Whether a company wants to generate more online sales, decrease its staff size, or reach a broader market segment, a marketing coach creates an action plan using strategies needed to achieve the actual goals.
A startup company is unlikely to have the time or resources to experiment with numerous marketing methods. As a result, a coach combines the owner’s goals and ideas with the coach’s suggested techniques to create a one-of-a-kind, step-by-step action plan.
For businesses that have been functioning for more than 15 years, the owner may need assistance in developing fresh offerings that would reinvigorate or challenge the entrepreneurial mindset. Perhaps, the market has shifted dramatically.
Any drastic change in the industry requires an entirely new set of clients, services, or other revenue streams to fund expansion. Thus, a business coach should help entrepreneurs through these and other stages of growth, even those where they may wrongly believe they should quit up.
In this post, we’ll cover the specific duties & responsibilities of a marketing consultant and how they work to help your company. We’ll also include the main reasons why should you employ a coach for your marketing strategy and the best attributes that you need to seek if you decide to hire one.
Understanding the Role of a Marketing Coach
Generally, a marketing coach helps new businesses navigate the unavoidable stages of undervaluing and mispricing their products or services, identifying clients who are truly a good fit for the company’s offerings, and teaching how to boost up when demand is high. A competent coach should provide strategies, tools, programs, resources, and expert assistance.
Luckily, a marketing coach who also runs a marketing consulting firm has access to a tried-and-true array of tools, including databases, designers, bookkeepers, and standards. Hiring marketing specialists who are unable to meet your needs can cost a lot of money and hundreds of hours of wasted time, so use only tried and true contacts, and have your coach oversee them.
Working with a coach via a consulting firm gives you access to a top-notch team of skilled designers, web teams, writers, coaches, publicity specialists, or TV producers that can assist firms of all sizes. Your dedicated coach should guide business owners through these and all the stages of growth, including those where people mistakenly think they should give up.
Why would you require the services of a marketing coach?
There are five primary reasons why you should hire a marketing coach:
- Growth Acceleration – A marketing coach’s marketing expertise will accelerate your growth. He implements a growth strategy to introduce the company product or solution to target audiences they have not yet reached or are not yet currently serving through a data-driven approach to determine how to optimize results.
- Split Testing – Your dedicated marketing coach can remove and/or modify activities that aren’t functioning to improve things that should be operating better. It aims to explore consumer response to a product or marketing campaign by making it available on a limited basis before a wider release.
- Implement Valuable Insight – A coach helps find chances your company hadn’t considered previously thanks to their neutrality and fresh insight. After generating insights, the marketing coach turns it into readable and accessible intelligence to make data-driven decisions and create value in people’s lives.
- Compete among the Industry Players – Hiring a marketing coach supports you while you work through your global dominance ambitions and put them into action. Through market research, your coach will take a look at the market for your product and evaluate which other companies are selling a product that would compete with yours.
- Accountability – The use of metrics to relate a company’s marketing initiatives to financially meaningful results and progress over time is referred to as marketing accountability. A marketing coach can justify the expenditure to enable the effective operation of the marketing organization to understand what’s working and what isn’t strategically.
Thus, find a coach who has had complete responsibility for managing a business – from continuing to develop the vision to hiring and firing, monitoring, marketing, and financials; generating operational systems; establishing sales; branding (for retail); and providing training – so they can share their knowledge and resources with you.
Other frequent concerns that a marketing coach might identify include:
- Enticing offers for your potential customers or clients to maintain loyalty.
- The target audience that won’t help your company achieve long-term objectives.
- Members of your customer list who won’t move forward with the end of the sales funnel.
- Methods on how to make your offerings more profitable and sustainable.
- The best moment to start offering new services, such as online courses or memberships.
An excellent marketing coach always starts by clarifying your objectives, then double-checking that what you desire is really what you require. Sometimes it seems sensible to aim after something, but your underlying drive dictates that a different strategy is preferable.
