This post explains the influencer coaching model, and why it’s an approach that has built many successful online coaching businesses.

We all know someone who's fallen into the, "if you build it they will come" trap where they obsess over their product or service without giving adequate attention to the market or their prospective customers.

In fact, most coaches encounter this very problem when launching their online programs.

Recently on our podcast, Phil and I discussed a phenomenon we’d been witnessing more often lately, which we’ve called the “influencer” model - coaches adopting modern digital marketing techniques to build their brand and audience to eventually have a sustainable inflow of prospective customers for their coaching services.

You can watch the full video of our podcast conversation on the influencer model here.

This concept takes the product-first mindset and flips it on it’s head by placing the majority of your focus on content and audience development first, before placing too much emphasis on your coaching offering.

So, what’s the difference?

Comparing the Different Approaches

Arvid Khal from The BootStrapped Founder summarizes the concept well.

While this is a concept well-documented within the startup world it’s one that we see too often in the coaching industry, especially in terms of coaches launching their online or remote coaching models. 

Great coaches don’t always make great founders, and as a result we see a multitude of failures when coaches place 100% of their focus on their coaching offering and hardly any to their audience or needs - i.e. key items to consider for effective customer discovery. 

In 2011 Eric Reis published The Lean Startup, which challenged the old mentality of product launches and argued that a company should be working closely with prospective customers throughout the entire product development process, including customer interviews and early product testing. 

In addition, the book introduces a principle called the build-measure-learn feedback loop, which is a technique heavily focused on the idea of constant iteration and evaluation of a product at every step for potential refinement before moving on to the next.

Through this approach you avoid the risk of spending months potentially building something that doesn’t really solve a need.

In contrast, the Influencer coaching model uses an audience-first approach and can be viewed as being a more customer-centric strategy focused on launching an offering with a specific target audience, and their personal pain points in mind. This mitigates the risk of struggling to find an audience for a new product, or “product-market fit.”

In other words, with this approach you leverage a captive audience to shape your concept from the early stages, pressure test your assumptions, and collect valuable feedback before formally launching anything to market. 

Arvid Khal highlights the differences in a simple diagram from his site:

Lessons from the Influencer Model

This strategy ultimately aligns nicely with some of the fundamentals of content marketing, which is the concept of using great content to attract those researching a certain topic or pain point, then nurturing leads to the point where prospects are ready to make a purchase.

In this post we dug into the details of setting up your content marketing funnel.

The key is finding a content channel that’s most appropriate for you and something you feel like you can keep up with consistently. Enjoy writing? Start a blog. Have a fantastic radio voice? Start podcasting.

The main thing is to get started and focus on publishing quality content that enables you to position yourself as a thought leader in your niche AND enable you to begin building an audience.

Remember, there is significant value in a defined, captive audience, even if it’s only a few hundred people. With an audience you are able to:

• Learn what issues or pain points may be plaguing individuals in your niche

• Get feedback on product ideas through webinars or surveys

• Build a relationship with those who could become coaching clients in the future

• Launch a small beta version of your offering to collect feedback and refine your approach

• Line up interested clients through pre launch waitlists

This formula has become more common and can be found within countless coaching businesses, ranging from health and fitness coaches to those in other niches like eSports coaching. Here are a few examples:

Chase Chewning

EverForward

Chase started podcasting early on as a way to create additional value for his coaching clients and over time his podcast has evolved into one of his primary channels for acquiring new clients.

To date he’s had over a million downloads and has launched a new offering helping coaching businesses launch and scale their own podcasts.

Lauren Tickner

Impact School

Lauren Tickner is a former fitness coach, entrepreneur and founder of Impact School. She initially dove into social media to share some of her own transformational fitness journey and along the way ended up building an audience of almost 150,000 followers through her recipes and workout videos.

Now she focuses the majority of her time helping coaches launch and scale online businesses through her company, Impact School.

Richard Royer

Valkrin

Richard is a professional eSports player who has amassed an audience of almost 200K followers on Twitch that tune in each week to watch him stream some of his sessions playing the hit game, League of Legends.

Since growing his following he’s introduced multiple coaching offerings allowing him work more closely with players wanting to take their game to the next level. 

While these individuals have very different stories the common theme is that they dedicated the time to creating the necessary content to establish authority and build an audience they could collaborate with as they developed their programs.

Thinking about launching an online coaching offering at some point? Start creating content immediately… it’s never too early to start the process even if you think it may be months or years before your big launch.

Have another channel that’s worked for you? Add to the discussion by posting it in the comments below.