Is Your Marketing Actually Working? The Brutal Truth for Coaches

In the fast-paced world of digital marketing, particularly for coaches and online entrepreneurs, determining whether your marketing efforts are truly effective can be challenging. After managing multiple six-figure ad campaigns and working with countless coaching businesses, I've identified critical factors that separate successful marketing from wasted ad spend.

The Hard Truth About Marketing Effectiveness

Marketing doesn't care about your feelings. This might sound harsh, but it's a reality every business owner needs to accept. I've witnessed countless coaching businesses pour thousands into advertising only to see minimal returns. Why? Because Facebook, Instagram, Google, LinkedIn, TikTok—none of these platforms care about how hard you've worked on your offer or how passionate you are about your coaching program.

The only thing that matters is whether your marketing resonates with your audience. As I tell my clients, "Ads don't care if you've worked a whole year to put this together." They perform based solely on how your audience responds to them.

How to Tell If Your Marketing Is Actually Good

One of the clearest indicators of marketing effectiveness is your metrics. When I audit clients' accounts, I immediately look at cost per link click and click-through rates. If your click-through percentage is below 1%, it's a clear sign that your copy, call to action, or overall message isn't compelling enough.

Good marketing shows evidence of:

• Strong, compelling copy: Your headlines, descriptions, and call-to-actions should urge people to take the next step

• Deep understanding of pain points: Not just surface-level problems but the thoughts actually keeping your ideal clients up at night

• Clear path to transformation: Showing exactly how you'll help them solve their problems

The Cold Audience Challenge

Many coaches make the critical mistake of assuming what works organically will work with paid ads. This simply isn't true. When you're running ads to cold audiences, you're starting from scratch with people who don't know you, don't like you (yet), and certainly don't trust you.

Your organic audience may convert at 50% because they've encountered your content multiple times and developed trust. A cold audience has none of that history, so your marketing needs to work much harder to build credibility quickly.

The Back-to-Front Marketing Approach

One strategy I've found incredibly effective is working backward. Start by identifying your end goal—what exactly do you want people to do? Then map out how to attract the right person who's at the correct level of awareness.

This approach ensures your entire funnel aligns properly. Every piece—from ad creative to landing page to offer—works cohesively toward a single objective rather than feeling disconnected.

Patience in Optimization

It's worth noting that even the best marketing requires optimization. In my experience, it can take 3-6 months to fully dial in a low-ticket funnel. For instance, I worked with a client whose order bump initially converted at only 10% when our benchmark was 30-40%. After analyzing results and making strategic changes, we eventually achieved a 55% conversion rate—the highest they'd ever seen.

The speed of optimization depends on:

• How quickly you analyze results

• Your willingness to make changes

• Your budget for gathering sufficient data

• Your expertise in knowing which levers to pull

Creating Scroll-Stopping Creative

In today's crowded digital landscape, your ad creative needs to do three things simultaneously:

• Stop someone from scrolling

• Resonate at a deep emotional level

• Present an offer that solves a real problem

This trifecta is what separates high-performing campaigns from those that drain your budget without results.