Have you spent hours/weeks/months slaving over your website, crafting elegant copy for your services page only to have disappointing sales? Are you still struggling to get enough clients to pay for your awesome services?
You’re not alone. In fact, this is really common – even for people who’ve got very healthy sized mailing lists and newsletter subscribers – those numbers don’t always turn into paying clients.
Bt don’t worry I’m going to show you one small change you can make to get more people to buy your coaching services
When I first started working with Tara Gentile, she introduced me to the concepts of Buy In and Buy Now – the two stages a client needs to go through in order to hand over their money in exchange for your goods and services.
Buy In is all about the ‘softer’ sides of your marketing messages, along with the big picture ideas, key messages, vision, values, and the overall tone of your business.
For example, your website feels welcoming and friendly. The prospective client feels she’s found somewhere she wants to hang out. She reads your blog posts, loves what you have to say, signs up for your newsletter and is by all appearances and prime potential client. This amount of Buy In gives you the opportunity to share your big vision, your beliefs and your key messages, as well as allowing your personality to shine through. You start to build a trusting relationship with your reader. You can show off your expertise, share valuable information and provide a lot of service.
Many marketing hours are spent helping new coaches and entrepreneurs build things like compelling websites, newsletters and email lists.
However, without a clear Buy Now those prospective clients will never pay you any money.
Actually, MOST of your website visitors won’t ever pay you any money. In fact, research has shown that only around 1-5% of your prospective customers who sign up to your email list will every buy from you. Don’t get depressed about that – it’s just the reality and I just want give you some perspective – in some ways marketing is just a numbers game.
BUT without a compelling Buy Now, getting clients to click on the ‘buy now’ button is a lot more difficult.
A Buy Now is a compelling solution to a problem your client has.
Let’s imagine you’re a health coach. You’ve got passion, skills and the ability to motivate women to change not only their diet and exercise habits, but their whole approach to health. You’re driving passion is helping those women to:
Give up the weight loss struggle
This is Buy In. It’s nice and broad – but it’s a bit…intangible. What exactly is the weight loss struggle? How will I know if I have it or not? Do I even believe it’s possible to ever be free from it (for most women, the answer is probably ‘no’.) So whilst very few people will say ‘No, I’m happy with the daily struggle with losing weight’, equally few will pay over their hard earned money for it – when explained in those terms.
It’s not a bad sentence – far from it. It shows your passion and that this is more about weight loss, more than a short term fix. But it’s probably not tangible and immediate enough on its own to compel people to get their credit card details out.
Lose up to 7lbs in the next 2 weeks
This is Buy Now. This is the tangible thing that is going to make many more people think ‘yes, I need that now and I’m willing to pay for it.’
That doesn’t mean they won’t also be able to give up the weight loss struggle in the process of learning the new ways of eating and thinking about their health that you’re going to teach them – and all of those additional benefits can really support your initial statement.
Your Challenge
Go over your sales and services pages – are you using too much Buy In and not enough Buy Now language?
How can you narrow it down?
Super Insider Strategy: if you’re not sure what the ‘buy nows’ are, go and ask your past clients. Even better ask your prospective clients this question:
If you could wave a magic wand and have one thing that would solve (insert problem here), what would it be?
Want help? Come on over to the Coaches Collective – my private Facebook mastermind and ask me personally.