A coach's guide to AI marketing

How to leverage AI to grow your brand and business

Artificial intelligence (AI) is dramatically affecting how industries operate. The coaching niche is not immune. Whether or not you see AI as a threat to coaching, it can undeniably help market your coaching business.

Standing out as a coach is challenging. There’s a lot of noise online from coaches, influencers and thought-leaders touting their services, courses and cohorts. But AI, if used correctly, can be your secret weapon.

That’s why we’ve put together this ultimate guide for coaches seeking to utilise AI in their marketing and content creation. You’ll learn genuine, practical ways to boost brand awareness and generate more leads for your business – without falling for overhyped promises or ineffective strategies.

AI marketing for coaches

In this piece, we’re going to be looking at using ChatGPT in your marketing processes as well as signposting some other tools and technology that could be useful.

Let’s do it!

1. Understand your audience

The foundation of any marketing strategy is a deep understanding of your audience’s pains and desires. Everything you communicate must stem from this understanding – it’s what shows potential clients you truly grasp their challenges and have genuine solutions. This is especially crucial for coaches, who connect with clients on an emotional level.

Large language models like ChatGPT can be powerful allies in developing this understanding, offering insights you might have missed and challenging your existing assumptions about your audience. Collaborative ideation with AI can take your audience analysis to the next level.

Here’s a powerful prompt to help shape your marketing strategy. Copy, paste and customise it in your preferred AI tool:

“Adopt the role of a marketing consultant. I am a coach specialising in [specific area or niche]. I mainly work with [describe your core target audience in detail]. I believe their main reasons for working with me are [describe reasons] and their biggest challenges are [describe challenges].

I want to deeply understand my audience to market my coaching services more effectively. Based on this information:

What are their 5 biggest fears?
What are their 5 deepest desires?
What hidden characteristics or motivations might I be overlooking?
How could I position myself as uniquely qualified to help them?
What specific language and messaging would resonate most powerfully with them?

Please analyse each point and help me develop a strategy to connect with them authentically.”

When you have these insights, you can weave them into your marketing materials alongside social proof of your coaching’s effectiveness. The combination of deep audience understanding and evidence of results is particularly compelling for coaching services.

2. Optimise your website copy

You likely communicate with your audience in several ways. However, the copy on your website and specific landing pages plays a crucial role in your marketing efforts. This includes your home page, about page, service pages and contact page.

Bad website copy creates a bottleneck and can kill sales.

You could have world-class social media content, perfectly curated email automations and be one of the leading coaches in your field, but if your website is unconvincing, people simply won’t get in touch.

In the past, improving conversion rates was a costly endeavour. You could either pay a professional to implement changes, run tests on various landing pages or do the research yourself to make iterations that hopefully improved conversion. Now AI has you covered.

While tools like Typing Mind offer AI-powered landing page feedback and Hotjar integrates AI into their analytics, you can also use ChatGPT to give you a substantial helping hand.

Try this prompt for any key page on your website:

“I want to ensure this page is optimised for conversion. The target audience is [describe the audience being directed to the webpage].

The desired outcome is that they [describe what action you want this audience to take after reading the page].

Acting as a conversion rate optimisation specialist with expertise in coaching businesses, critique the language and flow of this web page. Focus on:

How well it speaks to the audience’s needs and pain points
Whether the benefits are clearly communicated
If the call to action is compelling
Any missing elements that could boost conversion
Specific suggestions for improvement

Here’s the current copy: [paste contents of the page]”

Review each key page individually – what converts well for your home page might not work for your services page. Getting this right means every visitor from your marketing efforts has the best chance of becoming a client.

3. Create game-changing content

Creating content with AI is one of the most popular applications in marketing. With tools like ChatGPT and Claude, you can generate social media content, web copy, and blog articles. However, the biggest challenge, especially when creating content for a coaching audience, is ensuring that it feels unique and authentic.

This is where effective prompting of large language models becomes crucial. The LLM needs to understand your target audience, the content’s purpose, and subject matter. It also needs to grasp your perspective and, most importantly, reflect your unique voice in its output.

SEO-optimised blogs

Blog content on your site is the foundation of your entire content game. Blogs help you rank for keywords on Google, nurture your audience, and give you content for marketing emails and social media.

his three-step process will help you create impactful blog content with AI:

Identify your target keywords. Premium SEO tools like Moz, Ahrefs or SEMrush will do this for you. If you don’t have access to these, use this prompt in your chosen AI tool:

“Now you know all about my target audience, act as an expert SEO consultant. Suggest 20 keywords or phrases my audience is likely to search that would indicate commercial intent towards my business.”

