I recently spoke to a relationship coach who wrote a great article about how to deal with the family conflict people experience during the holiday seasons. It had a catchy title, was timely (she published it weeks before Christmas), and was generating a good amount of traffic for her. To ride the wave of momentum, she decided to boost the post on Facebook (that means she paid for more traffic) and as a result, she got even more visitors and feedback.

Sounds awesome, right?

Well, the problem is that the traffic and buzz led to exactly zero clients. Nothing. Zip. Zilch. Nada.

While she started with a fantastic article, what was missing was a couple of the key building blocks to creating a successful campaign on any social network. This article is a beginner’s guide to building a social media campaign that takes someone from a visitor, to a lead, to a paying client.

Selling coaching on social media is not much different than selling painting services door-to-door

After my first couple years of university, I started my journey into entrepreneurship by starting a painting company with a buddy of mine. We scouted out wealthy neighbourhoods with older houses in need of paint jobs, we blanketed the neighborhoods with flyers, and then knocked on every door offering free estimates. Our sales funnel looked something like this:

• Give a flyer and knock on 100 doors
• Talk to 25 people
• Provide 5 free estimates
• Book 2 jobs

With an average job being worth $2.5k, we knew we needed to book roughly 40 jobs to reach our goal of grossing $100k. That also meant knocking on 2,000 doors. Let’s just say I spent many of my spring evenings knocking on doors, never mind providing estimates and actually doing some of the painting.

Selling coaching on social media is not that different because customers still have to go through a series of steps before they make a purchase. In both cases, the customer goes from:

• completely unaware of your services, to
• looking at content you created (a flyer, a tweet, or Facebook update), to
• opting in to engage with you further (getting a free estimate or signing up for a newsletter), to
• hiring you

At each step, there is drop off (or what marketers would call a conversion rate). The really cool thing with social media is that the time that it takes a customer to go through the whole funnel can be very short. It can be a matter of minutes. Whereas, if you are selling a big ticket item like a house or car, the selling cycle might last many weeks or months.

The necessary building blocks of a social media campaign that gets conversions

They say that social media is all about having conversations and while that might be true, no amount of social media fans and followers is going to put dinner on the table unless you consider the building blocks required to get people to buy your services (e.g. coaching services).

The four basic building blocks are:

1. An attention grabber
2. The content
3. The call to action
4. The sale

What are each of these elements?

An attention grabber

This is what you see in your Facebook feed, your Twitter feed, on Google searches, etc… It’s what you use to get people to become aware of you and is comprised of a headline, a catchy image, a video and sometimes all three.

The content

This is the thing that you want people read, watch, or interact with. It’s a blog post, a video, an infographic, a picture, an app or an event invitation.

The call to action

This is what you want people to do after they interact with your content. Maybe you want them to read something else, take you up on a free consultation, sign up for your newsletter, or get a free quote.

The sale

This is the point at which the customer passes what some marketers call the “credit card test.” In an e-commerce setting, the transaction can occur with no human involvement. In the case of coaching, there’s usually going to be, at the minimum, a phone call.

The building blocks need to lead the consumer to a logical conclusion

Now that you know what each of the building blocks are, you need to make sure that they help your visitors turn into a lead and then into a paying customer. The conversion rate that you get at each step depends on how closely the first block connects with the last block.

Take, for example, the Wheel of Life tool that we created a little while ago. It’s a nice little lead generation tool that is constantly sending us traffic.

Here’s what the sales funnel building blocks for that campaign look like:

• The attention grabber: We get attention by putting out tweets and messages that say something like: “Is your life out of balance? Take the Wheel of Life assessment.”
• The content: If people click on the attention grabbing link, they land on a page that is pretty self explanatory and asks them to fill in their own wheel of life.
• The call to action: Once they fill in the wheel of life, we prompt them to search for a coach by typing in their zip code.
• The sale: When the prospect does a zip search, they are presented with a list of coaches in their area. They are asked to message a coach, check out the coach’s website, or request a coach recommendation.

The interesting thing about the Wheel of Life is that we tested two call to actions. We thought a lot of people would want to share their completed wheel of life on social media and thereby drive more people to the tool. But we want them to search for a life coach to balance their lives. It turns out that for every person that shares the wheel of life on social media, three people search for a coach. I wouldn’t have predicted that but it certainly works in our favour.

Why it works

The reason it works in our favour is because there is a good connection between the attention grabber (Life out of balance? Fill in the wheel of life) and the end goal (Get a coach).

Let’s consider the relationship coach with the family drama article during the holidays. What could have been a good call to action for her? What is the next logical step that will lead the customer to hiring her? Maybe it’s a free relationship building ebook, a teleclass on dealing with family drama, or a free consultation for relationship coaching. Whatever it is, it needs to be a close fit and that’s sometimes hard to predict.

This brings me to my last point. At every stage of the funnel, you’re not likely to optimize the results the first time. The secret is to continuously try new things and always measure the results, a tell tale sign of a successful mindset.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot my call to action. If you are trying to build a thriving coaching practice and are not yet taking advantage of all of the paid features on Noomii, you should upgrade now. Hint: Watch the video on this page and we’ll give you a discount code that you can apply to your purchase.

Check out these related articles:

• The Ultimate Wheel of Life Interactive Assessment

• The Single Biggest Change You Must Make to Become a 6-Figure Coach