WW 214: How To Clarify Your Messaging as a Financial Coach - Solo Show

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A Quick Recap from this episode

This week we’re going to be talking about something that I’ve heard a lot of coaches are struggling with: how to clarify your messaging as a financial coach. I’m excited to talk about this because it’s something I struggled to do myself in the early days of my business, and I’ve gotten so many DMs and questions from clients around this topic.

Are you changing what you do, who you help, what sets you apart about 100 different times? Are you finding it hard to find where you fit in in this online space and how you can stand out and attract the clients you want to serve? Then this one’s for you.

There are a few things you can do to get more clear on your messaging, your brand, and who you and your business are in this online space. We’ll discuss the 2 most important ingredients to your messaging: your niche and your legacy. Plus, I’ll walk you through a brand messaging checklist and share how you can apply it to your financial coaching business, but first, a story...

Something you may or may not know about me is that my first foray into the world of self-employment wasn’t through The Words and Money Podcast and being a money coach straight out of the gate. I first started writing social media and blog content for a small content marketing agency in Chicago.

I wrote content for estate planning firms, corporate furniture companies, sales and leadership executive coaches, and the content marketing firm, itself. I learned SO much about so many topics from that contract work, but I especially learned about content marketing, inbound marketing, copywriting, social media marketing, and messaging.

It helped me immensely in kickstarting my own content-based, social media marketed business. But if you thought I came out of the gate swinging, don’t be fooled. While I continued to write content for a couple years for all these different businesses, helping their messaging be crystal clear and connect with their ideal clients, I struggled to do the same for myself.

I had a general idea of who I wanted to help and how I wanted to help them, but when I say general, I mean, I couldn’t get through the exercises I’ll be giving you in this podcast episode for one reason and one reason alone: I was afraid to GO THERE.

Your Niche (who do you help and what do you help them with?)

The more specific you’re willing to get with this, the more clear your messaging becomes. You can begin to latch on to the unique nuances of this individual’s lifestyle, or tie in stories that create or stem from the specific problem you help with.

Your Legacy

Your niche is the most important because without it you don’t have a strong foundation to launch a business from. Not having a clear niche is one of the reasons your messaging gets watered down and lost among the crowd, so that’s always the #1 place to start with any business problem I encounter.

But the next thing I like to determine is your legacy AKA what do you want to be known for? If you were going to go on The Today Show, what’s the 30 second introduction you’d want them to give for you? And how will that help you stand out from the crowd? When identifying your legacy, a lot of this stems from what you stand for, but more specifically when it’s the money coaching world, it also stems from HOW you help your clients achieve the results they're looking for.

Your legacy may be heavily influenced by your coaching framework - something we help the money coaches moving through WCB develop - and if you haven’t guessed it already, your framework should be heavily influenced by your niche.

But this is where we’re able to bring the people you serve and you, together.

Knowing these 2 key things will get you on a really strong foundation for crafting very clear messaging. Now we can take it a couple layers deeper.

One of our favorite resources to link to and share in the content marketing agency I worked for was the website Business2Community.com. It’s nothing mind-blowing at first glance, but it’s packed full of great marketing resources that we loved to sink our teeth into back in the day, and I find a lot of the content we used to read from the website to still be very relevant today.

An article from 2014 shared a checklist on brand messaging, and I wanted to refer to it for the remainder of this week’s episode. It’s such a great way to outline getting clear with your messaging. There are 1 or 2 things I don’t necessarily agree with, but I thought it would be a helpful guideline to take and apply specifically to financial coaches aka your situation.

*Sourced from Business2Community.com

Let’s dig into it…

Messaging Appeals to the target audience: Your messaging should appeal to your Niche! Again, this is why the work is so important.

Communicates the value offered: The value of coaching comes in both tangible, monetary ways, and intangible ways. How can you communicate the value of coaching? It may take some experience and tracking of your early clients’ results, but you are also your first client - share your own results!

Reflects the reality of your business: Honesty is the best policy! If you’ve never worked with a client before, let your first client know! If it’s the beta round of your program, be honest about that! When you create content and talk about your business as if it’s something it’s not, it puts you in an awkward situation and pulls you out of alignment and integrity. It’s the worst place to coach from.

Different from the competitor’s message: Identify your unique value proposition, both in how you market to your clients, and also how you serve them.

Leveraged against the competitor’s message: You can create content that is polarizing (in a good way), that takes a stand, that hyper attracts your ideal clients to you, and keeps those who you probably wouldn’t want to work with anyway far far away (repel them, like the magnet that you are!)

Uses unique and snazzy words: instead, use their words - how would they describe their problem, their goals, the solution to their problems (not in your expert technical terms, but using the language they have access to)?

Communicates benefits before features: The Transformation - not time, # of videos, the spreadsheets, but how their goals are possible when working with you, their fears can be mitigated, and their problems can be made less painful.

Message is consistent across the board: Those who are most successful are quick to decide and slow to change. Approach your marketing and messaging with the mindset that you have to stick with this for at least 1 year (bonus points if you actually do it!).

Don’t forget that if you’re ready to keep your pricing simple and get some help making more sales, then it’s time for you to grab the Online Coach’s Pricing Workbook below!