A communication plan creates a communication strategy that will help you reach coaching business goals as quickly as possible. If you struggle putting out content, wonder what to talk about or don’t know how to keep track of it all, you will benefit from a great plan. But what does an effective communication plan look like?
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Why You Need A Communication Plan for your Coaching Business
Developing a communication plan is an essential part of your marketing and sales process. It helps you identify the best way to communicate with your clients, prospects, and customers. It also gives you a framework for creating content that will attract new people to your business.
Communication plans are most helpful when they’re created before you start selling or promoting your services. This allows you to create messaging that aligns with your brand and helps you to plan what, where, and when to communicate.
A well-written plan will allow you to communicate with clarity and consistency. When you have clarity about what you need to communicate to whom, when, where, and how, you’ll also convey it with better clarity to others. It also provides a structure that breaks down the complexity of communicating the expertise and products and services of your coaching business across multiple channels.
Once you have a communication plan in place, you can use it to:
- plan content development
- time your daily, weekly, or monthly communications (newsletters, social media posts, etc.)
- fine-tune your activities if you see what is or is not working well
- create synergies to avoid the overproduction of content
- plan ahead of launches to create “buzz” in anticipation of a newly launched product or even to plan your business launch announcement.
What A Communication Plan Needs
What a good communication plan needs depends on who you’re targeting and how much time you want to spend developing your message. If you’re looking to sell more coaching packages, then you’ll need to focus on creating a clear value proposition that makes it easy for potential buyers to understand why they should buy from you.
If you’re planning to build a mailing list of subscribers, then you’ll need a different approach than if you’re trying to get leads through cold calling. The same goes for social media. If you’re hoping to grow your email list by posting links to blog articles, then you’ll need something else entirely.
The following sections outline some key components of a good communications plan.
1. Identify Your Target Audience
- Who do you want to talk to?
- Who do you want to hear from?
- What do they care about?
- How do they prefer to receive information?
2. Define Your Message
- What’s your main point?
- Why should someone buy from you?
- What problem are you solving?
- What benefits will they gain?
3. Choose Your Communication Channels
- Which platforms will you use to deliver your message?
- Will you post regularly or just occasionally?
- Which marketing channels will you employ?
- When?
4. Develop Content
- What kind of content will you share?
- Blog posts?
- Videos?
- Infographics?
- Articles?
- Podcasts?
- Emails?
- Social media updates?
- Where will your marketing materials be stored?
5. Measure Results
- How will you measure success?
- Are there any metrics you can track?
- Do you need to set up a system to keep track of results?
6. Plan Improvements
As you learn more about your audience and your goals, you may find that you need to adjust your strategy. You might decide to change your tone, frequency, or medium. Or maybe you realize that one channel isn’t working as well as another.
7. Evaluate And Revise
As you continue to develop your plan, you’ll be able to evaluate whether it’s effective and refine it accordingly.
8. Launch
You’ve created a well-thought-out plan. Now use your plan to execute it and announce your upcoming launch – whether your business launch or your next product launch.
How To Use Your Communication Plan + Templates & Tools
You don’t necessarily need to write out an entire plan before you start your marketing activities. Instead, you can make adjustments along the way based on what you observe. Here are some ideas for how you could use your communication plan in your day-to-day activities:
Write a short summary of your weekly plan at the beginning of each week so you know where you stand. This helps you stay focused on what you’re doing and prevents you from getting distracted by other things.
Create a document or use a project management tool or a professional content planner to keep track of your activities. For example, if your communication plan indicates that you are blogging weekly and posting on Instagram daily, you need a planner to keep track of it. You could use a spreadsheet to do it as well if that works for you.
However, spreadsheets often make it hard to connect to other apps and to track multiple formats well. This is where great marketing planners or content planning tools come in handy. Take a look at CoSchedule, Missinglettr, Publer, or even Canva’s built-in scheduling tool and see what works for you. The screenshot below shows a social media calendar using one of these content planning tools.
Using these platforms will allow you to plan ahead (set-it-and-forget-it) and can even help you to analyze how well content performs, so you can reuse it or recycle it in the future. You could plan for weeks or months ahead.
Lastly, check out some free communication plan templates from Hubspot to start your planning with proven methods. This way, you do not need to wonder about how to write a communication plan from scratch.