For example, someone can declare, “By the end of the year, I want 10,000 email subscribers,” but what they want is a higher, more predictable long-term income. Making an offer for a higher-paying customer type might be a faster option. Getting ten thousand of the incorrect subscribers won’t assist anyone.
How Does Marketing Coaches Work?
A marketing coach works with company owners or managers to build clientele and suggest recommendations and marketing or operational tools. It helps the company achieve its objectives to raise revenue or improve productivity so that the owners aren’t going to spend every single moment wasting resources on their business.
So, a marketing coach builds an action plan utilizing precisely the tactics needed to achieve the actual goals whether a firm wants to increase online sales, reduce staff headcount, or reach a bigger market group.
Usually, marketing coaches work through the following ways:
- One-to-one Coaching Programmes
- Mastermind Sessions
- Coaching Memberships
- Group Coaching Programmes
- Online Courses
The majority of marketing coaches will provide one-on-one instruction. This generally entails frequent video conferences between the two of you, as well as in-between support via messaging software such as Zoom, Skype, Whatsapp, or via email.
For these coaching programs to succeed, you must commit to working with the coach for at least three months. Usually, start-up companies need to work with clients for at least 6 months. You’d be astonished at how fast time passes!
Examine the background of the person in charge of the training. If they have training or teaching experience, the course will almost certainly be of higher quality. If not, you may be able to obtain a feel of their style by looking at their past work. It’s always a safe choice to rely on recommendations from reliable friends.
What is your preferred method of learning? If you know you despise viewing videos, don’t purchase a video-based course. If you prefer to learn by doing, an online course may not be the ideal option for you. Know yourself and make purchases based on that knowledge.
What exactly do marketing coaches do?
Given that this blog can’t possibly discuss how all of the other marketing coaches in the world operate, we have developed this blog based on our company’s marketing coaching technique and how marketer buddies always approach a new project.
This is a common checklist that marketers have in their thoughts.
- The company objectives (Why)
- The target clients (Who)
- The unique messaging (What)
- Your written and spoken communications (How)
1. The Company Goals/Objectives – Long Term vs Short Term
Your mission and vision are high-level goals. When we think about long-term goals, we tend to think in broad strokes. In short, a futuristic vision.
- What do you want your company to look like in five to ten years?
- By then, what mission do you expect to have progressed on?
- How am I supposed to predict what my company will look like in ten years?
At this level, no specifics are required. Any goals you describe here are subject to change. High-level aims are similar to a cruise’s long-distance destination. Keep in mind that you are the captain. It still works if you decide to modify your route while travelling.
Thus, a marketing coach will be able to draw the company goals out of you possibly over time. Allowing for greater clarity and accelerating your motivation to set your motor accelerating NOW for something that’s barely on the horizon.
On the other hand, short-term objectives are those that you wish to accomplish in the next three to six months. This category is for projects that require a timeframe of less than a year old and go into great detail.
- In the next six months, what one factor from your portfolio or services do your ideal clientele desire the most?
- What do you need to market RIGHT NOW to help your ideal clients?
- What is the one action that will help you go forward the most quickly in the next few weeks?
Hence, a marketing coach can help you break down those large intimidating goals into narrower and smaller chunks until you have a workable set of actions. When you feel confident and convinced that you’re travelling correctly, you’ll know you’re on the right road.
2. The Client – Audience vs Offerings
The Audience as Your Customers
Your audience is a high-level definition of your consumer. If you’re lucky enough to have an audience, you might be able to say things like “they have these difficulties and this attitude on life,” but it becomes a little murky after that.
If a company’s audience is entirely made up of small business owners who want to grow their audience, but they’re of all ages, from all over the world, and operate various kinds of enterprises, that’s a good thing.
A marketing coach will be able to spot whether your perception of your audience matches up with reality. It lets you identify if they’re the right people to target if you want a smooth path to industry domination.
