18-07-2022

7 Reasons Why You should Hire A Coach Before You Hire Marketing Service Providers

WRITTEN BY MICHELE PARAD

Your marketing dollars will be put to greater use when you first hire a mindset and business coach, someone who has solid experience and understanding of the entire marketing stack so as to steer you in the right direction and prevent you from jumping into certain activities before laying down a great foundation and plan. Here are some reasons why working with agencies and freelancers may be too premature when you’re launching your business, pivoting or setting yourself up for the next stage of growth.

1. They don’t provide strategic advise. You are the visionary.

If you start off by first engaging with various marketing agencies or freelancers, they will only execute on your vision, they will typically not provide you with the strategy and tactics on whether your vision needs amendments. So imagine if you built out that beautiful new website or landing pages and then realize you want to overhaul your copy? Well then most of your design will need to change as well. If instead you went through a process to define your niche, conduct your market research, have a solid understanding of your mission, and your goals, then from there you can approach marketing experts with the confidence that you have a well defined plan.

2. They will sell you the urgency of their service whether or not you actually need it or are ready for it.

Many marketing agencies or freelancers specialize in one or a few specific niche areas whether it be brand, design, SEO, ads, organic social media marketing, funnels, affiliates etc. They will pitch you on the importance of their service versus other types of services and even demonstrate that with their client success stories. But how do you really know that this approach is right for you at the current stage in your business lifecycle? For example, you want to run ads, but did you check first if you have compelling resources and a process to nurture your leads? If you are sending traffic to a landing page is it well designed for conversion? is the ad itself optimized and what type of ad would make the most sense to run for your industry?

3. You may not really know what you are looking for, or how to prioritize your task roadmap.

As an example, you want to hire a virtual assistant, for behind the scenes admin help. But there are many types of VAs, some are more technical, that love software and building out your tool stack, others are better at calendar scheduling and organization and still others are more creative types that can help with graphics, video while others are best at research. On the rare occasion you may find a VA agency that has the ability to do all those things for you. But which do you need help with first and how to prioritize what?

4. Without a dialed in message and understanding of your content pillars and An established system to interact with clients, you’re other efforts will fall by the waste-side.

One new popular trend I see is people posting or attempting to post viral videos on social media without having an established website, offer, or way for people to purchase from them. For example, an assistant to a successful course creator messaged me and when I asked him how he could help me, he had a vague answer. Was he going to coach me on my plan of action? Did he have a done for you service? It’s one thing if you want to create buzz ahead of their launch but it’s another if you don’t know what their purpose is..then their content is a waste of time because you don’t know who you are speaking to.

5. If you Are out of Alignment, You Will only find the type of marketing Partner that is matching where you are at energetically and subconsciously.

If you’ve had some bad experience with coworkers, bosses, collaborators in the past and you haven’t cleared your patterns with delegation, collaboration or money, then chances are you may end up working with people that are not going to meet your expectations or will take advantage of you or will not follow through on promises. This can be a painful one to get out of and cause further frustration and a downward spiral in your general wellbeing.

6. If you don’t have a method for following your intuition and guidance you may not make the best decisions, especially when you are coming from “survival mode.”

If you just want to get yourself out there, get on podcasts or into events or stages or you want to be able to delegate certain marketing activities to others, you may choose the wrong partners if you don’t have a strong approach to listening to your intuition. It’s important to have an outside perspective of your team because effectively those are the people than can either help you move to a higher timeline or keep you stuck.

7. Whatever marketing you do, it won’t convert unless you genuinely believe you are worthy of clients and have a well thought Out messaging and sales process.

You can pay thousands of dollars for a lead generation expert, but if your subconscious mind is blocking you from getting clients, it doesn’t matter how many discovery calls you have, or how many people sign up for your email list, it wont convert. Or you could be wasting a lot of time on, for example, doing outreach or conducting webinars but then no one signs up for your higher ticket product because you are not yet an energetic match for that which you desire. You could also be pushing out content that doesn’t speak to the frequency of the client that you want to call in.

I hope the above insights were helpful in your decision-making process. We all have our individual journeys and how we get to our ultimate outcome so if you still end up working with marketers first and a coach later once you’ve established certain aspects of your business, that’s ok too! The most important thing is to follow your YES’s rather than Maybe’s when you decide on anything. Please reach out to me in the meantime if you’d like to have a discovery call to see how I may be able to support.