanding and connection that is fundamental to the success of any coaching relationship.
3) Existing Content Audit
This is where you review everything that you already have. This could mean your website, active social media accounts, podcast interviews, your existing email newsletter content strategy, books, etc.
By taking account of everything you are already doing, you’ll better understand what you’ve already shared. From there, you can identify potential gaps in your content.
For instance, let’s say you’re a relationship coach with a lot of marriage content on your blog. After reviewing the comments on your posts, you notice that people are curious about conflict resolution. You could use those questions to create a video, another post, or a podcast episode that showcases that topic.
Or, perhaps after reviewing your Instagram or Tiktok posts, you notice that videos on a certain topic get more engagement than others. This could be an indicator to create more content on that topic in your marketing channels.
4) Content Ideation
Before creating new content, use your insights from previous steps to brainstorm what content types and content formats are best for your strategy. Additionally, you’ll want to do research on the questions and phrases people in your audience are already searching for.
This extra research will help you identify what kind of keywords people are typing into search engines to find what you offer (i.e., “How to resolve conflict in a relationship”).
It’s like learning how to speak the same language as your potential clients! In addition, it helps you learn which topics are likely to perform best and attract the most visitors.
The 5-Step Process to Create Your Content Strategy
This may sound great so far, but starting can feel overwhelming! It’s no secret that intimidation leads to procrastination, so let’s remedy it with simplicity.
Let’s break down the content strategy development process into 5 easy steps. That way, you can start creating content with intention and direction faster than ever.
At this point, you should already have a good idea of where your dream clients are and what they’re looking for. Once you’ve defined your target audience from the steps above, you’re ready to begin the process:
1. Source
This is the “brainstorming” phase. Start thinking about what your audience would find valuable, what topics you’re an expert in, as well as how you’d love to create content.
To keep track of ideas, make sure you’re writing them down. Avoid judging or editing your ideas at this stage. Instead, allow everything to flow and get all your ideas down on paper.
2. Sort
Review the ideas you’ve written down and organize your list.
Which ideas feel most expansive, interesting, or exciting to you? Which ideas give you a spark of inspiration – like you want to jump into it and nurture it right away? Highlight those that stand out to you the most.
3. Select
Out of your sorted list from the previous step, make a new list. Include the ideas that both excite you AND align with your research on your target audience. These are your winning content ideas!
4. Schedule
Establish your intention to implement those winning ideas by setting a date. This could live on a content or editorial calendar, for example.
Set dates and times for when to create the content, when to post it, and when to review its performance.
5. Serve
Deliver/publish your content! This is in alignment with your desire to help people as a life coach, because you will be providing value to your prospective clients.
Maximize Your Content Strategy Efforts with a Proven Blueprint
As a life coach, “why” you show up online has to do with service. Your strategy is tied to “how” you get to serve more clients.
Often, it can feel like you don’t have time to develop a comprehensive strategy, let alone create and share the content…
Especially if you’re trying to figure things out all on your own.
So as you embark on your content creator journey, I invite you to take this free gift with you:
>> The Content Marketing Strategy PDF
Our mission is to empower difference-makers like you to fulfill their purpose and help others create lives they love.
We’ve spent decades testing, experimenting, and learning in the coaching industry — and we created this resource (and others!) so you don’t have to.
Skip the trial and error and confidently up level your coaching business with proven strategies by grabbing your free Content Strategy PDF here!
Leave a Reply