5 Branding Strategies for Coaches (and other Businesses)

Video Transcript

Hey, guys, this is Terence from Radical Marketing. Today I want to talk about a very interesting topic, and that topic that is also absolutely critical for your business is branding.

The topic I’m going to talk about specifically is business branding for coaches. And these are lessons from David Ogilvy, one of the founders of Ogilvy and Mathers, one which is now, I believe has been merged into the largest advertising agency in the world.

The other day I was just thinking about it, thinking, what’s the difference between my marketing agency and those big, big companies where they are getting huge contracts, like contracts with millions, even tens of millions of dollars per contract, relatively speaking, I’m getting paid absolute peanuts.

And it’s not because I’m a nice guy that I want to charge low amounts of money. It’s because they are able to command that amount of money for each job. So I’m just thinking, what is the difference between them and us? And the key difference, it’s not skills. I mean, we can do a lot of things better than they do, and I’m sure they do things that are better than us, too, but it’s not that much different. Ultimately, it came down to the brand. It’s because they have a brand, a very, very strong brand, and we don’t, even though we get great results and all that often.

And this is totally our mistake and my mistake that I forget to publicize our awesome results. Like recently, how we shaved like 90% off the cost per lead for client and I totally forgot to actually make a case study and document it, right. But those guys are awesome at doing that stuff, right. And also, the other thing is, because they have that brand, they are able to inspire confidence with the big corporate clients. So imagine if you’re a big corporate client CEO, sitting on your big chair and flying your private jet and you’re just thinking, oh, who should I give it to? Like this
Radical Marketing guys, they look pretty good.

And this big ad agency, they look pretty good, too, and they’re pretty similar. But hey, if the Radical Marketing guys don’t perform, my next on the line. Whereas if this big brand company does not perform, hey, everybody uses them.

So. Hey, I’m totally okay. My neck is not on the chopping board. So that is why yeah, it’s so important to have the brand now. If you’re a coach, it is exactly the same. Right.

Let’s think about Tony Robbins. Right. Tony Robbins could probably package his fart in the bottle, and people would buy it. Conversely, most coaches, if you try bottling your fart, I’m sure you probably go to jail or something along those lines. So the key point I’m trying to make is don’t bother with fart.

Definitely. And the key thing is that Tony Robbins has a big brand. So let me get into a few of the things that you can do today. To actually start branding yourself and start commanding those higher prizes and start standing out to be different. And all these things are actually what I’m doing in my agency. And I hope I can share this with you so that you can apply this to your business as well.

All right, so the first thing is to determine what is your brand, right? Otherwise how you’re going to start branding yourself if you don’t know which direction your brand is headed. Now, to this end, I have mentioned this book before. It’s called ‘Fascinate’ by Sally Hawksworth. Pardon me if I did not pronounce her name correctly, but go and grab that book called Fascinate.

The other thing you can do is she has a free quiz online once you have purchased the book. So you can actually do that quiz and it will tell you through the series of questions, what is your brand? Before I did that quiz, I thought our brand as radical marketing was innovation, but actually, our brand is actually more prestige than innovation.

So the whole brand that we are going to create is actually based on prestige. And that means, yes,
you got it, like higher prices. And that also means that we present better. Hopefully. If you look at
my previous videos, I was basically wearing a white t-shirt and loved all these videos, but now I’m
starting to wear shirts. We invest in a good mic as well, as you can see, compared to my previous
videos where we had this semi-decent mic. So things like that can help us in this case to actually
build that brand around prestige.

Now you need to determine your brand, read the book, figure out what brand suits you and how you can actually cultivate and make things so that you’re pushing every one of your effort, every one of your blog posts, social media posts, everything.

Communication is geared towards making and building that brand. All right, so here’s a few things
for coaches that apart from that, that you can actually practically do once you have determined the direction of your brand. Here are a few things that you can actually do to actually start building your brand for your coaching business. Okay, so here is the first thing you should do, which is what we do when we remember it, is to write blog posts, blog posts detailing especially your case studies, right?

Because people want to know whether you can actually get results, because people buy results,
right? So it is so important for you to actually detail your results, your case studies, write blog posts, long form blog posts to demonstrate your expertise and your deep thought in a particular topic.

And many of our clients came to us because we have all these long form blog posts that actually detail our thought process, our structure and our strategy in our blog post.

Now, you might be thinking, why do I want to give everything away? And then people just walk away. Look, people might take that information, walk away, right? I have no doubt that out of 100 people, that 90 people will probably come and take that information and walk away. But that 10%, another 10% will be thinking, well, these guys, even 5% will be thinking, well, these guys really know what they’re talking about.

