How to Keep Growing When Your Coaching Business Plateaus

It may have taken many months and many false starts, but when your marketing starts to gather momentum, it can feel like a turning point for your business. Instead of hard work for no gain, you can enjoy the results, new leads and return on investment that it brings.

However, what happens when it all stops?

Plateauing is perfectly normal for businesses, but you don’t need to accept it. With a few simple tweaks to your strategy and marketing plan, you can ensure your business continues to climb and grow.

Is your coaching business on a plateau?

Most businesses will be tracking and monitoring their marketing performance. By keeping a close eye on the figures, you’ll soon notice when your performance is falling shorter than you would like and your business is beginning to plateau.

As the plateau can manifest in different ways, it is essential to keep an eye on a range of results. This will help you to capture the plateau culprit quickly and put the steps in place to get things moving upwards again.

Your plateau may be as a result of a lack of new customer acquisition or lead generation. It may be declining audience engagement figures or reduced conversion rates. Your web traffic may be steady but not growing. Your overall marketing may seem likes its falling short of the mark.

By tracking a range of aspects, you can focus in on the problem areas to improve results. This will save you from overhauling your complete marketing strategy.

Expert tips on how to carry on after your marketing plateaus

If your strategy is losing audience engagement…

If you notice that your social media shares are getting fewer responses or your communication faces a disconnect with customers, it may be a problem with audience engagement. Fortunately, there are several ways that you can revive audience engagement.

Tips to increase audience engagement

1.    Calls to action – How can you expect your audience to engage if you don’t tell them how? A strong and compelling call to action will encourage interaction and engagement. Whether it's using a hashtag, retweeting a post or asking for comments, a prominent call to action is essential.

2.    Post and share regularly – It may seem like hard work, but regular content updates are the secret to increasing engagement. It shouldn’t always focus on the hard sell. Your social media feed can be useful for sharing details of sales and special offers. However, it can also be used to promote other businesses or charities in your area as well as sharing news from your industry. Post regularly and make it compelling so that people comment and share.

3.    Email newsletters – Email marketing is still a powerful method of engagement. Sharing a regular newsletter with your followers will help to establish your brand and show your expertise.

If website traffic is starting to slow…

Is the number of people visiting your website beginning to decline? If so, you may need to revitalise your campaign with a website update and refresh.

Tips to increase web traffic

1.    Conduct a full SEO audit. Are your pages optimised and easily found by search engines and prospective customers alike? An SEO audit will make sure you know the weak spots in your website.

2.    Focus on keywords – these need to be in titles, headings, sub-heading, image tags and more. Remember to optimise keyword density, do not use too few or too many times in your web copy.

3.    Check that all your information is relevant, accurate and engaging and add more content through regular blogging to increase its visibility and attract more traffic.

If the number of leads is dropping off…

Lead generation is essential; if the number of leads coming into your business is slowing down, then you need to think fast to rectify the situation and acquire a steady flow of new leads.

Tips to increase lead generation

1.    Giveaways – A free eBook, video access or template can be an enticing way to get people to share their email addresses. Create a compelling freebie and then set up a vibrant landing page to ensure you get the results you want.

2.    Call to action – Your website and content need to be full of calls to action. Don’t just leave it until the end of the copy. Have contact forms and links on every page of content that you create.

3.    Interaction – Customers love the personal touch, so dedicate some time to responding to and engaging with individuals on social media. By targeting customers specifically, you will not only develop strong leads but attract others who like your personal touch.

If you are no longer acquiring new customers…

Have you got a stable base of customers but aren’t attracting any new clients? Then you need to make sure your brand is attractive and easy for new customers to find.

Tips to increase customer acquisition

1.    Referrals – Customer recognition and referrals are excellent ways of driving sales and acquiring new customers. Incentivise your customers to invite their friends and family.

2.    Partner up – Join forces with a local relevant business and promote together; you’ll be sharing your audience base.

3.    Make sure your business is easy to find. Ensure all public listings of your business are up to date and you have as much exposure as possible.

If your conversion rate is declining…

If the number of leads is promising and web traffic remains high, then it could be a problem with your conversion.

Tips to increase your conversion rate

1.    Utilise independent review sites – Customers will trust brands that have positive (and real) customer feedback.

2.    Grab attention – Make sure your wording is focused and compelling to really drive your calls to action and make people excited about your brand.

3.    Use landing pages – These can be great for special offers, promotions and localised audiences. Make sure offers are limited time and exclusive, you want to make customers act quickly.

A marketing plateau isn’t always bad

If you feel that your efforts are reaching a plateau, don’t stress. This is your opportunity to take a step back and reassess your approach.

If you need any help in revitalising your marketing campaign, get in touch with the team at FunnelPress.

We’ll provide you with a free business strategy audit to help get your strategy climbing again.