Social media gradually changed the way people communicate, network, learn and even promote businesses. With billions of daily active users, it couldn’t be otherwise. Everybody is at least on one social media platform, nowadays. Hence, branding on social media is a great way to grow your coaching business; that is, if you create a holistic social media branding strategy, and manage to stick to it.
In this article, you’ll learn how to build your brand on social media, step by step, establish yourself as a thought leader in your niche and stay relevant, in a very competitive market.
Let’s get started.
Why you need branding
When you’re in the process of developing your coaching business, branding can be a powerful tool; especially on social media platforms that are designed to help you create a relationship with your followers (your target audience, ideally). Indeed, you can’t successfully grow an online coaching business without having a sound relationship with your clients, in the first place.
Branding, on social media, can increase overall brand awareness and provide you with a strong competitive advantage — if you do this right. Your followers’ perception will prove to be key in branding; and in conducting reputation management. Also, as we’ll see further on, through these platforms, you can establish and communicate your value proposition, clarify your area of expertise, and demonstrate your skills to prospective clients.
16 steps to build your brand on social media
More often than not, coaches don’t have much free time to orchestrate a branding strategy on social media; or, maybe they don’t know how to. Yet, to make your brand visible to potential clients, branding on social media is a must. By taking advantage of the dynamic social media marketplace, you can grow an engaged audience, boost brand awareness and outshine peer endurance coaches.
To get the most out of social media for your online coaching business, follow this 16-step guide:
1. Identify your audience
For successful branding on social media, first, you need to know the people you’re going to market your coaching services to. In other words, you must have a clear understanding of your target audience:
- Who they are
- How old they are
- Where they go about life in the real world
- What they do for a living
And then:
- The (sports-related) challenges they face
- Their goals
- Their values
When you know your audience well, you can adapt your social media presence — hence, your strategy — to their needs; and generate high-quality leads for your coaching business.
2. Establish a clear value proposition; Your brand statement
It’s also very important to establish what your values are, as this can make for a strong brand statement. Ask yourself, ‘What do you stand for?’, ‘What do you have to offer?’, ‘How are you different from other endurance coaches?’. Once you’ve identified those core touchpoints, write them down and make them your ‘doctrine’. Mind you, you must have a very clear answer to each of these questions, if you are going for successful branding on social media.
3. Identify which social media work for you
After having identified your audience, and clarified your value proposition, next, you have to pinpoint the social media platforms you need to make your way through. Mind you, these platforms can be hard to master. And, with so many available, it may be quite challenging to choose the one(s) that work for you. But, at the end of the day, it’s wise to focus on the one(s) that your audience is more active on. Doing so will shed light on the interests and needs of your audience. Apart from that, it will also help you understand what kind of content you need to produce, to make your branding on social media work.
4. Define your branding goals and strategy
The next step you need to take, on your way to successful branding on social media, is to set clear, measurable goals. That’s the only way to identify what you want to achieve. Without clearly defined goals and a solid strategy, you might end up chasing your tail; a wild goose chase of sorts.
5. Define your content and content types; Make it original and engaging
Effective social media branding highly depends on the content you publish; and in what format, every time. Therefore, it’s critical to define what you want to share with your followers; and, make sure to make it unique, compelling, and engaging. Above all, remember to create content that brings value to your target prospects. That’s how you’ll build long-term relationships with them; ultimately, increasing revenue for your coaching business.
A few things to consider, when creating your content strategy:
- Add a ‘call to action’ to your content, when necessary
- Always write in the voice of your brand
- Repost or share industry news and content
- Design infographics
- Use hashtags
- Upload pictures or videos from your athletes’ daily routine; or yours
- Utilize the live streaming feature
- Post as regularly as possible
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6. Create your own blog
A high-impact coaching blog is a perfect way to show your target audience what they can expect from a collaboration with you. By sharing helpful, and insightful tips you’ll earn their trust, as an expert. What’s more, keeping a blog offers a great opportunity to emerge as an authority in your niche.
7. Update and brand your social media pages
It’s important to let people know who you are, what you do, why you do it and how you’ve become the professional that you are. Updating your social media pages with all the necessary information is a fundamental step toward creating a successful brand on those platforms.
BONUS: Have everyone on your team update their LinkedIn profiles
You guessed it! It’s about time to let you on a tip that can make all the difference in your efforts to brand your coaching business on social media. So, you and your team — if you have one — should add career changes and achievements in your LinkedIn profiles; as well as academic info or achievements. This will inspire your followers, showing them that you are an active team that leaves no stone unturned, when it comes to pursuing knowledge; and your dreams.
