Lots of our clients that we speak to are surprised to hear we started as a coaching business, but digital marketing was a natural next step for us.
In this article I am going to outline what coaching is, how we got into digital and how our coaching comes through our service.
What is a Business Coach?
A business coach is just like a coach in football or any sport really. A football coach pushes a footballer, to achieve better and better performances, provides support when they are exhausted and flat out, and teaches the footballer new skills and tactics that they can implement to make them better on the pitch.
A Business Coach is similar. Their role is to help you to improve your business through guidance, support and encouragement. We work with small to medium sized businesses, helping them with their sales, their marketing, management, team building and so much more.
Most owners of small to medium sized businesses find it hard enough to keep pace with all the changes and innovations going on in today's modern world, let alone to find the time to devote to sales, marketing, systems, planning and team management, and then to run their businesses as well!
As the world of business moves faster and becomes more competitive, having a Business Coach is no longer a luxury; it has become a necessity.
The service is still relatively new however, with only a small percentage of businesses in the UK adopting a strategy that includes a business coach. It is the same in football though, as for years footballers have been “managed” by the likes of Sir Alex Ferguson, with the coaches playing second fiddle, or usually hiding in the background, going unnoticed. Now we are seeing a much more open philosophy when it comes to coaching. The role of the “Head Coach” rather than “manager” is becoming a more popular method, used noticeably by the models of Barcelona by Pepe Guardiola, who is adopting a similar approach to Bayern Munich now, as well as UK clubs like Swansea City, West Brom and Derby County.
Why Digital Marketing?
So why digital marketing you might ask. As previously mentioned, a business coach works with small to medium sized business owners on improving various skills, but marketing in particular. Most business owners that we speak to are usually excellent in what they do, but have a lack of experience in marketing, and that department usually suffers as a consequence.
As marketing has evolved due to the growth in technology, the decline in traditional forms of advertising is well publicised. A necessary part of business marketing today is a digital or online strategy. How can a small to medium sized business take advantage of the Internet?
This is a question we are often being asked, and we were asking ourselves this in our coaching days. As a business, we were speaking to web design companies and “online businesses, and it became clear that the industry was made up of very technical companies. The downside to this for SME’s is that they would often get a technically brilliant website that didn’t bring any benefit to the business. The reason for this is that no marketing thought was being put into the design of the site, the layout and copy of the pages. Furthermore the websites were un-editable, causing many issues when it came to trying to update the out-dated content. These sites were also were nowhere to be found in search engines such as Google.
It was our opinion then and it is still our opinion now, that if a website is not adding value to a business, it is pointless having it.
Why is it useful?
The web design industry is competitive, fiercely competitive. It is also mostly made up of graphic designers and IT people with a technical background. One thing to bear in mind when dealing with a company from this background is that they probably couldn’t care less whether your website works or not, their primary motivation is to have a website that looks good on their own portfolio!
Coming from a coaching background enables us to look at websites from a marketing perspective, rather than the aforementioned graphic design perspective so we aim for them to work.
At JDR, we provide regular training sessions to teach our clients how to update their websites, and teach you the skills that a web designer would normally charge by the hour for! Also, we provide regular coaching workshops, which are not only a great networking event (JDR's One Day Marketing Workshop) but they, help our clients stay on trend and implement strategies used in digital marketing.
Article by Andy Gibbins
