As a coach, your prime goal is to transform your clients meaningfully. Whether you are a leadership, management, gym, training coach, life coach, or even a business coach, your job is to enable others to achieve their goals. This needs to be in sync with your responsibilities and the purpose of the business, i.e. revenue, sales, and profit.
There comes the point for every coach when more than the amount of time available for their business is needed. Even the growth stagnates at times. This is because there are only a certain amount of clients you can work with within the given time. Taking anything more won’t work well for the reputation and will deplete your attention toward the client’s growth.
If you can relate to this then you are not alone.
Countless coaches have moved from one-to-one coaching and are looking to scale up. And this article will examine why taking your coaching business online is a great avenue to look at and how you can build your business online. Whether you are new to the scene or are figuring out how to take your coaching business online, you’re in the right place.
Why create an online coaching business with online courses?
When working with a single client, you are bound to focus on him. This reduces any scope for expanding your business. With one-to-one coaching sessions as the primary business model, you will hit a threshold where you can only add so many clients. This would stagnate your business revenues, thereby stalling growth prospects. This stalling of overall business growth is the prime challenge that prevents coaches from expanding their businesses. Whenever you hit this stagnation, an owner has three options.
Increase Pricing: You can charge more from your customers by increasing your prices. This would lead to increased revenues. Make sure you can justify this price hike.
Hire help: You could hire human resources as coaches to deliver your coaching program. You can only work in a position of authority to keep a check on the trainers and clients.
Expand with another medium: Online courses are your perfect partner in expansion. You can scale up and expand your online coaching business courses globally with an online course.
The question is: Are you ready to take your coaching business online?
Here are a few questions that can help you decide if you are ready:
Have you reached the threshold where no further expansion in the current medium is possible?
Do you repeat the same information for your clients time and again?
Do your clients go through a learning process for improvement?
Can the learning content in your current coaching platforms format be changed to online course content?
Is there a validated demand for your niche?
Answered most of these questions YES? Chances are you are ready to take your coaching business online while growing manifolds.
Before getting started with content creation, as a creator, you need to validate your choice. Here are some crucial steps that need to be taken before you begin creating content for your course.
Before getting started with content creation, as a creator, you need to validate your choice. Here are some crucial steps that need to be taken before you begin creating content for your course.
Before content creation
Find the ideal user persona
When you are on the task of curating your online course, you have a person or an image in your mind for whom you created the content. One who would buy the course and benefit from it. That is exactly the ideal customer you are looking for. It can even be your current target audience.
He has to be the one who identifies with your brand and offering. For instance, someone who is attending college would be more interested in your course that focuses on gaming. You cannot target such an online course to someone who is 60-70 years old. They won’t be your target audience as they cannot identify with gaming as a thing to learn.
Therefore it is extremely important to create a user persona that can, in a true sense, learn from you with the course taking care of their needs and wants.
Here’s a great tool that you can use to get a detailed visual of the user persona: Free User Persona Builder by Hubspot
What will consumers benefit from?
Find out what will make the consumer hit that buy button. What was the core advantage the user felt over your competition? These reasons are sufficient to understand the benefits the user will get while selecting your online course. When you take your coaching business online, these benefits are crucial to understanding the future needs and wants of the customers. Basis these findings, you can alter or add new courses to your portfolio. This would end up giving you an edge over your competitors.
Select a platform
After establishing the benefits and the user base, the time to select an appropriate learning platform comes. Such a platform needs to be holistic, thereby catering to the needs of both creators and learners. Knorish, as an online course platform, has been designed specifically for experts to share their knowledge with the masses and monetise it.
Content creation to take your coaching business online
Converting a one-to-one successful coaching business to an online medium comes without challenges. This section will try to smoothen this transition to make the process as streamlined as possible.
Revisit the user persona to get specific
Did any assumptions change during the entire process? Now is the time to revisit and integrate those changes into your ideal user persona. Note down the specific personality traits, skills they possess, and their current experience in the domain. These elements will help chalk out the final user persona for which the content will be curated.
To take your private coaching skills online, it is important to find the perfect customer for doing a successful business. He needs to be in sync with your organisation’s prospects and growth. A customer who doesn’t match your ideal persona is bound to leave the relationship at some point. In the beginning, he might familiarise himself with your product. But with time and a lack of required elements in the user persona, the relationship will end.
Define user’s transformation from current to desired
In this step, your goal is to define your user’s transformation from his current state to desired one. Define what he will achieve after buying your online course. Critical wrongdoing by creators is stuffing their technical know-how into a single course. This overwhelms a learner while lowering completion rates.