8. Share your content on a regular basis
Consistency in content sharing is key for efficient branding on social media. This means that you have to publish content regularly. What will help you is deciding how often you want to share content, create a schedule for it and keep it running. You can use automation tools to help maintain cadence. In this way, your target audience won’t forget about you. If you can’t handle daily posting, you can always post weekly. In any case, always choose quality over quantity.
9. Make your area of expertise clear to your audience
This is something to keep in mind at all times. You don’t want a prospective client to approach you thinking that you offer other services than the ones that you actually do. That can be very disappointing for both of you. Thus, always be clear as to what you do and what you have to offer.
10. Maintain a cadence and engage with your audience
A strategic approach for branding on social media, requires maintaining a cadence with your posts; and, of course, creating a relationship with your audience. This approach also includes building a strong customer care system. To achieve that, try to establish high and fast response rates on your social media pages. That will make your followers go from being total strangers to becoming enthusiastic brand advocates, faster than Eliud Kipchoge does the half Marathon ✌.
11. Use your contacts to build your minimum follower base
If you’re just starting out with social media and don’t have any followers, it’s a good idea to start adding your existing contacts to the mix. This way, you can build a minimum follower base. Then, you can start expanding your ‘army of followers’, gradually; while having your target audience in mind.
12. Join groups relevant to your industry and subject-matter expertise
Joining groups that pertain to your subject-matter expertise is an excellent way to:
- Understand the needs of your audience
- Reach out to more experienced people than you on a specific subject, and learn a few things from them
All in all, these groups will help you:
- Study market advisors, and influencers
- Generate ideas; and even discover opportunities for your marketing strategy
- Receive feedback from experts
- Gain people’s trust
- Establish partnerships to increase your brand’s credibility
- Expand your follower base
- Challenge yourself with business aspects that matter, to expand your skill set
- Help people who face problems related to your area of expertise
13. Use the proper trends via hashtags
Without a doubt, hashtags will help boost your branding on social media. How? Simply by allowing the right people to find your content. Put another way, using relevant hashtags, will eventually drive traffic to your content, and page. The key here is to find hashtags that match your brand voice and the content you share every time. That’s why you should include a combination of popular, relevant, and branded hashtags; without overdoing it, though.
14. Remain active and responsive
The more you tend to your garden, the more it thrives, right? That’s pretty much the deal with social media, too; remaining active and responsive keeps your page alive; and can even help your coaching business thrive, with proper management. The reason behind this? Well, posts with more active and thoughtful interactions will create faithful followers and get more reach. Your audience expects you to engage with them; particularly when it comes to providing support.
15. Monitor your progress on each medium
Setting metrics — for your defined goals — to evaluate performance will go a long way to creating efficient branding on social media. Thankfully, social media platforms provide tools to track and monitor social media performance.
Curate your content every quarter
This is a priority if you want your content to be evergreen (remember the garden we mentioned earlier?). What’s evergreen content, you may ask 🤔. Evergreen content is one that gets curated, long after its publication, to remain relevant and up to date. So, take note to curate your content every quarter, or so — without disrupting your cadence, of course.
16. Leverage thought leadership and become an influencer
Thought leadership is the hype in the digital reality; naturally, social media wouldn’t be an exception. Many experts place their bets on leadership content to make their brands stand out on social media platforms; and so should you, for that matter.
To elaborate, you should focus on providing content that shows expertise in your niche. Not just that, but always be available to answer questions and offer a few extra tips to your audience, should they need them. By doing so, you’ll register in their mind as an authority and an influencer; someone to look up to, when they need pro tips or answers. That, alone, can make a huge difference when branding on social media.
Discover opportunities to speak to people
Someone who really wants to communicate with people will always find the means to do so; and, trust us when we say, there will be plenty of opportunities to connect with people on social media. Be it on your own posts, influencers’ posts, groups you’ve joined, or through hashtags, the options are endless. Keep your antennas up and your eyes peeled; and seize every chance you get, to speak with others.
Boost your authority and leverage credibility and trust
Social media platforms allow you to communicate directly with your niche prospects and show them your expertise. Once they realize that, they’ll start interacting with you through your content (with likes, comments, shares). That’s how you’ll build credibility around your brand, and a loyal follower base that trusts you.
TL;DR
When used properly, social media can serve as a powerful branding tool for your online coaching business. Effective branding on social media will help you skyrocket your online visibility; and, why not, create some serious ripples in the endurance sports industry. The best part is that you don’t have to be a social media guru to achieve this. Nonetheless, if you’re going to succeed in this, you’re going to have to put your mind to it and step up your game. If you follow the simple, yet strategic, steps we’ve offered in this article, you’ll get off to a great start.
So, what are you waiting for? Start creating your brand’s bright future 😉!