Should You Be Using Advertising in Your Health Coaching Business?

Why is it that lots of holistic practitioners and health coaches I talk to think advertising is some big mystery or a dirty word? We have no qualms about spending half our day writing blog posts, facebook, twitter and google plus posts, putting pictures up on Pinterest and Instagram. Do you fall into what my friend Eric Walker calls “The Loop”? Let me know if this sounds familiar.

Are You Stuck In The Loop?
“The Loop” for entrepreneurs, is worse than a morning commute

I used to be stuck in The Loop. 

Here was my typical loop:

First thing I did was open my email

There were the new video uploads to YouTube that get sent to me automatically; there was Seth’s daily post; there were emails from clients, launch sequences and the content that goes with it, and at least 10 or more emails that I would open. 

Then onto Facebook 

First I’d go through my notifications, and respond where appropriate. Then my news feed where I might comment on anything and everything. 

Then over to Instagram, and a quick trip through Twitter

I’ve timed this, and usually it’s 20-30 minutes. That’s 20-30 minutes that I used to spend first thing every day consuming rather than creating. 

From Eric Walker on Google Plus

I am not saying that we shouldn’t be doing any of these things.  It is important to keep educating ourselves if we want to be seen as “the expert”.  Eric’s point in this post was to create before you consume.  It is easy to stay stuck in an endless loop of education and busywork and never really get down to the things that are going to actually propel you forward.

Depending on what your business model is, this may be different things, but when it comes to social media, at least a portion of what you are doing should be directly building your audience.  No matter what your business model, you need an audience to speak to.  

If you are overwhelmed by all the technology and just starting out, no worries, go book a talk at your local health food store, church, school, or anyplace that will have you.  This is really the fastest way to get in front of people if the technology piece is still beyond you.  Coaches are always asking me the fastest way to find clients and this is it.  Book a talk, get people to come and then get them to either sign up for a low ticket offer during the talk or a consultation.  It is much easier to “sell” your more expensive services 1-on-1, either after a consultation (please come up with a better name than a “health history”) or after someone has gone through a lower tier program of yours and gotten to know you and get results.  This is “sales funnel 101” and where most people start.

Once you are ready to start moving online one of the first things you need to work on is building an audience.  I have talked about a couple of different business models over the past couple of months, but they all have 1 thing in common, you need an audience.

My favorite way to quickly build an audience is by using Facebook ads.  SEO, social media, blogging, and all those activities are great, but they take lots of time, are not always consistent and can even stop working.  I remember at one point my blog went from getting 300 visitors per day down to 50 in just a few days due to some Google algorithm change.  If I had relied entirely on Google to build my business, I would have been up the creek without a paddle.  This is true of any single means you might use for building your audience.

The one thing that I have found to be fairly consistent is to use advertising to build your audience.  If you are new to the world of advertising Facebook is definitely the place to start.  It is easier to learn than many other platforms.  This is a screenshot of a couple of campaigns I currently have running and you can see that it can be a very cost effective way to get subscribers.

I will have to warn you, however, the numbers you see are not typical results.  I have been studying facebook advertising for years and have figured out what works for me and what doesn’t.  I have talked to lots of people that try Facebook ads for a couple of weeks with no training (maybe they read a blog post or listened to a podcast) and complain that they are getting terrible results.

Also, if you are going to invest money in advertising, you need to at the minimum have a nice looking lead capture page.  Paying for advertising and just sending people to your website’s home page is a waste of money.

You hear some people talks about penny clicks on facebook, let me tell you that for the most part that is a bunch of crap.  If you can consistently get new subscribers for $1 – $1.50 each you are doing very well.  The great thing about Facebook is that you can do some pretty interesting targeting, so that your ads only show up to the exact people you want to see your ads.  This is another reason why having a very targeted niche becomes even more important as you move your marketing online.  It is really easy to throw up a facebook ad and target a million people.  Of course your results will be terrible, the audiences that I target for the above illustration are fairly small, but they are very targeted to people that want to hear from me.  There’s a good chance that you found me this way.