How to Overcome Marketing Paralysis When Pivoting Into a new Coaching Business

If you have grown to feel bored, tired or exhausted of your previous direction in your coaching business, often this is the time to consider pivoting. Perhaps this is exactly what you have thought of or even decided on. Yet letting the world know about your new direction feels like an enormous task. You feel like literally everything needs to be done from scratch.

A conversation with one of my coaching clients made me think about the times I myself was considering a new direction, or even a U-Turn to something I have tried but did not stick with for long enough before.  Usually, it worked the second time when I followed my gut feeling to take my first experience as a starting point and tweak the offer to align with what I leaned and experiences through feedback of my clients.

But repositioning yourself when you are changing your direction does feel like starting from scratch. That is, in my experience, a dangerous and often paralyzing feeling, however common it is.In this article I will help you change your perspective and find ease with repositioning and marketing your new offer.

Focus on your offer

In order for your idea to become a client attraction machine, you need to focus on your offer. The sooner you have something outlined, the sooner you will be able to test it with some clients, tweak it, perfect it and — what is most important- start talking about it to your audience. If you want to have people read your social media posts or watch your videos and raise their hands or reach out to you for more information, you need to be very clear about what it is you do. Having your framework or method outlined helps you have some talking point that will paint the picture about what you actually do. Trust me, lack of clarity in their messaging is the number one reason most coaches fail to attract consistent leads and clients in their business.

Decide on your ideal client

When you pivot, you might be slightly vague about who can be interested in the new direction or offer. A little less traditional approach to it would be to start thinking what kind of people are you most comfortable around. What do they do professionally? What kind of personalities they have? What are they into? What skills and mindset would they have to bring to the table to really enjoy working together (and get results).

This is the time to reach out to some of your friends and past clients who may fit this profile and have a simple chat about their struggles and desires in relation to your new direction. Ask them what kind of support do they love or hate experiencing should they hire someone in your niche. Do not turn this into a pitch, it must be a very neutral conversation, but it can reveal amazing insights for your offer and the container you will package it in, as well as more clarity on the type of person that may be an ideal client for this new offer.

Test your offer

Create a beta version of your offer, that is a much shorter in terms of delivery time, or even sample strategy sessions. Focus on helping your beta clients achieve quick and tangible results. This will help you collect very excited, but also valuable for your promotions testimonials, that you can use to add credibility to your marketing materials.

It will also help you tweak your framework, or even create one and test if it is really bringing results. At this early stage you are free to change things around and even pivot further into your niche or make your offer more interesting to a broader audience, if you are focusing on something really specific.

Start creating your content around your new offer

Do not wait until your offer is perfect. Start talking about the elements that you cover inside. Discuss any topics that are directly related to your ideal client’s level of knowledge that they must have in order to start working with you.

For example, as a Visibility Strategist, I need to ensure my clients have a basic understanding how to use Facebook: how to create a post, how to go live, how to share a post into a particular destination. They need to be open to consistently creating content around their brand and their business and happy to show up as who they are (using personal branding) in order to create relationships and connect to their potential leads and clients. So in my free content I will cover a lot of information and even free mini courses that explain those must-haves in details, without the need for me to cover it or focus on it with my clients personally, which will take a lot of time, but will not speed up creating true results.

Your content is perfect to “prepare” your ideal client for only require the relevant information to taking the action to achieve what your are coaching them through. Your content also pre-sells exactly what you will be working through inside, so the more clarity you give about your offer to your audience, the more raised hands you will see and the more leads ready to enrol you will enjoy in your business.  This is why the first two steps are so important.

Let me stress again, however, that you do not need to wait until the offer is perfect, before promoting it. In fact, the more you actually speak about your offer out loud, the clearer you yourself can become on what topics related to it are the selling points, so you can base all your content just around these “bestsellers”.

Another thought to ponder on. Social Media is such a fast paced world. What you said 3 weeks ago will not be remembered word by word, so every new post, when more clear about what it is you do, gradually replaces the assumptions your audience might have had before based on you previous content.  Just keep creating more posts and talking about your core topics, over and over again. You can completely reposition yourself from anything you have done before to anything new within as little as 90 days and build the perception of a go-to expert in your (new) niche if you put your focus on content creation.

Give and be Re-Given

As much as you need to focus on creating content to reposition yourself, you need to strategically connect and engage with people who resemble your new aligned ideal client.

Start with existing connections who may fit the bill. On Facebook you can add them to a specific Friends List that you can visit every few days and engage on their posts (Friends Lists have their own mini Newsfeeds that only show posts from members of these lists). This will make these people notice you and see your content, and if they feel like it follow your new direction. You will be surprised how many people in your existing audience may need what you are focusing on in your new direction.

The bottom line: you are not starting from scratch

You already have lots of previous experience promoting yourself, attracting leads and closing clients already. Now we just need to help you give yourself a full permission to show up, position and market yourself in a new role.

That permission is often the reason that is stopping you from taking action confidently and consistently. The rest are just strategies.