Don’t Label Your Target Market _Final

>> Have you ever noticed how as a society we have a tendency to place people into groups or categories for our convenience, students, senior citizens, single moms, young professionals? We do this because it's helpful for creating communities, designing programs and services, for marketing purposes, and for establishing our own personal identities, knowing who we are and where we belong. As coaches, we group people together when we think in terms of our target audience or target market. We're taught to narrow the scope of our coaching programs and aim our marketing at specific groups, overweight moms, stressed out middle-aged corporate women, vegan teens, and so on. We're encouraged to create a very specific and vivid image of what our target audience looks like to imagine what they look like, and what they think, what they do, where they shop, and so on. Now this is great wisdom for marketing our services and attracting prospective clients, and I wouldn't argue against it. But for the purpose of being strong coaches, today, I want to look at this in a different light and examine the risks of pigeonholing our audience. If we're not careful to avoid coaching through the lens of a target market, we can hinder our relationships with clients by inadvertently creating labels, making assumptions, and projecting our own beliefs, judgments, and values upon individuals and groups. Now I'm not saying we shouldn't have target market rather that we need to make sure that just because we create an image of who we want to attract and work with that we don't make the mistake of treating people how we think they are instead of who they actually are. So you work with busy moms who are trying to lose baby weight, you speak to and relate to your audience, as you should, by identifying the commonalities they face as being part of this group. For example, poor sleep, the struggle of balancing work and home life, finding time for exercise, and so on. This relatability gets their attention and gets them in the door. But once they're in, you have to remember that there are far more differences across the individuals in your target market than similarities. So while your work may focus on the shared challenges typically experienced by this group, you still have to first and foremost take the time to really get to know them as unique people, and to work with them as such. This means being mindful to not make assumptions about them based on your vision of your target market or by using a one-size-fits-all coaching program. The experience of a new single mom will be very different than the experiences of a new mom who's married. The culture of motherhood will be different for a mom who was raised in a farm in the southern United States as a child of a family of seven and a mom who was raised as an only child on a military base in Asia. Attitudes around parenting will differ between a mom who is a devout catholic preschool teacher and a mother who is an atheist college professor. A mom with a trust fund and a part time job will have much more flexibility to implement self-care and find time to exercise than a mom who's working two jobs finishing up school and just barely scraping by. For you to really reach these moms, you have to approach them all with a beginner's mind knowing that they're all coming to you with different stories, different needs, and different limitations. You have to get to know them as complete unique individuals, not just as members of your target audience. Otherwise, you'll never truly develop empathy because you won't understand what it's like to be in their shoes. You'll make recommendations to clients that don't fit their situation, and they'll likely feel frustrated and misunderstood. We all want to treat all of our clients with the utmost respect and dignity as unique, worthy, and inherently good people. As coaches, we want to make them feel like they're part of a community or a group of people facing a similar struggle so they feel connected. But in order to competently coach people from diverse backgrounds, we must also acknowledge and honor their differences. This is why we teach you a variety of coaching methodologies in addition to stressing the need to explore a person's background, so that you can truly be flexible and customize your interventions to meet each client where they're at. So to recap, we want to always be careful to avoid alienating our clients by getting to know them and treating them as individual people instead of viewing them as members of our target market. To do this, we must use a beginner's mind by really getting to know them and keeping in mind that they have more differences than similarities as a group. Do you think you might be making assumptions about your target market? Head on over to the Facebook group to discuss your concerns and experiences and lean on each other for support. Thank you so much for watching. Take care.