How to Find a Marketing Coach

How to Find a Great Marketing Coach

For business owners who want to earn their highest income while maximizing their valuable time, a Marketing Coach is the secret weapon to keep on track.

Whether a company wants to generate more online sales, decrease staff size, our outreach to a wider territory, a Marketing Coach will create the action plan using the correct strategies to achieve their goals. Often business owners call me believing a clever logo or tagline will bring them new business. While those tools can help with branding, there are much more significantly successful strategies to get business in the door. A good coach should be able to advise companies not only what steps to take when, and what marketing costs, but they should be able to teach you the critically important factors in various marketing tools; from redesigning a website, to creating articles or white papers, starting a blog, conducting podcasts, developing ad campaigns or finding no-cost strategies that give great return on their investment.

Creating a step-by-step action plan removes the ‘what if I did that’ factor for growing businesses by taking their vast ideas and making an actual marketing plan that works for their unique business. It’s unlikely people have time to play a guessing game about what will work and what won’t when they’re starting or growing a business and have limited time and cash. It’s just not the smart approach to go it alone without a Marketing Coach.

Once you know what to do, it’s easy to get marketing chores accomplished. It’s the same as any pursuit in life. If you want to run a marathon, you need to start with a training program that slowly builds muscle and endurance over time. Marketing is the same as any pursuit, it’s just that when we run a business we often have less practice at marketing so waste enormous time, money and anxiety in the process.

That’s really not necessary when you can have a marketing coach guide you instead.

What are the six critical qualities a marketing coach should provide?
1. Experience. Presumably you’re paying someone to guide you who has already made hundreds of mistakes at their own expense and learned what works and what doesn’t. That street savvy will save you time and cost. A great coach should have experience in dozens of industries so they can bring you ideas that work in other industries besides just the one you are in. For example, I’ve brought strategies from my former experiences in film to a client in the publishing business to increase their outreach. You want to ensure that your Coach has vast track record in marketing communications – they should understand Search Engine Optimization when they’re advising you about building a website and should be able to point to successes they’ve achieved. They should have built blogs, websites, written articles that have been published, developed trade show exhibits, created ad campaigns, achieved publicity for clients online and off, created sales materials from business cards to elaborate brochures, produced events, spoken to organizations and have actually conducted sales.

2. Resources. A great coach has tested resources for business owners from bookkeepers to databases to podcast producers to designers. Your coach should pay for themselves from these referrals alone. Using vendors that are not capable to fill your needs can cost thousands of dollars and hundreds of wasted hours—so USE tested contacts and have your Coach manage them.

3. Contacts. Without hundreds of contacts, a coach probably isn’t engaged enough in the community or in your market to find you great opportunities, or at least to direct you where to seek them. A great coach is actively engaged in business, political, educational or community associations, keeping current on strategies, resources and technology that can help you, and has contacts in industries that may serve you directly or indirectly. If you’re trying to meet small business owners, for example, to inform them of your professional services, a coach should know of 5-10 great
associations to introduce you to. Ask your potential coach which associations he or she belongs to in order to get an idea of their involvement or awareness of contacts that may benefit you.

4. Intelligence. Without this, it would be impossible for a coach to grasp what you are trying to achieve and creatively find ways to help you. Many coaches stick only to one industry, or have a limited understanding of how to generate bottom line results for a company. A great coach has had full responsibility for running a company: from developing the vision to hiring, firing, marketing, management and financials to creating systems of operation, developing sales, merchandizing (for retail) and training employees. And their intelligence should be obvious when you first begin to discuss your business and your ideas with them.

5. Clients that value them. A great coach has clients who value them because they know their getting trusted resources, information, guidance, strategy and results. Read some case studies, and ask the coach to let you speak with a few clients so you can ask how they benefit from working with that coach. That should give you a sense which of the various coaches will work best for you. Choose a coach that is really compassionate and believes in you and your work. Running a business can be a lonely, sometimes hair-pulling struggle, so get someone on your side who will be there when you need them and will understand all the emotional phases one goes through building a business.

6. Telephone & email consultations. I think it’s most helpful for people to have easy access to their coach. You may need a second opinion on a large proposal you’re about to send out. Or you may want someone to review your website updates before you pay a large sum to your web designer to make those changes. You need a coach who can respond reasonably quickly so you get help at these critical junctures.