I’m doing a lot of marketing work for coaches these days. I love the challenges and rewards of this niche and realize I bring a unique perspective to this type of work — and it’s because I know the value of being coached.
I’ve worked with coaches and mentors many times throughout my life — people I hired to work with me for professional growth and those who helped me with my personal goals.
Since January 2019, I’ve worked with business coach Ilise Benun. She’s made such a difference for me and my business (#fanforlife). Earlier this year, I hired a keto coach from YouTube to help me refocus on eating low-carb. She was helpful, but since I’m still a work in progress I may hire another coach before the holidays. A preemptive strike kind of thing.
Being a true believer in coaching makes me a natural advocate for the profession. And when I understand a niche and have personal experience with it, it gives my Melanie-the-Marketer super-powers an extra boost.
WHY BUSINESS COACHES SHOULD USE LINKEDIN
Raise your hand if you’re a business coach who needs to spend more time on LinkedIn.
If you read any of my recent blog posts, you know I’m a huge fan of LinkedIn. Today, I’m doing a mash-up of two favorite topics — coaching and LinkedIn, bringing you my top tips for business coaches who want to stand out on LinkedIn, grow their connections and get more coaching clients.
So … to the coaches reading this, here’s why I believe LinkedIn is practically perfect for you:
- LinkedIn is all about business, so it’s tailor-made for your needs. People use LinkedIn for business purposes, so that makes this social network your best platform. If you love using Instagram or Facebook, consider those nice-to-haves. Devote most of your time and energy (at least 80%) to LinkedIn. Trust me on this.
- You can easily find your ideal clients. Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, with their overly simple search capabilities, don’t make it easy for you to find the right people to connect with. LinkedIn’s search feature could be better, no doubt. But you can still find and connect with prospective coaching clients by industry, company, role, background, education, mutual connections, geographical locations and more. Exciting, right?
- Use LinkedIn as your CRM. This might be one of my favorite aspects of LinkedIn, and this isn’t the first time I’ve said this (for example, here). Instead of investing in a CRM — the cost, the learning curve, the guilt if you don’t stick with it — use LinkedIn. It’s what I rely on to keep track of DMs I send people, along with the dates I reached out and their responses. I can search LinkedIn for email addresses and phone numbers and other personal information whenever I need more of the typical CRM data.
- There are endless options for how to stay visible on LinkedIn. Sure, people who follow you on other social networks can see your posts occasionally. But LinkedIn outshines the other social platforms by a mile because of all you can do on it to stay visible. Let me count the ways …
fab four for linkedin mastery
1. Post engaging status updates.
LinkedIn’s algorithm won’t show your activity to every connection, but many will see your updates — especially once your post begins to get more likes, comments and shares.
All of this activity stays connected to your profile via the Activity section (see example below), so people can more easily catch up to see what you’re doing on LinkedIn — and how other people are responding to what you share and comment on.
2. STALK PEOPLE (In A LINKEDIN-APPROPRIATE WAY).
View connections’ Activity section to see what they recently shared and liked. This gives you somethin’ to talk about 🎵 sang Bonnie Raitt 🎵 when you want to engage with a person but aren’t sure what to say.
3. LIKE, COMMENT, Share. A LoT.
You might be thinking, Duh, Melanie! — that’s Social Media 101, and it’s not that hard. But it is difficult when you’re a busy coach who forgets to use LinkedIn regularly. I’ve been using the platform about 10 minutes a day, including weekends, since January 1. It’s been easy to do, and my business benefits from all of the activity.
4. RE-PURPOSE PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED CONTENT AS ARTICLES.
You know LinkedIn has a blog-like feature, where you can share longer content, right? I’m not a fan of using your best content on LinkedIn first, but I love the idea of getting extra mileage out of older content that’s on your website and turning it into a LinkedIn article. You already spent time creating the material, so repurpose with purpose!
Meet one of my BUSINESS coach clients, Denny
Dennis O’Connell is a coach who works with executives and leaders in IT.
I’ve been working with business coach Denny O’Connell for over a year now. His niche is an industry he knows and loves, Information Technology, where he spent his career leading successful teams in sales, marketing, operations and other departments.
Denny recently asked me for advice on how to improve his personal LinkedIn profile. With a new coaching accreditation under his belt, Denny knew he would be using LinkedIn more regularly, and he wanted feedback on messages he was planning to DM people.
I reviewed his profile and one-to-one messages wrote out suggested changes, explaining why I thought the revisions made sense. Denny agreed and made my changes and did a few of his own, too.
A few days later, Denny emailed me an update on his progress with the personal outreach via his new and improved LinkedIn profile. Of the 60 DMs he sent out, he received 40+ responses — and we both thought that was great!
IF YOU’RE A BUSINESS COACH, LET’S TALK
If you’re a business coach who needs an experienced marketer who understands the ins and outs of LinkedIn — and someone so enamored with the platform that she hired an illustrator to create cute little LinkedIn characters for her — I’m that marketer. So let’s talk soon!
Image Credit: Inlytics on Unsplash
Melanie is easy to work with and very responsive. I'd recommend her for your marketing and communications needs.
Highly recommended!
With Melanie’s understanding of the ketogenic way of eating, her writing skills and her ability to match my desired tone and voice for the emails, she was quickly able to write them on my behalf — and to my great satisfaction. This saved me a ton of time and allowed me to get my coaching website completed.
Consider me a happy client!
Your insights to the benefits of LinkedIn as my calling card are inspiring. Thanks for sharing. My weekend goal is to refresh my profile. Love the class with Ilise.
Thank you, Margaret! I’m glad you enjoyed the AWAI session. It was a pleasure for me to be a part of it.
Well written article and very informative – thanks for sharing! I’m seeing more and more how powerful LinkedIn is and I plan to use it a lot more than I have in the past.
I’m looking forward to your interview with Ilise Benum this Friday!
Thanks for your note, Shelli! I hope you enjoyed the interview. I had fun doing it, once I got used to Facebook Live! haha
Saw you on Ilise Bunen’s 21-day challenge. Sounded right to me. Thx.
Hi, Dana. I hope you’re enjoying the 21-day challenge. Two-thirds through it, right?