Are you struggling to reach your target market, or you aren’t reaching your revenue targets? If the answer’s “yes”, then it’s time to know the benefits of partnering with a small business coach.
In today’s increasingly competitive digital environment, businesses are struggling to attract their target customers. That’s why you need to market yourself effectively to get more leads and customers.

It’s even harder for small business owners like you because you’re already wearing several hats to grow and sustain your business.

In this blog post, you’ll learn the eight key expertise areas of a small business coach to help you better reach your customers and close more sales.

What Does a Small Business Coach Do?

Small business coaches provide a variety of services based on your requirements. Some will only be in charge of certain marketing efforts. Others will be in charge of your full marketing approach from beginning to end.

Furthermore, they are responsible for ensuring that the correct campaigns are launched to assist you to achieve your objectives, regardless of the breadth of services you pick. They specialize in generating leads and increasing sales conversions through online marketing platforms.

Working with a small business coach will assist you in selecting the best marketing channels for your product and target demographic. You’ll be able to raise general awareness of your brand and products, create qualified leads, and close more purchases in the long run.

Many of the best business coaches have prior experience in the marketing industry, advertising, or data analytics. Copywriting, visual communications, and public relations are additional skills they need to possess. They also keep up with the latest trends, technologies, and best practices in internet marketing.

More importantly, they understand the psychology of customer behaviour. This is necessary so that your company may start marketing initiatives that will persuade your target demographic to act without coming off as aggressive.

Key Areas of a Small Business Coach’s Expertise

When you decide to partner with a small business coach, they primarily focus on creating, implementing, and tracking paid and organic internet strategies. They specialize in developing marketing strategies for small and medium businesses without the need for a massive budget and prolonged waiting time.

Small business experts use offline marketing efforts in addition to numerous internet marketing tactics to boost your revenue. Some of these are content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, and PPC advertising to attract more clients to your products and services.
Here are eight areas where a small business coach’s expertise can be utilized to boost revenue.

1. Marketing Strategy

A marketing strategy serves as a roadmap for all the campaigns you’ll launch, making sure your company will be successful online. It includes the specific business goals you want to achieve, your available resources, a timeline for analysis and results, marketing channels, and KPIs.

The strategy also details the key messages to be used, the audience segments to be targeted, and the mix of channels and tactics to reach them.

Depending on your arrangement, your small business coach will be responsible for:

• Planning a fitting approach for your company based on your industry, target audience, and current digital marketing effectiveness and activities.
• Identify priority objectives for your company (e.g., getting more traffic, generating more leads, and increasing conversions).
• Exploring select online marketing channels and platforms to start (e.g., Google Adwords, Facebook ads, and SEO).
• Regularly checking of data analytics to get results relevant to your company’s priority objectives and recommend the next steps.
• Updating online campaigns for retargeting and optimizing leads to increase conversions.

2. Branding

Branding goes beyond your logo, tagline or slogan, colour schemes, and fonts. There’s also your brand identity.

It includes your unique selling proposition, personality, and the feelings you want your target customers to feel about you and your products. Hence, the small business coach aims to improve the overall brand image with creative online marketing campaigns that, hopefully, effectively results in conversions and leads.

To achieve this, you and your coach should follow and align on the points below:

• Brand purpose: Know your products and services like the back of your hand and the ‘why’ behind them.
• Target audience: Define your customer and understand them through their digital footprint and behaviour.
• Competitor and market landscape: Scope the critical players in your industry, identifying what they do differently, and how to angle your approach.
• Unique selling points: Understand what makes your brand, product, or service unique.
• Brand voice: Know how best to communicate with your target audience using a consistent and cohesive voice so your brand will be ‘seen’ the same way across different platforms.
• Brand recognition: digitally engage with your customers in many ways and be consistent in how you speak to them.

Following a compelling digital brand strategy with the above points, your company should be able to enjoy an overall increase in brand awareness, loyalty, and advocacy.

3. Content Planning

To start, the small business coach creates a content calendar to document and guide efforts based on the company’s overall content marketing strategy.