Plan your content structure. Select the blog titles that fit best, excluding topics you’ve already covered. Focus on areas where you have strong views or insights. For each title, get AI to create an outline:

“Create a detailed outline for a blog post about [topic]. The target keyword is [keyword] and the audience is [describe audience]. Include main headings, subheadings and brief summaries of what each section should cover.”

Write your content section by section. This gives you more control and keeps quality high. First, tell the AI your tone and style – you might want to share some of your existing content as an example. Then create each section individually so you can adjust and re-prompt as needed.

For longer content, always get a structure first. You should also familiarise yourself with tell-tale ChatGPT-isms so you’re not creating obviously AI-generated content.

There are, of course, tools built for this very purpose including Jasper and Copy.ai. Software giants such as HubSpot and Semrush have developed their own text generator features too.

Social media content

Just like with longer form content, tools like ChatGPT can be used to create social media posts in a matter of minutes. But just as with blogs, without the right prompts, the output will be very hit and miss. AI still doesn’t quite get the vibe of social media and doesn’t know the inside information on what makes posts appealing to users.

To get usable output from LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude, you need to be very specific about your target audience. Those desires and fears we discovered earlier are crucial here. We also need to be prescriptive about the language we do and don’t want to use.

Provide sample text, a banned word list and, ideally, examples of posts you’d like to emulate.

Try this prompt to get started:

“Create 5 social media posts for [platform]. My coaching style is [describe style] and my target audience is [describe audience]. Here’s an example of my usual tone and style: [paste a previous post you’re happy with]. Make sure the posts sound authentic and include specific examples or insights.”

What ChatGPT really excels in is ideation:

“I’m a [type of coach] coach. Here’s some information about my target audience [provide as much detail about your audience as possible]. I need help in coming up with post ideas and angles that will appeal to that audience, position me as someone who can help and ultimately grow my social media profile.

Give me 20 ideas for social media posts. For each one, explain the angle and an example hook (a compelling and intriguing first line that is not a question and no longer than 8 words in length that will pique the interest of readers.)”

Coachvox, which you’ll read about in section 8, has built-in content creation tools that use your existing content and coaching style to produce LinkedIn posts and blog content.

4. Create unique, eye-catching images

Visuals play a huge role in marketing. They’re the difference between someone stopping on your social media post and continuing to scroll. They’re the difference between your emails or web pages connecting with someone or not. Using generic stock imagery that doesn’t match your brand won’t give the right impression.

You can create images for your marketing campaigns with Midjourney or design a whole new brand identity with Looka. There are many AI image-generation tools available, including offerings from Adobe, Google, and Microsoft. However, ChatGPT with built-in Dall-E is an easy and accessible place to start.

Here’s a prompt to create professional coaching imagery:

“Create an image of a [person/professional in your niche] at work in a [explain work environment] doing [something relating to your brand or content]. The person should be shown from behind. The image should be [describe the look and feel you want, e.g. bright and airy, atmospheric, futuristic] and use the colours [describe your brand colours].”

(Note: Creating images of people from behind or at angles tends to produce better results than attempting front-facing portraits with current AI tools.)

When prompting for images, provide clear guidance about subject matter, layout, colours and overall feel, but avoid being too specific about minor details. Focus on creating visuals that:

Match your brand identity
Connect with your target audience
Work well across different marketing channels
Look professional and polished
Stand out from typical stock photos

(Check out the AI images for coaches we created.)

5. Customer insight and analysis

Modern AI has massive analytical power, but you don’t need to be a statistician or computer engineer to harness it. Even tools like ChatGPT have built-in data analytics, and they’re becoming commonplace in CRM and marketing tools.

Feed in sales data, web traffic data, customer survey responses and even anecdotal evidence to hear what AI thinks about your audience, their behaviour and how you can tweak your marketing approach.

If want to take AI-powered marketing to the next level, you could even use ChatGPT as your sales and marketing coach.

6. Create a compelling email series

World class email marketing isn’t about crafting a single silver-bullet email that makes all your dreams come true. The best email marketers create email series that take their audience on a journey, tapping into various elements of the human psyche, gradually building a compelling case for your audience to take action.