The Customer and Your Offerings
Companies don’t need to try and formulate every offer to appeal to every single person among the desired audience. However, it is necessary to examine them and realize that there’s a specific problem they’re struggling with.
It happens in most start-up businesses online and then makes an offer for only a slice of the target audience. However, doing ideal customer work on your own is painful especially if you are still on your journey to find your ideal customers.
So, a marketing coach can help you get clear on your ideal customer for a certain offer. Then, he simultaneously makes sure that the said ideal customer exists and isn’t a figment of your imagination.
3. The Messaging
Your Business Offerings and Brand Awareness.
At the level, this category in your coach’s head is all about your brand and how you position your business. Your branding is what people say about you and your business when you’re not in the room.
Then, your business position is what people think you can do for them, in comparison to their other options. However, you can’t control external things in the industry but you can influence what people think of your marketing communications through the offers you put out into the world.
Consequently, a marketing coach looks for ways to raise your brand visibility. In other words, to get more people to know about you and what you do.
There are three factors that a marketing coach considers for every company he works with:
- Promise – It is the emotional motivation for your customers to purchase it from you. Your marketing coach helps you compose a core statement or phrase that encapsulates your client’s situation and their feelings about it.
- Packaging – A marketing coach objectively tells whether the product packaging sits together by proactively managing objections for your offerings like ‘is it worth the money’, ‘why should I trust this company for my chosen product’, and ‘will I purchase another product or subscribe for more sessions’.
- Pricing – A marketing coach will support your business more on self-limiting beliefs as most entrepreneurs will make assumptions that aren’t based on fact as they can gently separate the fact from the unhelpful fiction. When people see the value in what you’re selling, they’ll buy it. If they don’t, they won’t.
4. The Communications.
Everyone’s favourite subject is marketing communications. There are a plethora of ways to get your high-level message (your brand message) out there and sell your wares (low-level messaging).
However, you should be able to recognize the limits of such a technique. How do you know what to include in your marketing communications if you’re not clear on your two levels of goals, both customer definitions, and the high-level versus tactical offer and messaging?
Long-term & brand building communications:
- Press Relations / Media Ads
- Writing a physical book or eBook
- Public speaking
Examples of tactical, short-term communication and sales channels
- Email marketing
- Advertising
- Affiliate marketing schemes
Of course, there might be overlap between the two; the outcomes will be determined by the messaging you send out through each marketing channel.
Marketing coaches will be able to help you decide which channels you should be used for brand building and visibility raising. Also, they will review your long-term and tactical goals, target customers, offer and messaging and communications.
The Duties & Responsibilities of a Marketing Coach
In lieu with our discussions above, a marketing coach’s primary duties include:
- Come up with ways to engage with new consumers or reprise their position with existing ones.
- Review the company’s current marketing materials and efforts to see how they may be enhanced or changed.
- Examining the client’s audience and customer base to discover the most effective way to reach their key demographic
- Supporting the business in developing a consistent and identifiable brand identity
- To enhance their client’s professional reputation, a marketing coach addresses earlier public relations or marketing mistakes.
- Encourage consumer interaction by leveraging social media and other popular channels to reach out to the client’s audience.
- Working with the client’s staff to ensure that all material is consistent and follows the company’s messaging and tone guidelines.
- Using keywords and other best practices to optimize all marketing content for search engines.
- Handling the client’s email and website accounts
- To assess performance and demonstrate progress, a marketing coach keeps track of and summarizes campaign results.
To work effectively with their customers, marketing coaches require a combination of technical and soft abilities. Marketing, business, communications, and psychology are among the skill sets that you need to look into.
Seek a coach that can demonstrate both innovative thinking and realistic, results-driven analysis if your company is contemplating employing one. The coach you hire should be knowledgeable with your target audience’s consumer behaviour and eager to collaborate to get the greatest possible outcomes, not just for their portfolio but also for your company’s objectives.