A new year, your new marketing plan

Here we are, January 14 and nearly two weeks into the New Year…now is the ideal time to locate and dust off last year’s marketing plan. Take some time today to freshen it up with new ideas and goals to reflect where you’re headed in 2011.

Don’t have a marketing plan currently in place? No problem! It is never too late to get your business organized. (Click here for the resources to help you put your marketing plan together from scratch.)

While we cannot hand you aspiration or carve out your individualized action items for the year, we can provide you with some data and metrics you can use to get your marketing plan down in writing.

As with any good marketing plan, you need to include a section on customer analysis. Or, in other words, you need to determine your target consumers and what it is that they want in a coach. The key question you need to answer here is “why does this group of people want coaching?”

And that’s where our data comes in: findings from the 2010 Global Consumer Awareness Study show us that more than two-fifths (or 42.6 percent) of respondents who had experienced coaching chose “optimize individual and/or team performance” as their top motivation for being coached. This piece of information can easily be included as part of your customer analysis. And that is only one finding from last year’s study! You can be sure that there is plenty more where that came from.

To make this data finding process a little easier (and more personalized to your corner of the world), we have recently released data tables by country. Each report outlines various findings from the awareness study—findings you can easily incorporate into your own marketing plan. Access your country’s data table here.

Need help with other aspects of your marketing plan? Download our Marketing Plan Basics document here. This document includes a basic outline and step-by-step instructions in creating your own marketing plan.

How do you flush out your marketing plan? Have you conducted your own market research? What are some new additions to your 2011 marketing plan?

Coaching Young Adults

One month ago, this blog featured the post The client demographic you should be targeting now. The below was written by a coach who targets this demographic in her coaching practice.

There was recent ICF research found that 25- to 34- year-olds are more aware of professional coaching, more aware of the ICF, more satisfied with their coaching experience and more likely to recommend coaching to others than their older counterparts.

In my coaching practice, I have targeted this age group. And to acknowledge myself, I have been successful at it.

First, I know my market. I know their likes, interests and challenges - I can relate to them. In my 20's I experienced a lot of confusion and with they help of a coach, I found direction, meaning and purpose. Life is full of transitions, and one of the biggest transitions is into "adulthood."

Many young adults experience setbacks, making it challenging to adjust and achieve their personal and professional goals. From relationships, career, finances and personal development, this age group has learned from early experiences but still has plenty of time ahead of them.

Research says, "The transition to adulthood is a complex process in which youth who have been dependent on parents throughout childhood start taking definitive steps to achieve measures of financial, residential, and emotional independence, and to take on more adult roles as citizen, spouse, parent, and worker. This transition can be a period of growth and accomplishment, especially when youth have the resources they need to navigate this process, such as community connections and a stable family that can provide guidance and financial assistance if needed, and access to education and experiences that provide a foundation for learning, life skills, and credentials."

Second, the fact that your brain never stops developing is the perfect opportunity for coaches to step in and assist individuals to make positive changes.

Coaching this age group to replace old limiting beliefs with expanding beliefs is essential because they are looking for answers to change habits and behaviors. This age group is open to explore new possibilities and new ways of thinking. I find that young adults are very motivated and coachable.

Lastly, I know how to find my market. I chose my main means of marketing to young adults via the internet. Since many 25 - 34 year old's were originally shown the internet at school they are most familiar with looking for resources on the internet. Using social media, e-mail marketing strategies and other online marketing strategies makes it easy to reach young adults.

It is very exciting and rewarding to put young adults on the path to discover their truth and life purpose.

I love coaching and making the decision to become a coach was one of the best decisions of my life. Remember, if you stretch your potential as a coach, you help others meet their potential.

Reach out to a young adult and offer coaching.

Anna Goldstein, January 2011

Coaching Tool: When Your Client Feels Stuck

Appreciative Dialogue is based on the popular approach to organizational change called Appreciative Inquiry that focuses people on what’s working rather than trying to fix what’s not. This is an excellent technique to use when your client feels stuck and can’t solve a problem. Taking an appreciative approach, they see their issue through a new lens, not the normal critical lens assigned to problem solving. They jump outside of the box that their logical brain likes to play in.

In fact, the sorting and arranging of information involved in typical problem-solving processes works against their ability to see the problem in a new light. They can try to shift and rearrange what they know, but their thoughts end up swirling around in circles. Many times they will give up and keep doing what they have always done.

Appreciative Dialogue goes beyond assessing capabilities—what they can do—to being mindful of everything they can access to create a peak experience. As the coach, you guide them to explore everything that contributed to the creation of peak experiences in the past and then consciously apply those contributions—strengths, values, gifts, emotions, attitudes, and perspective—to a challenge they are currently facing.

As a result, your clients can align their best energies to powerfully conquer roadblocks and create amazing results. Here is the script you can use:

Step One: Set aside current issues. Instead, think of a time in your past when you felt energized, significant, and fulfilled. This moment could have happened yesterday or years ago. It could have been when you completed a project or event or when you were doing something special. Can you recall a particular peak experience?

Step Two: With this memory in mind, answer the following question:

What five things did you contribute to creating this peak experience?
- Strengths, Talents, Gifts
- Emotions/Attitude
- Values
- Unique Sense/Perspective

Step Three: Looking at your list of contributions, what can you carry forward to the challenge you are now facing? What is possible for you now?

