Learn from My Career
In this Mental Coach Mentoring video, Dr. Cohn answers the question: “Does advertising your mental coaching service help you get students?”
This is the common question from newly certified MGCPs after taking the Mental Game Coaching Certification (MGCP) Program. Should you advertise your services to athletes and coaches?
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Transcript
Hi, this is Dr. Patrick Cohn with the MGCP Certification Program, and in this short video I’m going to talk about some of the mistakes I’ve made along the way so you can learn from my career.
0:16 How about marketing your mental coaching services?
0:21 Lots of different ways that you can do that today. You can do that obviously with social media. You can do that within your website itself.
0:30 You can do it within online advertising. You can also do it within offline advertising as well. But there are some forms of advertising that are better than others.
0:42 So how do you market your coaching? Should you advertise? Strictly traditional advertising, I would not do. Do. It’s absolutely a waste of your time.
0:55 What do I mean by that? I had a very targeted population and that is motocross racers and motocross coaches and team owners.
1:05 There was a magazine that goes to them periodically. So what I did is I took out a full page advertorial in that particular magazine.
1:15 And, it flopped. So I spent a lot of money on that particular ad and it just didn’t work. So there are certain forms of advertising that may work, but a traditional form of advertising like advertising in a magazine or advertising in a newspaper, it’s just too broad.
1:35 You need to reach a very targeted audience. For example, one of the things I did early on in my career is I wrote articles for PGA of America sections.
1:48 That was awesome. That got me in front of a lot of PGA Tour, uhm, pros because they would get it as well.
1:55 But it also got me, uhm, in front of all the teaching pros in that section. And I also, did what are called educational seminars for teaching pros who needed credits, So that form of advertising was very good.
2:11 It didn’t cost me anything. I just would write an article and send it over to them. And that brings me to point three.
2:18 It’s a much better option to educate your target audience. Educate athletes and parents about what mental training is, I did that with a newsletter for many years.
2:31 I would actually send out a newsletter to all college golf coaches, yeah. It was very expensive, but I would send it out to all college golf coaches, get my name in the mix.
2:42 And it would have tips, it would have tips. I would have a schedule when I was out on tour, working with players as well, and certainly how to get in touch with me and how to get in contact with me, um, if they wanted me to come in and do a seminar, ah, for their team.
2:56 So that was highly, highly targeted, um, and it didn’t cost me anything other than to send out the newsletter. Today, I simply do email newsletters, uh, uh, uh, In addition, you want to educate people on what the benefits are for athletes.
3:13 How does it help athletes? Do you want to improve consistency, for example? Do you want to have more stable confidence when you’re competing?
3:22 You want to be able to deal with doubt or distractions, um, so being able to show others what is mental coaching, how does it help, is the way to go in any format you could do.
3:38 um, you could simply put together a one-page article and send that to your target population, for example, um, and ask the coach, uh, to share it with the athletes.
3:46 So, you want to add value to what coaches are doing, and hopefully then you’ll get your name in the mix hope that’s beneficial, hope to see you in the next course, thanks.
