4 things to know from this article
- 40.2% of coaching markets hold buyers who aren't shopping for a coach yet.
- 49.9% are driven by relief from something that hurts, not by ambition.
- 52.2% already know the kind of solution they want and are comparing. Those two groups need opposite posts.
- 79.8% of sub-markets want something the broader market above them doesn't cover.
The reason a coach's blog gets no traffic usually isn't the writing. It's that every post is about coaching, and the person you want has never typed that word.
We mapped 918 coaching markets from 2,004 books those buyers paid for and 1,547 things real buyers wrote about their own situation, and tagged each market for how far along the buyer is. It's the topic half of what the counting says about marketing for coaches.
In 38.9% of markets she knows exactly what's wrong and has no idea what fixes it. In another 1.3% she doesn't know there's a problem.
Four in ten. Not looking for you, looking for what's happening to her.
Who is actually reading, and what stage is she at?
Three different people, and a post can only really serve one.
| Where the buyer is | Share of 918 markets | What she'd search |
|---|---|---|
| Doesn't know there's a problem | 1.3% | Nothing yet |
| Knows what's wrong, not what fixes it | 38.9% | The symptom, in her words |
| Knows the kind of fix, comparing options | 52.2% | The method, and who does it |
| Sold on an approach, choosing a person | 4.0% | Your name, or your modality |
| Deep in it already | 3.6% | Specifics and edge cases |
A post called "how coaching can help you" is written for the fourth row. That's four percent of the market, and they already know who you are.
The 38.9% in row two is the biggest group you can actually reach cold, and she is searching her own symptom. Not the diagnosis. Not the treatment. What it feels like at eleven at night.
So what do you write instead?
Her problem, in her sentence, before yours.
A woman signed off work with stress, a man dreading Sunday evening, a mother whose son stopped answering, a manager promoted past what he knows. None of them typed "life coach". They typed the thing that happened.
That's the topic list. Take the push that made somebody in your market open a browser and write about that, at the point before she has a name for it.
There's one more thing the data says about the register to write it in. 49.9% of the markets we mapped are driven by relief from something that hurts rather than by ambition. Content pitched at growth and potential reaches somebody who wants out, and sounds like it's for a different person.
How specific should the topic be?
More specific than the niche you'd put on a business card.
79.8% of the 918 sub-markets we mapped want something the broader market above them doesn't cover, and 30.6% sit at a different stage of awareness from the niche they belong to. So "anxiety" and "social anxiety at work" are two different articles for two different people, and a post trying to serve both serves neither.
That's the same reason a homepage trying to cover four things covers none of them, which the niche and audience post goes into.
Does this actually bring anybody in?
Slowly, and it compounds, and I'm not going to put a number on it because we haven't measured one.
What we can say is where the effort gets wasted. A post that reaches the right person and sends her to a homepage that fails the five-second read, as 86% do, has spent the traffic and kept nothing. Content is the cheapest way to arrive at a conversion problem at scale.
So the page it points at comes first.
What this can't tell you
We mapped what buyers in 918 markets are driven by and how aware they are. We haven't measured a single blog.
So nothing here says how often to post, how long a post should be, or what any of it returns. It says which person is out there to be reached and what she's typing, which is the part a content plan usually skips.
Could your market be different? Yes, and twenty sales conversations will tell you more about your own buyers than any of this. Our data is the starting point for somebody who hasn't had those yet.
Questions coaches ask about this
What should a life coach blog about?
The problem her buyer already has, in the words that buyer uses, before any mention of coaching. In 38.9% of coaching markets the buyer can name what's wrong and can't name the fix, so the symptom is what she types.
How often should a coach post content?
We've no data on frequency and won't invent one. What the data does say is that a post aimed at the wrong stage of awareness reaches nobody however often it goes out.
Does blogging still work for coaches?
It's slow and it compounds, which is the same answer it's always been. The question worth asking first is whether the page your posts point at can be understood by a stranger in five seconds, because 86% of coaching websites can't.
Should I write about coaching or about the problem?
The problem. 40.2% of coaching markets hold buyers who aren't shopping for a coach yet, and a post about coaching is invisible to all of them.
The figures here come from our own corpus of 10,954 scored coaching websites and 918 mapped coaching markets. How we built and scored it.