#90: Who Do You Serve?

Well hello there and happy new year health coaches! Yay, we made it. We are here. It's 2020 and this is our first episode of the podcast for 2020 awesome. But it is the fourth in a special series that we've been doing, designed to help you make this year your best year yet inside your health coaching business and heck, inside your whole life. So in the past three episodes that we did like back in December, those focused more on goal setting and mindset and you can go back and check those out if you want to look for episodes 87 88 and 89 but today we are sort of jumping into the more practical aspects. All right, how do we actually make this happen? Michelle, just tell me what to do. Everybody just wants, just tell me what to do. So we're going to be getting into these practical steps that you need to take in order to move forward in a big way.

Now if you are here live as we are recording into the health coach power community Facebook group. As we do every week, I'm more than happy to take your questions. You can just say hello in the comments and chat me up as we go along there. Now I want to share a personal story about changes in my own health coaching practice as it relates to today's topic, but before I do that, as some of you may know twice a year and only twice a year, I offer an opportunity to work with me and like a very hands on way inside my life fast track semester of healthy profit university. Now I'm not going to go into like all the details about that now because we are not here to talk about that, but I do want to let you know that the wait list is now open at healthcoachpower.com/waitlist and you can head over there and add your name to the list if you just simply know, "Yeah, I'm interested in this."

You know you're already kind of had this on your mind just for being on the wait list. You're going to get some extra bonuses from me. You're going to get some exclusive behind the scenes sneak peaks as we go through the next couple of weeks and some overall extra lovin' so again, if you're in any way interested in getting that hands on help with your business, the wait list is now open at healthcoachpower.com/waitlist. I know I promised you personal story from the business that is coming, but we also need to give a great big shout out to Britta. Hey, Britta who left this five star review on iTunes and I'm so super grateful for all of you who go ahead and take the time to do that. Did you know you can actually leave a review right from the Apple podcast app on your phone?

I don't know if that's what Britta did, but here's what she said. She said, "I love this podcast. Michelle does such a great job of tackling everyday problems and questions we have as health coaches. She also provides a ton of help for creating and improving your business. I'm very thankful for this podcast."

Britta, I am thankful for you. Thanks for listening. And please send your mailing address to support@healthcoachpower.com so we can properly thank you with a little gift. Okay. Time to give you that little peek into how my own health coaching practice is working these days and really how it's evolved through the years. So even a year or two ago, most of my health coaching clients were people who had literally been on my mailing list like two years, three years, four, five, six, seven, like a long time.

And wow. Right? Like that is a long time to wait to turn a prospective client into a paying actual client. Would you agree with that? Yes. Yes. So there are other ways that I would move the needle to sign clients. There's other things you can do, you know, you can hold special events and launches and whatnot and that definitely works. But there's been a huge change that has happened since I finally, finally launched my new website, launched my new brand. That is ding, ding, ding. I want you to listen to this part. My new brand that is much more specifically targeted to a particular market. Yeah, you heard it here first. I think what happened in the past was that somebody had to hang out with me for like several months, several years to get a sense of what I was all about and now like if you go, if you go to my, my health coaching website, which is shesgotpower.com, you're going to know like anybody upon arriving is going to know right away.

If I'm the coach for you, it says right on my homepage, it says right on my business cards anywhere else that you might see me. I help women heal from burnout and chronic stress. Boom. Like that's what I do. That's who I help and this was sort of a ballsy move for me because I've been in business, I've been working as a health coach now for 10 plus years. I've had all sorts of clients. I'm good at helping a lot of different people with a lot of different things. We've had a lot of successes through the years, but with my recent rebranding, I've basically started from scratch in some ways and said, okay, here's who I am, here's the very, very specific group of women that I serve best that I know best and what do you know? I mean I used to get a very, very, very slow trickle of client applications through my website and like 50% 75% of them were no good meaning not somebody that I wanted to work with, somebody who was out of the scope of my practice or somebody who didn't have the means hire a coach.

It was just be really people from all over the place. So a lot of times the applications were like a big fat no for me. But now totally different story. Just this week I booked a couple of consultations and I'm noticing that the applications are coming in like on a regular basis. Like it's not a slow trickle anymore. It's like something I can predict and count on this frequency of the applications even though, and this is huge, even though, and not putting a lot of effort into promoting myself, like honestly I've been slacking off in a lot of ways, prioritizing my time and it's not like I've been really promoting here, you know, book a consultation. It's really more about the people who are landing on my website. They hear or they hear my message once. Maybe they're hearing me on a podcast when I'm a guest or whatever it is, and they hear that message or they see that message and it's so crystal clear that they immediately know who I serve and how I can help that person.

