July 24, 2019

“How do I get local clients?” and more...

Sent by Jonathan Stark on July 25th, 2019

(PRE-S: I still owe you two “revelations” messages but today was group coaching day, so that’s the focus of this email. Stay tuned tomorrow for the second revelation.)

In today’s group coaching session, we had a bunch of good questions that touched on topics like:

How to market upstream services like branding that don’t have an obvious immediate outcome
Default product ladder “rungs” for a coaching business
How to manage a coaching calendar without going insane
When and how to use vanity domains
How to price R&D work

Plus, we did a deep dive on starting a podcast, and working with local vs remote clients.

Good stuff!

Here are some of the questions I answered today:

My primary area of expertise is branding, but it’s challenging to hone in on pains since “branding” can include many touch-points that connect a customer to a business. The most narrow I’ve gotten is “I help small businesses attract and retain new customers.” which still feels general, but allows me to provide solutions in all areas (print, product, digital, etc.). What are your thoughts on how “branding” is defined and the associated pain points? (timestamp: 1m 30s)

My local market has lots of high revenue small businesses which are good opportunities but they are very hard to get in front of. There are not many local industry specific conferences/publications etc. Do you have any suggestions for directly targeting local industry in this type of situation? Is it a mistake to focus on local. If so, do you have suggestions for taking first the first steps in getting remote clients? For context, I do full stack custom rails development of backend systems (timestamp: 22m 25s)

Promoting a brand new podcast: I’m launching a podcast called “Marketing for Consultants” in the next month or so. The audience is independent consultants who need help marketing their niche consulting business. Do you have any recommendations on how to launch the podcast to maximize impact/listeners in my target audience? I have no problem investing money if I’m spending it properly. Jonathan, I know you’re a big fan of 80:20, particularly when it comes to your podcasts: what’s the 80:20 here? (timestamp: 36m 31s)

Can you talk about the productized coaching ladder, and also the nitty gritty about how you manage clients and appointments. It seems like having the differentiated services and lots of people you coach, the logistics get challenging. (timestamp: 50m 40s)

Productized service on its own domain name/website: I’ve got a great domain for my productized service - a “does what it says on the tin” domain. Any thoughts on having the service on a standalone site, away from the primary business brand website? (timestamp: 57m 41s)

Can you explain a bit about value-pricing for Research and Development? Thank you. (timestamp: 61m 15s)

(If you’re curious, you can review the entire list of past questions here)

Do you have questions like these that you’d like to get answered?

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Yours,

—J