Hey Coach, What’s Your Marketing Mix?

When I was head of marketing for EnergyCAP, Inc., my job was to create qualified sales leads for the Sales team. Since I have a passion for publishing helpful content, my tendency was to focus on content. We published ebooks, case studies, blog posts, slide decks, and videos aimed at attracting and educating potential clients. But that was only part of our plan.

Had we just focused on content, we would have missed a lot of leads. Some of them loved content, but not all of them did (sad). Our leads were in a lot of other places too, and we had to go to where they were. We needed a marketing mix.

Your marketing mix is the combination of activities you use to promote your product or service. Like its name implies, your marketing mix has multiple parts.

One of the biggest mistakes some coaches make is limiting their marketing to just one or two activities. They do whatever is easiest or most comfortable, and then wonder where the leads are. This is like investing in just one or two stocks. If they tank, you’re out of luck. But if your investments are diversified, they pull in value from different sources.

Building a coaching business means diversifying by exploring and discovering what brings in new clients. This takes time, experimentation, and cost.

Most coaches get into coaching to help people, so they may give little time or effort to the actual business-building. But the business-building is what enables them to help more people, so the business-building cannot be ignored.

In the book, Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth, the authors share 19 “traction channels” for building a business. (Think of “traction channels” as marketing activities.) Although the book is aimed at business startups rather than coaching practices, the principles still apply—explore all the possible marketing activities to find the ones that work best.

The ones that work best will make up your marketing mix. By gaining traction through your marketing mix, you will gain traction for your coaching practice. Traction means “high customer demand.” If you want to be a coach in high demand, you will want to gain traction in your coaching practice.

You do this by creating a well-informed marketing mix.

Let me ask you a few questions:

• What’s your marketing mix?
• What process did you go through to arrive at this marketing mix?
• What difference would it make for you to create a well-informed marketing mix?
• How much time are you willing to devote per month to building your marketing mix?
• How much money are you willing to pay per month for your marketing mix?
• What’s keeping you from creating your ideal marketing mix?

I would highly recommend reading the book, Traction, to get you thinking about traction channels and your marketing mix. May it help you explore and discover…and create your ideal marketing mix. Go get 'em!