And if it's a match, if they're like, yes, that's me, they're at like now it's 98% of the applications I get are a perfect fit, perfect fit. I have never had consultations go more smoothly. I have never signed clients with more ease or at a higher per hour rate, if that makes sense. Like I don't sell my services on a per hour basis. But if you were to break down my packages into how much time I'm actually spending with each client one-on-one, it is outrageously higher the compared to what I used to get. So the big, big difference thing I really want to drive home in this episode is that it is all about choosing to narrow down to that very specific target market, speak that person's language and build an audience of only that exact type of person, not an audience of like you know this person over here and like at this mishmash of these other people over there that you met at this random thing that you did and you know you're you don't want, you don't want like this menagerie of a zillion kinds of people on your mailing list.

You want one perfect prospective client type on your mailing list. We're going to talk more about the mailing list and how to build that audience during next week's show, so keep your eyes open for that. If you're like, okay, great, Michelle, how do I do this? We're going to get more into that, but for just right now, please hang on this thought because it's so important. Who do you serve? Like tell me in the comments, who do you serve or who can you serve really, really well? It might even be interesting to answer the opposite question. Who do you not serve? Who do you not serve particularly well? Like I know I don't serve men. I don't. I've had like one male client in my career and it wasn't my favorite. So who can you serve? Who do you not serve or think about it this way, who out there desperately needs the help that you are uniquely qualified to provide and that might have to do with your training.

It might have to do with your lived experience, your unique qualifications. A lot of times I hear coaches say that they work with drum roll please. Women who want to improve their health. Oh no, that's not a target market. Everybody just scratch that right off the table. That's not a workable or useful way to describe the person that you want to reach. Women who want to improve their health. I mean, what does that even mean? We know they're women. Other than that, doesn't every woman probably want to improve her health in some way? So let's try a few more. Um, how about if you said, I work with women who have Crohn's disease. Okay, now you're getting somewhere that's more like it, you know that you could probably find her at the, you know, the GI doc or in certain support groups on Facebook, so on and so forth.

What about I work with families and young children affected by ADHD. Yeah. Okay, great. Now we're talking, now I know exactly what kind of content you're going to be putting out. Again, we would know where to find these people. You know, particular doctors, therapists, you know, places where parents are already going with their children, the schools certainly. So that would also work. Or even something like, I work with lawyers in New York city, like it doesn't always have to be around a particular health condition. You can choose a target market based on location, based on career age, a group that these people belong to, but something that's going to help you find them. That's very important. If you're like, Oh, I work with women who are 23. Great, how are you going to how are you going to actually do that? Like you're going to go to the women who are 23 meetings, like there's no such thing.

So you have to pick a target market based on criteria that will help you find them and communicate with them in a very targeted way. So I want to give you an example of what I mean by that. Like communicating with some buddy in a targeted way or how to use your target market because it's really a marketing tool. It's a tool. It's not like, um, everyone thinks the target market means like, Oh my God, if I say I work with women who are 40 and have ms, then what if, uh, someone wants to work with me who's only 30. It doesn't matter. You can work with whoever you want, anytime you want, it's your business. But in terms of marketing yourself, you use a target market as a tool to figure out what you're going to do with your marketing so that you can find the right people.

And so you're not just standing in the middle of the world shouting like I can help you get healthier and people just walk by. You have to be shouting something really specific so that the right people turn around and pay attention to you. So here's an example that came up, uh, recently inside of our healthy profit university group. Now listen, I know this can be hard, like no doubt, I've been doing this a very long time. I can generally, like if I was on the phone with you right now, like anybody who's listening right now, if we were on the phone together for an hour, I can usually help you nail that target market like within the hour, cause I have a lot of experience. But if you're having a hard time with this whole concept, just like take a breath, like shake it off. It's okay, don't worry.

It is normal. Everybody, I promise you everybody struggles with this. And I really did too. Like it's easier for me to help you than it was for me to sit down and look at my own business and like my own rebranding and figure out which target market I was really going to commit to because this stuff is personal. It's hard. So if you're unsure, just like it's okay, you're like, where are you need to be right now? Don't worry, you are perfect. You just could use a little bit of help. Like we all need that. So like this example, right, here's, here's some help that might, um, illustrate for you how you would use a target market or what is the purpose of having a target market? So one of our members inside Healthy Profit University, she told me that she's targeting moms between the ages of 35 and 45 who have two to three kids live in the Midwest working care-giving positions and they have a history of yoyo dieting.

