Wise Goose Founder and Director Helen Sieroda shares some thoughts about the importance of ethical marketing for coaches, touches on marketing snares and snags and offers a some suggestions for marketing with integrity.
Over the past few weeks, we’ve been preparing for our 2025 BCorp recertification, this happens every three year. It’s a rigorous process and treading water for three years isn’t an option. We need to demonstrate a journey of continuous improvement.
There are some areas where we are already doing better, and places where we need to improve. Going through our impact assessment I realised that Wise Goose didn’t have a written marketing policy. We are small, and maybe we don’t need a policy, but it started me thinking about the importance of aligning marketing strategies with our core values and mission.
We do our best to live our values through the way we do business and talk about our work, but I’ve not really thought about this as marketing. This is probably because I’m definitely not a marketing expert. In fact, I’m ambivalent about a lot of the ‘hype’ that gets generated in marketing .
I may not be a marketing guru, but I do want to build a business that’s sustainable and makes a profit. For me, learning to be okay with marketing is about embracing being a business owner, and building effective systems that can create real lasting success. So what’s been my problem?
Someone who helped me to understand my ambivalence was Mats Alvesson. In his book The Triumph of Emptiness, he demystifies popular, upbeat claims about branding in higher education, organisational change, professionalisation, leadership and coaching. He argues that a culture of grandiosity is leading to numerous inflated claims as organisations focus excessively on image, brand, visibility at the expense of substance and genuine value.
Inflated claims that over-promise and under-deliver can easily sneak into the marketing of coaching and coach training. With this in mind, ethical marketing is not just a strategy—it’s a commitment to authenticity, transparency, and genuine engagement, ideally to serve worthwhile purposes., or as Simon Western for the Eco Leadership Institute puts it Coaching to act in ‘good faith’ to create the ‘good society’. This can apply to pretty much any coach, whatever their niche, so I hope the following suggestions will resonate whether you are a life coach, executive coach, career, wellness, relationship or any other kind of coach.
Transparent Practices
Transparency is crucial in building trust. Focus on providing honest and accurate information that helps potential clients make informed decisions. Be clear about your coaching methods, pricing, and what clients can expect from your services. When I designed the Wise Goose website ‘experts’ told me to leave out the ‘fees and dates’ page. I was determined to make it easy for potential students to have the information they needed to compare us with other training providers and make a confident and clear choice about their next steps.
Genuine Engagement
At the heart of ethical marketing is genuine relationship and engagement. This means interacting with all stakeholders (not just potential clients) in a way that is sincere and meaningful. Rather than viewing potential clients as mere leads, or ‘prospects’ see them as individuals with unique needs, challenges and aspirations. Encourage thoughtful conversations, give personalised responses, and show genuine interest in their hopes and dreams and aspirations. This is what coaching is all about, so hardly needs saying! But sometimes, even though it seems obvious it’s challenging; for example if I really want more clients, the focus easily shifts from what’s best for them to my needs. I might feel under pressure to try hard to sell my services and ‘convert’ them rather than focus on where they want to go and if and how I might help them get there. If I think a client would be better served by another coach, or another training programme I say so and refer to someone who could be a better ‘fit’. But sometimes, turning away business feels like losing out- and that’s hard.
Building a Community
Hiding your light under a bushel, and waiting for the world to come knocking on your door won’t work and is one of the biggest pitfalls new coaches fall into. You need to let the world know what you do! Aim to build genuine relationships and to connect with other coaches and professionals not just potential clients. Attend workshops, and webinars, go to training sessions, read books then go and talk to friends and colleagues about them. After meeting someone you have a connection to, follow up with a personalised message to show are genuinely interested in staying connected. Partner with other coaches, therapists, or consultants to offer joint programs or workshops. Collaboration can expand your reach and introduce you to new audiences. Wise Goose has thrived through collaboration, not all have been successful, but all have been worth exploring. The word-of-mouth referrals that come our way through our community are incredibly powerful, it’s the foundation our business is built on.
The Power of Storytelling
Share stories that highlight your values, experiences, approach and the impact of your coaching (with permission and respecting confidentiality.) Testimonials are a powerful way of illustrating how your coaching has helped clients achieve their goals. They can demonstrate the tangible benefits of your services. Rather than trying to explain what coaching is in theory, find ways to show how you are offering a clear path forwards that can lead to real, positive change and results. It’s totally possible to do this while being honest and avoiding the temptation of creating a glossy front on your work.
Education and Expertise
Share your interests and knowledge through blogs, videos, articles, webinars, podcasts and workshops. Write or speak, depending on your strengths and preferences. Provide educational content that helps your audience understand how you can address their specific needs. It’s a place to share your approach, and focus on how your coaching process works and can help them get from where they are to where they want to be. This not only positions you as an ‘expert’ but builds trust, allowing you to interact with potential clients and other professionals in a meaningful way.
I know social media can be a powerful tool for ethical marketing but it’s not my favourite place and I don’t engage enough. So on this topic I encourage you to “do as I say not as I do” – use it to share valuable content, engage with your audience, and build your brand presence. Focus on creating content that educates, inspires, and adds value. Join relevant groups and participate in discussions – be generous – comment on others’ posts and engage with your community regularly.
Social and Environmental Responsibility
Incorporating social and environmental responsibility into your marketing strategy reflects a commitment to broader values. Highlight your efforts to support sustainable practices, contribute to social causes, and promote ethical behaviour. This a big part of our brand at Wise Goose, it resonates with clients who share similar values. Over the years I’ve learned that though it might put some people off, in the end it means we get to work with the people who are a good ‘fit’ with our approach and values – and that is a real joy!
In a nutshell, gaining attention, generating a buzz, showcasing your services and values, and creating traffic that can significantly boost the growth of your business is a primary purpose of marketing.
This begs the question – when you have a business that’s growing how much growth is enough? Just like any industry coaching can play into the myth of endless growth, feeding consumerism with life denying, planet depleting consequences. What kind of growth is good growth? What purposes does all that coaching serve? What if growth is not the only story? What is a good life – for us as coaches or for our clients?
Coaching can be part of the problem or part of the solution.
As coaches we have a powerful frameworks, structures, tools and techniques to help clients work towards their goals. We can do this while helping them explore new ways to be in the world, find new stories to tell about what matters, and consider the differences between surface wants, and deeper needs., We can help a client focus on transactional goals to achieve immediate tasks, and at the same time hold wider transformational goals to drive long-term growth and development. This isn’t about preaching or telling our clients what they should want, or how they should be. It’s about holding the bigger picture, inviting exploration, so they can discover what’s important, choose where they want to go and how to get there.
I want to finish with ‘worthwhile purposes’ I mentioned earlier. Over ten years ago on a Dartmoor walk, Jonathan Wise shared his story of waking up to the negative impact of his work in advertising, how he quit in the middle of a recession, and his journey towards getting people in the industry to ask tough questions about purpose. Marketing and advertising aren’t the same thing, but they are close cousins. This video from Jonathan and his associates at ‘Purpose Disruptors’ is aimed at the advertising industry, but there’s a lot here that’s relevant to our work as coaches, especially the exploration of ‘The Good Life 2030.’
