Can Marketing Be Ethical For Coaches?

There's an ICF group that I belong to and someone asked this question (I'm paraphrasing here)

I keep reading that to market effectively I need to talk about outcomes. How do I do this and still abide by the ICF code of ethics that says that a coach should have no agenda?

This is a great question and one which causes coaches endless angst. How is it possible to describe the benefits of coaching without having an agenda of your own?

To answer this question, let's get back to basics.

The Two Skills Sets In A Financially Viable Coaching Business

All financially viable coaching businesses have two essential, but entirely different skill sets.

One of these skill sets is your delivery skills. These are the skills you use when you're sitting down with a client to coach them. They include your coaching skills, and any other delivery skill you have - think Gestalt, NLP etc anything that you use when you're with a client to help them reach their goals.

The other skill set is your 'creating the opportunity to do the delivery' skills. These are your client acquisition skills which are marketing and sales skills.

Some coaches have an existing network that contains people who are in a position to commission coaching within organisations and their marketing might be coffee dates, networking or drinks after work. Interestingly, these coaches often don't understand that these activities are marketing at all - but they are.

Other coaches don't have this existing monetiseable credibility and so need to build their client base through more traditional marketing routes. These coaches are my clients.

ICF Code Of Ethics

The ICF code of ethics applies to the delivery side of your business. It's important that the coach has no agenda when they're coaching.

The ICF code of ethics does not apply to the 'creating the opportunity to do the delivery' side of your business, because with marketing you definitely have an agenda and the agenda is to get clients.

Does this mean that you can market in a manner that it completely devoid of ethics? No, of course not.

What it means is that you can stop trying to make the concept of marketing fit a code of ethics that's about coaching, not marketing.

How Do I Market Ethically?

There are two sides to this question and they are about being effective as well as ethical.

To market effectively, we must have a focus for our marketing. All effective marketing is focused.

Once we have that focus which is a target audience - or niche - we can then buckle down and do the work that's involved with creating a marketing message that's focused on exactly the people we want to work with and that explains to them the benefits of working with you.

To market ethically, we need to understand

• the problem the potential client is grappling with, that coaching can resolve (their current reality)
• the way they want their life to be instead (their preferred reality).

We need to explain in our marketing that reaching a preferred reality is entirely possible - which of course it is with good coaching.

The ethics comes in when we're contracting with our client. They need to understand that no outcome is promised, or guaranteed with coaching and that they need to take action to achieve the results they want. Yes you're there to provide the process by which they can figure out what action they might need to take, but that the action is for them alone.

Let Me Help You

If you'd like to dig deep into the idea of ethical marketing for coaches, may I invite you to join me for my 4-day challenge, Nail Your Niche.

In the challenge, not only do I explain why you might want to consider choosing a niche for your business, but we dig into the ethics of marketing too.

You can register here: https://thecoachingrevolution.com/NailYourNiche