Okay. So that's plenty specific. A lot of times I say like, maybe you're not being specific enough. This one was very specific moms, 35 to 45 two to three kids live in the Midwest, working care-giving positions, have a history of yoyo dieting. Like, okay, we know that we've had enough information there. Maybe even too much. So then the thought is, okay, once you have defined a group, it starts to inform your marketing efforts. Like what kind of content would you create for this woman if you were trying to target that group I just mentioned, what kind of content would you create? Like if you were going to create some sort of downloadable freebie, some sort of PDF or something to put on your website, you know, to help build your mailing list, what would that freebie content be? So you could create something like how to end yo-yo dieting cause she's a yo-yo Deiter that's true.

But is it targeted to her, cause there's like tons of yo-yo dieters out there. There are like, you know, teenagers who yo-yo diet. There's like women in their like sixties and seventies who had been dieting for the past 50 years and they're just, it's just way across the board. We have yo-yo dieters everywhere around the whole globe, not just in the Midwest United United States. So how do we actually a more specific group like these Midwest moms? Well, one sort of cheap solution would be you title the piece, how to end yoyo dieting for the Midwestern mom, but really like is the information going to be any different? No. You know, so throwing in a few key words here or there, I don't think that's like the best way to go, but at least it's like an effort. It'd be like an effort at being targeted.

So here's a different idea. Like if this was my target market and I wanted to create content that was so specific to her that she couldn't help but notice me, she couldn't help but turn around and go, Oh Hey, now maybe this person could help me. And that's what you want, right? Anytime you're creating content, even just like a blog post, you want to make it for her or for him, whoever your target market is, you want to come up with a concept that's like so specifically for that person that other people they probably won't even be interested in it. So my suggestion and if you have other ideas, just shout them out. My suggestion for these Midwestern moms or something like a menu of fast food or chain restaurants in the Midwest, like I don't know what you guys have out there, Arby's, Applebee's, uh, whatever.

You get what I'm saying? And at tell, tell her in this document, give her this menu that she can keep in her glove compartment. The best thing to order at each of these establishments so that she doesn't have to go on another diet. Okay. Cause you know that this mom and this age group, but these kids living in the Midwest, like I'm assuming she is driving to soccer practice. She's driving to ballet. She's like dropping kids off and picking them up every night everywhere. And these are the restaurants that she's passing. Like these are hard choices, so help her. This would be a resource that she's going to actually want. She's going to actually pay attention to it. Whereas if it was just like a generic guide to yo-yo dieting, that's something she might download. She'd probably not even gonna read it. You see what I mean?

Like I'm not saying like I just came up with like the best. Perfect, awesome. As a freebie idea for this target market, I'm just trying to illustrate like how your concept and how you go about creating your content can fall out of your target market and be so, so much more effective than if you, if you're being more generic about it. So you're really using your target market to develop excellent content that brings the right people to your door and this applies to your freebies. This, like I said, to your blog posts, to what kind of workshop you're going to hold at the local, wherever you're going to hold it. Even the location, the location of that workshop should fall out of, well, where does my target market go? Where are they already? Where are they congregating? That's where I'm going to hold my workshop.

Makes sense. I have got like a ton more to say about choosing target audience, so I have a couple of things for you. First, I have a free gift to help you. It's called nail your target market in five steps. Yes, tried and true five steps. You're going to want to download this. You can get it at healthcoachpower.com/targetmarket and also we have done a couple of episodes on this but it's been a while like it's been a minute since we had this conversation. You guys, I'm really glad that we were revisiting it for the new year. If you're like still sitting in this boat of I work with people who want to get healthy, ditch that, ditch that right now. I want you to go wherever you get your podcasts, iTunes, Spotify, whatever. Um, go into our archives of the health coach power community podcast and find these episodes.

We've got episode number 27 was is your target market narrow enough and episode number 10, it's called nailing your target market. Where I go a little bit more into how to actually do it. Again, this is just one of several smart ways that we're going to be discussing in this series to structure your business, to take action and move forward in 2020 so you can make big progress with less effort. Trust me, this is the way to go. I don't want you guys burn it out on me. I need all of you. We all need to be here. A lot of work to be done in the world, right? So more progress, less effort. I promise. It is worth it to know exactly who you serve and if you can't quite wrap your head around it today, that's okay. You could sleep on it. You could take your time. But this is also why I offer hands-on coaching twice a year. So if you want to get on the waitlist, like I mentioned earlier for my fast track semester, just head over to healthcoachpower.com/waitlist and I will see you there and I will see you next week when we're back talking about building that audience, building that mailing list. So you can make 2020 your best year yet. All right. Take care everybody.