They are real experts, I really want to work with them. And they reach out to you, right? So
not only does it help you to develop your branding, it actually helps you to get customers and leads as well, right?

So that is the first strategy, writing long form blog posts. And when I say long form, we’re talking 3000 to 5000 words, right? It’s pretty long. You can turn videos, images, flowcharts, what have you. Okay? If you go and check out our blog posts, you can see quite a few of them are pretty long, right? We call them pillar posts and you can see how we lay them out. If you go to the Radical marketing website, you can check that out.

Okay? Radicalmarketing.com the Radical Marketing without Dash is some Middle Eastern guy took it and yeah, I doing nothing with it, which is super frustrating.

Anyway, side note, coming back, the second thing you should do is obviously get on social media, do posts that help build your brand for us. We don’t do that many posts, but what we do is create YouTube videos. So this video will be on YouTube and you’re probably watching this on YouTube, right? So the whole purpose there is to actually help to continue to build our brand and to get views on YouTube. So that is part of our strategy. Okay? So definitely put out good content, video content on YouTube. And obviously, that YouTube video is also embedded in our blog post and it’s also shared on our social media channels.

All right? So the third thing I would suggest for coaches to do, and this is what we just recently did ourselves, is to publish a book. Okay? So my recent book that I wrote is actually about funnels, right? It’s about eight highly effective funnels for coaches to actually grow their businesses and get more leads, right? So that is the book title and the topic of the book. And right now we are basically going it self-published because going to a traditional publisher is just way too much hassle. So we’re just going to get it published the self-published way.

Have it on a place like Amazon and all the digital online bookstores. So it will be a printed version and of course there will be EPUB versions as well. So that way we can reach more people and we don’t have to wait like twelve months for some publisher to edit a single paragraph that they don’t like. So we don’t have to go through all the hassle, right?

Having a book will actually help you to build your brand dramatically. And let’s face it, most coaches won’t do this. If you write a book, you’re instantly maybe in the top two, three platter book.

Okay, I could be wrong with the stats, but you definitely would be in the top percentage of coaches who actually do that.

All right? So the other thing is that we are planning to do as well is a podcast. So consistent regular monthly podcast where we are planning to interview coaches and interview them in relation to their marketing, what’s working for them, what’s not working, lessons learned, all that kind of stuff. And that is going to be our podcast so that it’s still consistent with our brand and we’re going to hopefully get some high quality coaches into that podcast. So that podcast will help us to continue to create content to build our brand as well.

Okay? And the 5th thing is to speak on stage, right? So if you can speak to many, many people on stage, a physical stage or a virtual stage, it’s going to be good for your brand, right? Make sure you take the recording of that video, put it on YouTube, put it on your blog post, etc.

The whole thing there is speaking on stage, if you’re invited especially to speak on stage, is going to help you to build your brand, right? Because speaking on stage gives you that instant credibility. If this guy is speaking on stage in front of a few hundred people and you take a photo of it builds instant credibility, right? All right? And of course, by speaking to reaching many, many people at once in a virtual event or a physical event, all those people are going to know about you as well.

So it’s great for also getting new customers. And the final thing I would say is to make sure you act consistently. Brands are not built overnight, they are built over a long, long time, right? It’s kind of like for me anyway, it’s like going to gym. I keep training every day for months and months and months and I see very little gains, but I do see some gains. And yes, please don’t look at my muscles. There’s nothing much to show there right now, especially after COVID and all that. It’s just terrible. Let’s not talk about it. It’s depressing.

But the fact is that a brand, just like anything good, is built over a long period of time, okay? So make sure you act consistently, that your staff, your team is also trained to act consistently. That everybody jointly helps to sustain and build this brand through the communications with clients, through the communications with prospects
and to the world. All right? So I hope this gave you some good hints and tips and practical hints and
tips actually, to start building your brand. If you haven’t started yet, make sure you invest the time to create all those things that I just mentioned just now, and I really hope that this will help you. This
video will help you to build your brand.

And if you enjoyed this video and you’re watching it on YouTube, make sure you subscribe for more awesome stuff from us and hit the like button so that this message can be shared with more people to help more people. And yeah, make sure you check out our blog posts, our blogs and other videos because there’s a lot of awesome content that we have created. And who knows, the next blog post might just have one idea that will help you to actually transform your business.

So thank you again for watching and end. I’ll see you on the next video.