The Promise Instagram Made You

We’ve been told that all we need to do is show up on Instagram and post valuable content consistently. And that if we do, we will see results. But there are reasons why coaches don’t get clients from Instagram, and it’s rarely what you’re being told.

We’ve been encouraged to create lots of reels. To use all of the bells and whistles on the platform to grow our following, and that in doing this it will lead us to clients who want to buy in to us.

The reality of Instagram is very different.

We end up spending vast amounts of time inside the platform for too little in the way of monetary return.

Despite the lack of results, coaches continue to invest heavily in Instagram, in the hope that somehow, along the way, the results will start to come.

Years down the line many coaches still struggle to make sense of Instagram, and to turn it into a platform that brings clients and money in to the bank.

It can feel incredibly frustrating when we’re not seeing the results from our time invested, especially when we can find competitors who look like they’re achieving insane results on the platform, and they’re no better than us. That hits hard.

Years ago Instagram was the place to be to get our businesses in front of audiences who would want to buy from us.

Today the landscape is very different.

Why Coaches Believe Instagram Should Be Working

I’ve had a love/hate relationship with Instagram for many years. My journey started back in 2018 – a time where engagement and growth on the platform seemed much easier.

If you look at my Instagram (find me here), eight years down the line I still have less than 4000 followers. Shocking I know! I could be embarrassed about the lack of growth over such a long period of time. However, despite that small following I still achieved a 55k a year coaching practice from Instagram some years ago.

So Instagram can work. But not necessarily in the way we are told it should.

We hear that we must show up consistently. Create reels, carousels, singles. Add trending audio, use stories, get into DMs and have conversations, and make sure we spend time daily contributing to other accounts.

And for sure – those are all key strategies we must pay attention to, but there are other factors we need to have focus on, if we really want Instagram to start doing a better job at finding and growing a following and getting clients for us.

What Instagram Does (And Doesn’t) Do

Instagram like any social platform these days, will only be as good as the input from the coach. It cannot take poorly thought out strategy and give you the following you want and need.

It will do its best to put your content in front of the right people, but if the content you’re feeding in to the machine is confusing to the algorithm, your results will suck. Even if the algorithm is able to decipher who to show your content to, and it does that well, if content then doesn’t resonate deeply enough with those people, great results are unlikely.

As we show up with the hope and excitement that Instagram is going to build a fantastic audience for us, it’s only going to do that if the input you give to it works not just for the algorithm, but for the people you’re targeting too.

Therein lies a problem. Because many coaches are garbage posting (sorry not sorry). I’m honest enough to admit I’ve done this myself. The content is not connecting well enough to both the algorithm and, more importantly, the audience. This is why coaches don’t get clients from Instagram.

No amount of reels, carousels, singles, DMs, Manychat automations, stories, trending this that or the other is going to work for you on the platform, if you don’t figure out how to connect content to your audience, in an increasingly busier and noisier space.

All is not lost. Things can change. And none of this means Instagram is dead, or that you should abandon it as part of your strategy.

It does mean the problem is not purely on Instagram’s shoulders (although we like to tell ourselves that is so!). And it does mean that attention needs to be paid to what you’re bringing to the platform. Fix that, and Instagram has a very real chance of becoming a space where you do attract clients.

Here’s where to start fixing things.

before instagram can work for you, fix these three things first

Clarity about your audience

Start by getting absolute clarity about who it is you’re showing up to serve.

A coach dropped me a comment the other day asking about the audience she should serve. She told me she wanted to help adults over the age of 21 who felt stuck and needed clarity. She added that they could be leaders of teams or projects or just themselves.

My response was that she needed to sharpen up her audience, and also be clearer about what she helps them solve.

Simply talking about stopping people feeling stuck and getting them clarity is not enough. Stuck with what? Career? Business? Relationships? Health? Looking after the dog? There needed to be one specific thing she could help people get unstuck with as a starting point.

Then there was quite a lot of chaos in who she was choosing to serve – adults over the age of 21, team and project leaders or just themselves, is not a clear enough audience.

A 21 year old would require content messaging that would be very different to, say, a 58 year old. Leaders of teams would need very different content messaging than leaders of projects or people who are ‘just themselves’.

The point is that if you show up on Instagram with the idea that you’ll serve the whole damn world, you’re likely to serve no-one, and this is an important reason why coaches don’t get clients from the platform.

In the 121 sessions I have with female business owners, audience clarity is a common theme I help them with. When they first come into business transformation sessions with me, I look deeply at their entire business. More often than not I see that they’ve failed to very clearly identify who it is they’re going to work with. So one of the first actions we take is to get clarity on this.

Before you start spending a copious amount of time creating content for Instagram, it’s important to know, deeply, who you’re creating that content for, so that you can speak individually and personally to that person in everything you create.

Any person finding you should quickly be able to see who you serve through not only through the content you’re posting, but also through your bio. This helps pull the right people in, and repel the people who are not the right fit for you. It also helps the algorithm choose more effectively who to surface your content to.

Know their single biggest pain point

Often when I work with coaches, I watch them trying to solve all the things for all the people.

I get this. We are natural care givers, and our goal is to improve as many people’s lives as we can, whilst getting paid for doing so.

However. When you’re showing up in surface level spaces like Instagram, it will serve you much better to be consistent around helping people solve one very pressing need they have right now. This has advantages that include:-

• The algorithm can more easily learn what it is you do, so that it can serve your content to the right people. If you’re talking solely about improving family relationships between parents and their children, it can find people well aligned to that. If you’re talking about family relationships in general and adding work relationships in to the mix – you’re making the algorithm’s job much harder.
  
