If you understand what makes your ideal coaching market tick, you’ve got insider knowledge that can be turned into your own money-making products. Offering information products that solve a compelling problem for your market will help boost your credibility, build your brand, and amp up your coaching business revenue.
Here are seven steps to innovating, designing and launching your own products:
- Tune into Your Niche Market for Ideas
- Leverage Your Product Funnel
- Outline Your Coaching Product
- Map Out a Project Plan
- Create Your Product
- Create Your Marketing Campaign
- Get Set to Deliver
I’ll cover the first three of them here. For the rest, see Part 2 and Part 3.
Step 1 – Tune into Your Niche Market for Ideas
Relevance is key. What are your coaching clients actively seeking right now? Active is the watchword here. We all want happiness, peace of mind and balance, but few of us actively seek those things.
The goal is to create products that will build your credibility while increasing your income. General life coaching topics (balance, transition, life purpose, self care) won’t accomplish that. So resist the impulse to create a product addressing a broad topic that would fit every one, and that any coach could write.
The golden product ideas zero in on the top challenges for people in your market, and the outcomes they are trying to achieve on their own, but are short of the mark. If you have logged 100 or more hours coaching folks in your niche market, then you have valuable insider knowledge about these challenges and outcomes. Focus in on a topic that will command their attention.
Once you are tuned into your market, compelling product ideas will flow. Keep an idea book. Look back at the four quick-to-market ideas from last week’s post.
If you “are” your market, you can draw from your own experience. I am a coach, so this works for me. When I am working through a critical problem in my business, it’s likely also a top challenge for my market. I keep part of my mind in observer mode, watching how I solve it. By saving others some of the pain I went through, I can channel my experience into a product that’s ideal for my market.
If you aren’t easily coming up with ideas, these could be the reasons:
- Your coaching market is new to you. To learn about your market, conduct informational interviews with at least ten individuals in that market. Listen for the holes in their knowledge. What common mistakes are they making? What are their most elusive goals? Answers to these questions are keys to potentially profitable products.
- Your niche market is too broad. Narrow to an accessible group of people who will invest in coaching.
Step 2 – Leverage Your Product Funnel
Before you create and launch a product, consider how you’ll build the case for people to want it and how, after they buy it, you’ll point them to the next step with you.
There’s not much value in a having a single product sitting out there like a satellite in outer space. Instead, design each product as part of a constellation of offerings. You don’t have to create them all at once, but do create a plan for how you will lead your coaching market through a funnel of programs and products that keeps them engaged with you. That’s how you build leverage and cultivate raving fans!
If you don’t yet have a Unique Benefit Statement that speaks to your market’s top challenges in their language, start by creating one now. The key to an entire suite of products and programs is contained in a compelling benefit statement.
If you design your product funnel around a benefit statement that really captures what you are offering your market, then it’s easy to add offerings as you create them, building your funnel as you go. This is a process that takes time. But when you leverage each product off the one that came before, you don’t have to start over to build momentum for each offering you create.
There’s more on designing a leveraged product funnel, including an example, here.
Step 3 – Outline Your Coaching Product
Get the outline of your product down on paper, including the title, features and benefits, and price. Keep in mind how it fits into your funnel.
Unless you already have a large database, your first product will be designed to capture leads, and will be free or low cost. It should be highly valuable for your target market, as well as point to your other offerings (your 1:1 coaching for starters, later the other products and services you will add to your funnel).
This product should be downloadable, to maximize sign-ups. It could be a report, assessment or checklist in pdf format, or an audio presentation plus transcript.
A compelling title is the most important aspect of your product! It must point to an outcome your market really wants. They need to feel, by the title alone, that they’re going to achieve an elusive goal and find solutions to their problems.
For example, suppose you are creating a teleclass for realtors (a viable market). A title that’s descriptive of the content might be:
Key Points in the Sale Process: Setting Buyer Expectations, Staging, and Managing Objections
but a more outcome-based title is:
Seven Steps to Double Your Commissions
In Part 2, I’ll go into planning, executing and marketing your coaching product.
In my Champion Your Ideal Coaching Market workshop I teach how to choose a viable niche market, create a Unique Benefit Statement that positions your services as essential to your market, and design a suite of products and services that will command your market’s attention.