Also, the calendar provides focus and direction for your company’s content creation that will later prove valuable and relevant as you grow. There are different content calendar templates that you can explore, such as Trello, Asana, Airtable, or just a simple Excel file.

This document affords a smoother process of identifying the right type of content to produce, topics and subtopics to be covered, frequency and timeline of publishing, selecting channels to feature the content, team member allocation for specific content, and progress updates, and the like.

Working with your business coach should manage your workflow process and answer the following questions about the content strategy:

• Who’s the target audience for your content?
• How does your content answer your target audience’s specific problems?
• What to highlight to differentiate your products and services from competitors?
• Which content types work best to achieve your digital marketing priorities?
• Which marketing channels work best for your content?
• How to better allocate and manage human resources to address all content planning needs?

4. Project Management

Project management involves combining various skills, techniques, and knowledge to complete specific tasks and project requirements. Whether the small business coach you’ll hire will be working with your team or not, he or she must be equipped with this skill to ensure your marketing campaigns are launched on time.

How a major business project is handled can either make or break a company — and even his company’s fortune. Unfortunately, most small businesses that are new to project management are left to “sink or swim” with insufficient guidance.

Thus, your coach’s project management works as an essential skill-set across functions, marketing processes, professions, and the workforce. Projects ranging from the likes of an elaborate organizational transformation to content planning need research, design, and a careful plan to achieve the best outcomes.

Notably, a project is defined as a temporary endeavour to achieve a planned result. There are a lot of areas of every project that a business coach must remember, some of which are the cost, manpower, and project timeline. This means that handling a project without a clear-cut plan on how to go about it is like holding a ticking time bomb.

5. Storytelling

Establishing an emotional connection with your consumer increases trust between you and your customers by connecting with them on a personal level.

When brands tell a story, consumers listen.

So, try to ask yourself: Would you read a story of how a consumer benefited from a product or a list of its benefits?

Storytelling can be shown in different types and formats. But, before that, to write a compelling brand story, a small business coach focuses on these aspects:

• Know the core brand identity and create a brand narrative or signature story.
• Provide clarity to the ‘why’ of your company.
• Find and understand what makes your target audience tick.
• Optimize the impact of different content formats, types, and styles.
• Utilize the strengths of different online platforms for specific content formats or types.
• Create consistency in the look and feel of your content.

Choosing the right small business coach should be the best brand storyteller who can paint pictures of people, events, places, and experiences that connect audiences to the values a brand stands for. The great ones do it without force-feeding anyone a direct narrative about their company, product, or offer.

Besides setting you apart from competitors in the minds of your customers, a small business coach can use brand storytelling to plan an effective marketing calendar for the year. A promotional calendar that’s based on real-life stories is going to be very engaging.

If your only story is making a sale after a product launch, people are going to be less and less interested over time. When you mix in brand storytelling, you keep people’s attention and engagement across multiple channels so that the next time you need to sell a product, they’re already paying attention.

With that sustained attention, you can also build brand loyalty and maintain it. Your dedicated coach will take time to create stories for the sake of connection and entertainment, people develop an emotional connection with your brand and develop trust.

6. SEO

As experts in the field, a small business coach should stay up-to-date on the latest SEO best practices and trends. With around 3.5 billion searches worldwide made on Google every day, optimizing content for search engines has never been more critical.

SEO, or search engine optimization, is a primary online marketing method aimed at increasing quality traffic to your website through organic search results.

When your content’s optimized, your rank in search engine results will be higher and more visible to your target audience. SEO requires some patience to see results, and your digital marketing consultant must ensure you achieve the results you want to achieve.

Some of the ways that your small business coach can do this are:

• Publishing relevant content that stays true to your brand story while providing industry-related news to give your audience an update.
• Build an SEO strategy around topics that are relevant to your industry and company and make sure to update the content regularly.
• Doing keyword research to optimize relevant SEO keywords with high traffic potential on your content.
• Building links across your content to make it worthy of sharing.
• Familiarizing how the ranking algorithm goes and maximising click-through rate (CTR) with your titles, URLs, and descriptions.

7. Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising

Your chosen small business coach must be savvy about the different PPC ad programs offered on Google and social media channels. They should also know how to maximize your ad spend in promoting your products or services to your target customers.

PPC advertising is done for a diverse set of industries. It’s also used if you want to generate traffic to your websites faster, like through Google AdWords or Facebook.

Imagine what it would be like to get coached by a PPC expert who you can trust. Someone who will keep your interests at the centre and who will patiently work with you to get you to a level you feel good about.

This service offered by a small business coach is for any business who wants to manage their own Google Ads account but with the backup of regular support and guidance from a Google Ads expert.

When you sign up for a coaching session for your PPC campaign, you will most likely add your account to a monitoring system where you get regular advice on any urgent issues (e.g. budget overspending) as soon as they occur. Then, your coach will regularly review your account in-depth to identify any areas that need attention and to look for opportunities to improve your PPC/Google Ads strategy.

8. Analytics and Evaluation

By reviewing and analyzing your data analytics, a small business coach determines quantitative types of content. This includes the specific topics which bring in more traffic to your website, social media accounts, and other digital channels.

A business coach can also use data analytics to understand your target audience’s behaviour and preferences. Then, you can leverage these insights to create campaigns that’ll help you build more trusting relationships with your customers, get more leads, and generate sales.

Together, the coach and the business can work on any aspect of Google Analytics as it affects your website data and online business. You will learn how to configure Google Analytics, set up filters, goals, reports, alerts, dashboards and whatever else you need, and, above all, how to get meaningful insights from the data.

When to Hire a Small Business Coach?

All businesses encounter a situation wherein you believe any business coach can help you, then go ahead and hire one.

Clearly-defined business objectives and brand purpose serve as good starting points in assessing your readiness to invest in coaching sessions and further grow your business.

But certain factors can serve as signals that it’s time to work with a small business coach. These include:

• You’re not experiencing a positive change in your leads and sales, even if you’ve tried implementing different marketing strategies.
• You’re working with a small team that’s already stretched to its limit.
• Your team lacks the expertise and knowledge of developing online and offline marketing campaigns.

What to Expect When Hiring a Small Business Coach?

Now you know what a small business coach is and why you should consider partnering with one, you’re likely wondering what’ll it be like working with one. Through these points, you’ll see a glimpse of the business-owner- small-business-coach working relationship:

Receive calculated estimates and projections

With just the digital marketing aspect of your business, you are dealing with a lot of unknown areas and constantly changing paradigms.

Thus, your dedicated small business coach gives you pretty good calculated estimates and forecasts based on best practices and tried techniques that have recently worked.

One way that you can assist in mitigating overestimation is to tell your consultant to separate speculation from actual numbers and be conservative.

A partnership between you and the consultant

Right at the onset, you must set your expectations regarding the role of the small business coach against your business objectives and goals. Give a clear direction.

Also, you have to be ready to give them some feedback. Feedback is always welcome because it allows them to gauge better the challenging areas and your approach on how to tackle them.

Then, constant communications and regular updates on successes and roadblocks help identify tactics that work against those that do not. There must be transparency for the partnership to be clear of doubts and guesses.

These will help both parties move forward in addressing issues and reflect the professionalism and adaptability of the consultant to your specific needs.

It’s NOT a short-term commitment

Each implemented business strategy takes time to see the desired results. When you create new content or post an ad, don’t expect immediately to see a boost in sales and engagement.

It is not a hard or fast rule, but it takes at least six months before you see results. Also, it typically takes longer to generate results from organic campaigns compared to paid advertising.

For organic campaigns, the only real investment is time (and quite a lot of it). After all that time and effort, if nothing’s happening, you should start to investigate why.

Partner with CamRoberts: Your Expert Small Business Coach

Partner with CamRoberts: Your Expert Small Business Coach
Adopting the mindset to take your small business to a higher level is one of the most liberating and empowering feelings you can experience. So, if you’re serious about taking that next step and leveling up to double or even triple your revenue within the next 12 to 18 months, then you’ve come to the right place.

Apply now for a FREE 20-minute Zoom Consultation with me and let’s talk about how to do that.