To avoid this:
Note their current experience, levels, and where they stand with point X. This is the starting point i.e. before the course.
Now jot down the desired state i.e. what will he be after completing the course. This is the endpoint Y
Always keep this in mind, your learners are less interested in content and are more result-oriented.
If you have too much information to put across your learners’ base, try and divide this into multiple online courses. This helps in creating a separate product while enabling the learner to opt-in for the next course as and when he requires it.
Map this transformation in the form of a curriculum
In this section, we will dig deeper into the entire course curriculum. What are the important bits to consider when moving from the current state to desired one? Consider these bits as the chapters and sections in your course.
Inculcate learnings in each chapter required for the learner to progress to the next chapter.
Take these learnings as lessons. Write down these chapters and lessons to curate a course outline for the course. More content doesn’t mean more added value. If you can take your learner from the current state to the desired state without a truckload of information, there is no harm in that. Include necessary elements and knowledge during his journey to the desired state.
With these, now is the time to create your content. Every learner has a varied learning method. As a creator, you need to use a combination of these tools and elements.
Varied content in varied formats
Chapters and Sections
Analytics for results and interpretation
Assessments
Live online workshops for a personal touch
So with these options, you can really take your expertise, and knowledge, convert it into great content and take your coaching business online.
Branding and marketing
If you have followed the steps so far, you’re almost there. But before you launch your course, you must get the branding and marketing in place. And to do that, you need to:
Establish thought leadership by sharing valuable insights into your domain and community You can enter and engage with a pre-established community to complement your presence as and when required. Building the brand from scratch can be a real pain. Try and find a similar and relatable community within the domain. This will help you reach the masses faster. You can use LinkedIn and Facebook. Find groups on these platforms that are specific to your niche. Offer them advice concerning your expertise. This way you will be able to establish trust in their eyes while gaining a followers base. This user base would constantly interact and engage with you. They will reach you for advice or a doubt thereby establishing thought leadership.
Get featured within the community As you are a coach it is important to build visibility as an established expert in the domain. You can get visibility by featuring in :
Videos You can reach out to Youtubers to get featured in their videos. Following this, you will be able to reach out to the Youtubers’ audience to establish trust and relationships with them. Further, you can begin your own YouTube channel to gain a significant number of social media followers.
Live Events and Webinars
You can become a panelist in an online live event or a webinar. Sharing your experiences, and advice, and resolving the doubt of the audience can help you to gel with the community.
Guest blogging when using Knorish blogs you can invite a prominent influencer to blog and write articles for your website. This way the readers can establish trust and credibility towards your brand. This will even help in backlinking to your blogs and eventually to your sales page.
Create your community and followers base.
After establishing yourself within the community, a significant number of those within the community will begin following you. They are more likely to engage and reach out to you for their doubt resolution. Furthermore, this will increase your following on social media handles while increasing your leads. These leads can then be retargeted to be converted into paying customers.
This way, you will establish your community, making you an influencer and an expert in the domain.
Create Facebook groups. Facebook can be a great weapon to create an engaging audience so you can sell your online course. Several coaches use Facebook groups as an alternative space to interact with their existing user base. To grow and convert these Facebook groups into a standalone community, you need to.
Have consistency: If you want your members to be regular, even you need to preach what you teach. Create and let them know about the schedule for when new content will be posted on the group. This way, you can understand their timings and post content as and when your community is up for engagement.
Don’t be boring: No one likes to be bombarded with technical information everywhere. Use this social media opportunity to indulge in fun activities. Organise quizzes, problem solvers, and polls on Facebook to make it a fun place to learn and connect with other community members. Emotions must be there within the community to keep the user engaged and attentive.
Use multiple social media platforms up your social media game innovates by using varied social media platforms. We recommend upcoming platforms like Reddit, Quora, and Pinterest over traditional Instagram and Facebook.
As a business consultant coach, these platforms are a fantastic way to establish thought leadership. This is because these provide an opportunity to resolve user queries while allowing the creator to choose their domain. Whether to use one or many depends upon the type of the course academy. Using a perfect blend of social media focused on engagement is the way ahead.
With all of these steps, you can increase the brand awareness of your coaching business while targeting the customers with new and innovative marketing strategies.
Towards the end, we would like to ask every coach reading this piece to consider the online move seriously. With a pandemic haunting the world, going digital is the only way ahead. It will help you go global while allowing you to focus on the home turf simultaneously.