The intent of Appreciative Dialogue is to teach the brain how to make the shift from problems to possibilities. How can your client look at the present moment in light of their past peak experiences? New ideas will appear in the conversation as you connect the positive past with the present moment.

You can also use Appreciative Dialogue to extend and repeat a positive experience. The focus is on “what can I continue?” Your clients detail what they did to create the glorious moment so they know specifically what to repeat.

Remember to have these conversations often so your clients can determine what mindset and energy patterns will best serve them. The results will help them adjust and revitalize their daily activities.

Adapted from Wander Woman: How High-Achieving Women Find Contentment and Direction by Marcia Reynolds, PsyD, MCC and a past president of the ICF. Contact her at Marcia@outsmartyourbrain.com.

Waking up to Happiness

One of the joys of getting older is gathering a wealth of experience to guide myself through life. Though of course, being older, I’m not sure I remember it all. Hmmm.

Anyway, thankfully through my work as a coach I have lots of lovely people around me who continue to teach me so much. A Head of Talent Development in a major commercial organisation recently said to me: “Success is how you feel when you wake up in the morning”. Wonderful. I had to ask and thank them for their quotable quote.

And it appears our government here in the UK is waking up to this wisdom too – the Prime Minister has asked the Office of National Statistics to find a way of measuring the county’s happiness. The intent is to build this into government thinking, policy and action and so that the monopoly held by the ‘Continuous Economic Growth’ lobby has some balancing force. And about time too.

The economic growth has undoubtedly been good. It has brought clean water and warm housing and universal education and health service and food to the shelves of so many. And it’s something that is to be still more widely enjoyed globally. But as I often find myself exploring with clients, ‘a weakness is a strength overplayed’.

The sustainability of delivering these benefits in the way we currently do is clearly questionable. And with over 30 million anti-depression prescriptions handed out in the UK alone every year, greater wealth has clearly not led to universal happiness. So getting a grip on what we want, what we really, really want is now approaching it’s time.

Which brings me to coaching. Is there a profession better placed than coaching to help people unravel their thoughts, hopes, feelings, and indeed prejudices and misconceptions so that they can see the connections, and find what it is they truly want and who they are? Is there a profession better placed to help people help themselves to take action, build new, more useful choices and habits and achieve what they want in the ways that are right for them?

And of course, the real power of what we do lies in the fact we are not preaching as experts, but simply inviting and enabling people to see their work and life and options from many different perspectives, then giving the support to do something about it. They discover. They decide. They act.

We truly have a role in shaping the future, because we enable people to choose to see the world through many different lenses. As more people see themselves in a bigger way, I believe they will see us all in a bigger way, and this will change direction from a highly individualistic ‘me/more/now’ culture to a wiser, interdependent view of ‘us and them and you and me/enough is just fine thanks/and is this good for future generations?’

I hope there will be a future time where happiness is more widely felt and enjoyed, because one person’s success is not about beating another in some ranking/performance/level of ownership table, but rather the success (and fulfilment) comes from one person helping another, and another….Coaching conversations with clients, and the wisdoms that emerge from them, has shown me how we are connected to everyone and everything around us, the past that got us here and the future of those who follow us. A strong vibrant profession will enable more and more people wake up feeling good. That would truly be a mark of success for our profession. It’s a great time to be alive.

Now where have I left those reading glasses?

Neil Scotton, PCC, December 2010

A new way to market yourself

Fresh beginnings…we all love them. There is something so promising about a blank slate. Maybe that’s why so many people make resolutions at the start of each New Year.

As we march through the remaining days of 2010, our minds inevitably think about what we expect or hope to accomplish in the New Year. Maybe we want to lose ten pounds, eat better, exercise more, start writing that book, get over your fear of public speaking, make new friends, create a better work-life balance and build a social media platform all in 2011. So many resolutions start strong only to fade into some distant memory before we flip the calendar page to February.

It seems that often, the problem with keeping a resolution is lack of ongoing support and accountability. As a coach, that’s where you come in. Use this time of year to your advantage and market yourself and your coaching services as that accountability needed to make resolutions stick.

Want some research to back this up? The latest study from the ICF found that people are turning to professional coaching to attain goals in their personal and professional lives. More than two-fifths (42.6 percent) of the ICF Global Consumer Awareness Study’s respondents who had experienced coaching chose “optimize individual and/or team performance” as their motivation for being coached. Following this reason was “expand professional career opportunities” (at 38.8 percent); “improve business management strategies” (at 36.1 percent). The study also showed that coaching is being used to help people increase their self-esteem/self-confidence and manage work/life balance.

Not only is coaching allowing people to attain their goals, but coaching has proven to be a very satisfying experience as a result. The study also found that 83 percent of respondents were “satisfied” and 36 percent were “very satisfied” with their coaching experience.

Right now is the perfect time to market your coaching services to clients wanting to meet their newly made resolutions. Couple these findings with examples of how coaching can help them reach their goals and resolutions (through goal defining, action plan creation, accountability, etc.).

What about you? At the start of a New Year, do you find yourself working with clients on reaching their New Year’s goals?

How do you plan to market yourself to new clients in 2011?