On this week’s episode of SUCCESS Line, I talk to a young entrepreneur, Veena, who is ready to go all in on her coaching business. However, she is struggling to make herself stand out in the oversaturated coaching market and wants to know how she can augment her business through social media.
These days, it is easy to get lost in the sea of the same. Coaching is a crowded and watered down industry. However, that doesn’t mean there aren’t great coaches out there or that you can’t become one yourself. If you relate to Veena’s plight and want to learn how to stand out, stay consistent and drive more engagement, read on for my top three takeaways.
1. Show up authentically.
One of the biggest traps for entrepreneurs is trying to be everything for everyone. But we don’t need everyone, we only need the people who are looking for what we uniquely have to offer.
In a sea of the same we have to find ways to make ourselves stand out. There is plenty of opportunity out there, but it all starts with understanding what makes you unique and doubling down on that message. You and your unique personality are the reason someone will choose you out of the hundreds of other coaches available. Consumers choose the person first and the service second.
If we want to increase engagement, it starts with showing up more authentically on social media. It doesn’t mean you have to share every detail of your life—it can be a simple video of you talking to your audience. But when it’s you speaking to your audience directly, you will automatically draw in those who want to work with you (and push away those who don’t).
Allow people to get to know who you are and bring yourself to the forefront of your content. If you do, I think you will see your engagement increase significantly.
2. Get clear on your message.
The bane of most entrepreneurs’ existence on social media, including my own, is consistency. Social media is a full-time job that I don’t have time to give to. What I do to mitigate this, and what I coach my clients to do, is map out my content quarterly and come up with a theme for each quarter.
When you choose a quarterly theme, curating your content suddenly becomes much simpler as you have narrowed the lens with which to filter everything through. If something doesn’t fit with that quarter’s theme, the content simply goes into the “maybe later” pile.
When you get clarity on your North Star and find a quarterly theme that supports where you’re going and who you want to bring with you, your audience will show up. It may be a smaller audience, but the engagement will be much higher because you’re connecting on a deeper level. I would rather have a lot of comments and messages that show a deeper connection to the content than thousands of superficial likes with no interaction with the consumer.
Define for yourself what kind of engagement you’re looking for and what levels would mean success to you. And perhaps most importantly, create a system to measure what you’re doing to see if your content is effective or not in facilitating connection with your audience.
3. Create a community.
Once we pinpoint our uniqueness and find our audience, we need to figure out how to have a consistent dialogue with these people over time.
For example, Veena just wrote a book, but she is unsure how to find out how people are responding to it. To address this, she needs to create a communication plan. This could look like many different things: She could reach out to the people who have purchased the book, she could create a Facebook group, an email list… the list goes on.
But a book, just like video courses or any other content you might create, is only one of the tools that moves your business forward. While scaling your business, your job is to put as many nets out there as possible to draw as many people as you can into your world.
Find a way to create a community of like-minded people who resonate with your message—it all starts there. The value of your business is, in large part, determined by the community you create and the engagement within it. Become the person for your community who provides value and is seen as an expert. Over time, as you provide more and more value for your community, they will invite others to come in and join the fun.
The SUCCESS Line is no longer releasing new episodes on the SUCCESS Podcast Network, but you can still listen to the full conversation below.
