How To Use Content Marketing To Attract Your Dream Clients

Are you an entrepreneur with an online business and finding it difficult to stand out because there seems to be so much competition? If that is you, don't worry because in today's article I'm going to break down how the most successful businesses are thriving online and how you can to.

In this article I will: 

1. Explain what Content Marketing is as it relates to making money online through coaching, consulting or course creation.
2. How content marketing allows you to attract clients instead of chasing them. 
3. Helps you make sales 10x easier by building the know, like and trust factor. 

In 2020 when I started getting active on LinkedIn and building my business, I had a tiny fraction of the understanding of digital marketing that I do now but for some reason I had this feeling:

Just focus on creating quality content and you won’t have to worry about finding business.

And so, during the Pandemic, I did just that and my first 3 coaching clients came to me with no cold outreach.

The prior year (2019), I had participated in a business coaching program teaching other people to be coaches. I had enrolled in it more out of curiosity than anything (plus I get a yearly educational stipend that I can use for things like coaching and courses).

It intrigued me to become a coach but wasn’t even close to something I was seriously considering at the time.  

But the strategy they were teaching was awkward AF.

They said you needed to find other big influencers who were doing what you wanted to do (Tony Robbins, Gary Vee, etc) and then hang out in the comments of their posts and then try to strike up conversations with other people in their comments and then try to ‘slide into their DM’s’.

Once you were in their DM’s, then you ask them ‘probing’ questions and try to find their pain points, then somehow get them on a call and try to agitate their problem, then present a solution and talk them into buying a high-ticket coaching program from you.

I was new to the coaching game and didn’t need any money or clients but right off the bat that strategy seemed like a really bad idea.

But on top of that, this type of strategy yielded very few people the actual results the program guaranteed.

They told people that they weren’t working hard enough, or weren’t ‘taking action’, and even borderline shaming people for their lack of results.

I knew something was off, but I didn’t see the bigger picture until I started understanding more about ‘content marketing’.

Here’s the thing: for someone to buy from you, especially a high-ticket service like coaching or consulting, they need to ‘know, like and trust’ you, I call it the KLT factor.

If you do what this coaching program recommended by stalking people then chasing them into the DMs and hop on a call and try to sell them on a high-ticket package, it’s a long shot that you’ve created any KLT with them and a stab in the dark that they actually have the problem that you can solve at that particular time.

Then, these aspiring coaches get rejected and feel like failures, then give up. But the game was rigged against them in the first place.

The missing piece:

It does not matter how good your product or service is if you don’t have eyes on that offer (traffic).

You can use the ‘hunt and peck’ method of trying to stalk people’s content or DM people one by one.

You can try the ‘spray and pray’ method of automating DMs or outreach and sound like a robot, which also doesn’t work because people can feel the desperate energy behind it.

Or you can skip out on all the hassle of prospecting and cold outreach (which sucks anyways) and become a better content creator to attract your audience.

Does this mean you just start posting content and clients will magically appear in your inbox asking you to do business with them? Does this mean creating reels and TikToks where you dance around and point at quotes will have people begging to do business with you?

Maybe here and there, but I don’t think this is a reliable and repeatable scenario for most people.

Here’s the thing, marketing and sales go hand in hand together. Marketing builds up awareness of your brand, your offer and your client’s problems.

This was the big missing piece between Mr. Influencer/Guru being able to sell high ticket coaching programs so easily while leaving new entrepreneurs struggling to find clients.

By becoming a better content creator, people start to know, like and trust you. Think about some of the bigger influencers that you follow on social media, some of them you feel like you know them personally even though you’ve never met them personally.

So, what’s the difference between marketing and content marketing?

Traditional marketing (online ads, magazine ads, billboards, tv ads) puts the focus on the product, service or brand.

Content marketing is about putting the focus on CONTENT that your audience loves to consume because it’s either informative or entertaining (or both) and not the offer or brand.

The content creates raving fans who know, like and trust you. Your offers don’t attract them, they simply become a business byproduct of the

How Star Wars makes money:

A great example of content marketing is Star Wars. Yes, they’ve had many blockbuster movies breaking records and making millions (if not billions) of dollars.

But in 2023, Star Wars is making movie quality TV series for the Disney Channel and you can see everything as part of a $6 per month subscription.

Instead of spending massive amounts of money advertising, they give away the content for free and create raving fans that love the movies (the content) and will then buy all the merchandise (where the money is).

The 3 x C’s: Create, control, convert.

You don’t need to be one of the top content creators out there to do REALLY well with selling your offers, you just have to understand how to create traffic, control traffic, then convert it into sales. And…there are plenty of incredible content creators that get a ton of engagement but can’t sell anything.

Think of big social platforms, podcasts, YouTube and search engines as massive ‘oceans’ of traffic. Your content is like a big net that moves some of this traffic into a smaller lake (this is your following). Then by using the right CTA's you can move them into an even smaller 'pond' like an email list, a group, a community or a challenge.

The last part is converting traffic to a sale, its like fishing in a small pond instead of a big ocean! If you’ve nurtured the clients along this path (create, control, convert) the sales process is 10x easier because your audience has already self-selected and you’ve increased the KLT factor with them.

Key takeaways:

Spending more time creating and refining your content skills can reduce or eliminate cold prospecting for clients (and you can use that time to get better at content).

Content ‘warms up the sale’ because it creates brand awareness and increases the KLT factor.

Content alone won’t likely bring repeatable and sustainable clients but you can use it to attract your audience, then move them into a closed environment like your email list, a community, or a challenge where it makes it easier to convert them to clients because YOU are the authority.

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