• When you help with one pressing need your audience is struggling most with right now, it makes it easier for your audience to understand that you’re the go to person to help them scratch that itch. They see multiple pieces of content from you speaking about that one thing, and it helps firm in their mind that you could be the one to work with.
  
  If you’re showing up and talking about Pinterest today, email marketing tomorrow, and LinkedIn the day after (this was me once upon a time!), you become the master of nothing, and the expert to no-one. People will not find it easy to make opt-in decisions off the back of too many choices. They’ll walk away and find someone else more niched down instead.
  
• When you know your audience’s single biggest pain point, and you constantly deliver messaging around that thing, it becomes much easier to create content. Even if you think you’re repeating the same message over and over, to the point that it becomes boring to you, it will not be boring to the people you serve who are looking for the solution to that pressing need they have. They’ll start to see that you’re the coach that helps with that one thing, and that makes it easier for them to make a decision to buy in to you.

Differentiate

When you know the audience you’re going to serve, and when you know the one pressing need you’re going to wrap your content, freebies and offers around, there’s one more important strategy to consider. This can be the missing piece of the jigsaw for many coaching businesses.

When you explore Instagram you’ll find thousands of other coaches in your niche. That’s who you’re competing with on the platform. That’s who you have to stand out from, and not blend in with.

Even when you know your audience and you know the one pressing need you’re going to help them with, if there are a thousand other coaches doing the same thing as you, it’ll be really hard for you to help people understand why they should choose you, and not the other coaches.

This is where differentiation becomes your super power, but this can be one of things coaches find really hard to identify for their businesses (which is where I step in).

Differentiation is when you take what you do and you wrap it in something that helps you stand out, and its such an important part of anyone’s business strategy that it was the subject I chose to cover in the very first issue I wrote for my Jenny Lane Letter.

Let me share a little with you about that Letter – because it’s one of the big differentiators in my own business.

We’ve all got mailing lists right? (Hopefully!). I’m guessing most of us send out a regular newsletter via email to our list (again – hopefully!).

A mailing list is key to our business strategy, and an important asset we can grow and own, that safeguards our business and gives us the ability to sell more. I’ll cover more about mailing lists in another blog post.

The point is – every Sheila has a mailing list these days. Which means your audience is receiving multiple emails a day. And just like on Instagram – you have to figure out how to stand out with your mailing list.

I have a mailing list. I send emails regularly. But more importantly I have an analog Letter. It’s delivered to your door every month. That’s a huge differentiator for my business because I don’t know any other coach in my niche doing this right now.

The analog Letter is a way I can get information in to my customer’s hands. They’re more likely to open, sit and read, because it’s not sat amongst hundreds of emails in their inbox. It’s different. It stands out. It works. More on analog Letters in another blog post.

Instagram is no different.

No matter who you’re serving or how big your competition is, you have to figure out how to take what you do and make it stand out. Stand out with your content. Stand out with your messaging. Stand out by separating yourself from the masses.

If you can’t do this, even if you know your audience deeply, and even if you’re helping with one pressing need, you’ll blend in with everyone else offering the same or similar services to you.

There are lots of ways to differentiate on Instagram (and in your business as a whole). It can be the way you deliver your message to your audience, how you speak, what you look like, how you have an anti approach to the way your competitors show up and work, the style of language you use, the way you coach, and more.

Right now on Instagram every person and their goat is shouting about using AI, and everything you can do with AI in your business.

I stand right in the middle of all that noise, waving a big red fancy flag and sharing about not over using AI, because in doing so you may lose your business. It’s a big differentiator of mine inside Instagram, and in other spaces I’m visible.

I also shout about building a coaching business that doesn’t have to rely heavily on 121 client work, but one where you can still make 70k+ a year whilst giving you time and freedom back. I do not know any other coaches in my niche doing this right now. It’s another differentiator.

I can’t tell you here how you should differentiate. There are lots of different coaches in many different niches who read this blog.

However, you can come to any of my free, live monthly Business Fix sessions on zoom and get some input from me about your differentiators. These live sessions are exclusively for female led businesses who are coaches or any other business niches (I have lots of creative ladies who stop by).

You can register for the Business Fix live sessions here, and you’ll be notified via email when each Business Fix session takes place.

So, To Recap

Right now, your most pressing strategy is not posting more, chasing trends, following hacks that don’t work, or trying to go viral. Instead do this:

• Be very clear and consistent about the audience you’re serving and make sure that information is visible in your bio and throughout all your content messaging.
• Choose the most pressing need your audience has right now, and create your content messaging, your marketing, your freebies and offers around that one thing.
• Figure out how you’re going to differentiate and start to speak about that differentiation everywhere you’re visible.

These three moves will give you much more power to attract clients on Instagram than following any of the noise, trends, hacks inside Instagram’s platform.

Let me know how you get on! You can touch base with me through any of the methods listed at the end of this post.

come and fix your business live with me

Every month I run a free live Business Fix session on Zoom – it’s exclusively for female coaches and business owners. It’s an hour where we dive into the real problems that are stopping your business from working the way it should. There’s zero fluff, and no motivational speeches. You’ll get honest, practical input from me – someone who has been building successful businesses for over twenty years.

If any of what you’ve read in this post has landed and you want to improve the results you’re getting in your business, come to the next live. Register here and you’ll be notified of the date for the next live session.

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