Here’s a mega prompt you can try by copying and pasting into an LLM, editing the square brackets:

“Assume the role of an email marketing strategist with world class copywriting skills. Compose a three-part email series to promote [a product or service or deal you’re offering]. The email series must be compelling to the reader with the overall goal of maximizing click-throughs and conversions.

My business is [provide your business name and details of what it does and whom it serves]. [Explain why it offers value to its audience].

My audience mainly comprises [insert audience characteristics] and their biggest challenges are [list challenges]. The biggest appeal of [the specific product, service or deal] to them is likely to be [list features or benefit]. My writing style is [describe your writing style] and I aim to come across as [describe how you position yourself, e.g an expert, trustworthy, etc].

The campaign structure should be designed to tap into different aspects of the reader’s psyche: creating initial curiosity, building trust through value, and finally, leveraging urgency and FOMO to encourage action. For the first email, focus on building curiosity and interest, identifying with the reader’s challenges, without directly selling. Start with a relatable anecdote or question that taps into the common challenges or aspirations of my audience.”

7. Create resources and lead magnets

Going beyond sharable content and industry research, AI can drastically speed up the creation of larger bodies of work.

White papers, downloadable resources, lead magnets and even entire books can be co-created using your LLM of choice. Like with blog writing, Claude is a popular choice due to its ability to write more closely to your style, especially if given some example text.

Decide what material will help your marketing efforts and get planning. Creating a structure or outline for your document is hugely important to avoid one long piece of rambling that will do more harm than good.

Explain the purpose of the document, the target audience and provide examples of your writing style to the LLM.

8. Create an AI coach version of you

You might think AI chatbots are everywhere, but not ones that can actually coach your audience effectively. Creating an AI coach based on your content and style can be more straightforward than you think with tools like Coachvox.

This is particularly powerful for coaches who have already created content and built an audience keen to tap into their expertise. An AI version of you can strengthen your marketing in several ways:

Lead generation through interactive coaching experiences
Creating unique, personalised social content
Adding value to your audience through 24/7 guidance
Generating press opportunities as an AI pioneer in your niche
Nurturing leads throughout your marketing funnel

The AI chat acts as experiential content marketing – giving unique and relevant guidance to your audience based on your expertise and approach. Many coaches have secured press coverage for being early adopters of AI in their field.

While this option requires more investment in time and effort than other tools, AI clone marketing could be pivotal in how you position yourself and your brand. If you’re curious about how this works, you can watch this quick explainer:

Coaching platforms like Coachvox often provide support through their creator communities to help you maximise press and marketing opportunities with your AI.

9. Industry research

Research can be incredibly useful in marketing. The latest studies can be a goldmine for sharable content. It helps position you as knowledgable within your niche and become a broker of relevant information.

But research can also help in designing your content and even your products. AI tools can help you understand your industry and audience on a deeper level and even predict shifts in the market.

ChatGPT is a fine tool for this and you can ask it to reference its sources. A more specialist tool but just as easy to use is Perplexity, which has many fans when it comes to research.

10. Automation

Automation is the term we give to making your processes automatic. It’s not a brand new concept, but AI has broadened the scope of what can be automated in your coaching business. As a coach, we want to be able to focus on our work, impact and building a brand around our message, but often, business processes can take a lot of time.

This includes the many areas of marketing. Automation removes manual tasks and, therefore, time and brain space, so you can focus on the bigger picture and deeper, more meaningful work.

There are too many potential ways automation could help your business operations to cover in this article, but if you’re unsure where to begin, ask ChatGPT for ideas on where to start. Explain your processes and weekly tasks relating to marketing and ask where AI-powered automation could help out.

Thankfully, a lot of this automation is being built into tools we’re already using but it’s often down to us to explore these options.

AI marketing tips and tools for coaches

There are truly countless opportunities for coaches in the AI era. But there are also risks and challenges. Coaches face the threat of competition from other coaches, educators and influencers who are better able to leverage AI. They also face a threat from AI itself with its increasing potential to help and guide people through their life or business challenges.

It’s time to get on board with AI, whether by simply using ChatGPT to better understand and communicate with your audience, or it’s committing to using AI-powered tools to take you to the next level.

Keen to learn more? Go deeper with how coaches can use ChatGPT to grow their business.