Landing Pages for Coaches: What they are and how you should use them

This post covers topics that are better suited to coaches who already have a basic understanding of web pages. I suggest you read our post on Web page basics for coaches to accompany the knowledge you can gain here.

A landing page is any page on your website that a visitor might land on when they come to your site.

They might be coming from Google search results or from your online marketing and advertising.

Most coaches don't really use landing pages and just assume that the home page is where everyone starts on your website.

The problem with sending people to your homepage is that it's very generic. A home page won't effectively deliver specific messages to your audience about your products and services you've carefully designed to solve their problems and help them reach their goals.

If you create specific products and services for different types of customers you need to create specific pages designed to ensure that your visitors are presented with the targeted messages that are required to truly reach your audience.

Defining who your Customers are

When we create the messages for our landing pages we need to think about the 4 questions we should always be asking when we are thinking about solving our customer's problems.

1. Who are your customers in your niche? and where are they now?
2. What are they trying to achieve? What is their idea of a "better life"?
3. What obstacles are currently in the way of them getting to where they want to be? What's stopping them? what is causing them "pain"?
4. How can your products and services help them overcome those obstacles and get where they want to go? how will your products make their life better?

Now let's use this to develop our messages for our landing page. This is a trick I learned from an entrepreneur named Justin Jackson as part of his Tiny Marketing Wins project. Take a look at some of his stuff, it's not coaching related but great tips and tricks for small manageable marketing tasks.

So Justin's trick is to open up a simple text editor like notepad on your computer and paste in those 4 questions and leave a few lines between each that we will fill in with our messages.

I've set up an example below;

1. Who are your customers in your niche? and where are they now?

Who are they?

The customers in my niche are busy professionals with children and partners. Both male and female. They in their 30's or 40's so children are still school age. They are very busy but have a little more time on their hands now their children are at school.

Where are they now?

They have achieved a lot already in their careers and family life but now feel like they need some new challenges. Balancing a career and family has taught them to be very selective and efficient with their time.

2. What are they trying to achieve? What is their idea of a "better life"?

They have achieved a lot already in their career and family life but they want a new challenge. A long-distance triathlon is something they are interested in training for, possibly Ironman but probably start with a half distance to build up to it. They have high expectations for themselves in terms of performance but also value the social aspect of training and racing.

What is their idea of a better life?

They want their life to be better by having the freedom to take on a new challenge but also the satisfaction of achieving something very difficult to a high standard without compromising their family, career or business commitments.

3. What obstacles are currently in the way of them getting to where they want to be? What's stopping them? what is causing them "pain"?

Their time is limited as they typically work 50-70 hour weeks and have commitments to their kid's school and sporting activities. Training and racing for long-distance triathlon are very difficult and much of this niche are reasonably new to the sport of triathlon or even general endurance sport. They may have participated in other sports to a high level, but have limited knowledge around what's required to train for and race a long distance triathlon. They may have a bit of a mind-block when they consider launching into this sort of training as have heard people talking about 30 hour training weeks and are wondering how they could ever commit that sort of time and it's stopped them from considering taking the journey in the past. They have the perception that to be successful at long-distance triathlon your training needs to be your number 1 priority. However, for them, their family and career must come first.

4. How can your products and services help them overcome those obstacles and get where they want to go? how will your products make their life better?

You as a professional coach have the knowledge and experience to help them overcome these obstacles. You've faced the same challenges with other clients and/or your own training and have developed proven processes and strategies over time. Your one to one coaching services will offer the advice and programming so that they will not have to make mistakes and learn on their own. You may also have some template training plans for those who do not wish to commit time or money to a complete one to one coaching service. These plans have been built based on years of experience and working with dozens if not hundreds of athletes with similar goals and similar constraints. The obstacles and challenges these customers are facing are not unique and you have dealt with them successfully over and over again and achieved great results. You can improve the lives of these customers by helping them avoid costly mistakes and save them time. You can help them reach their goals faster and with more confidence.

Designing Your Messages for you Landing Page

Ok so taking those answers let's start with the first question. This is going to be our headline message for the landing page. In the headline, we want to address the customer so they know we are talking to them directly. We need to catch their attention straight away so they know this page and the products and services are targeted at them. In the headline, we can use both who they are and where they are now along with their goals and aspirations.

Quick tip: The text in italic is our template and the text in bold is our end result we will use on our landing page.

1. Who are your customers in your niche? and where are they now?
2. What are they trying to achieve? What is their idea of a "better life"?

Dream of taking on the challenge of an Ironman? but don't think you have the time required to reach your potential because of work and family commitments?

Now we need to address their challenges that they are facing, the uncertainties and doubts. At this point, we want to them to think "yeah, these are my challenges exactly. This is what's holding me back". We need to let them know we understand their problems and pain points.

3. What obstacles are currently in the way of them getting to where they want to be? What's stopping them? what is causing them "pain"?
Training for an Ironman is hard! You have to:
- Balance quality time with your family;
- Keep on top of your business or career commitments;
- Stay healthy and avoid injury and sickness;
- Juggle your busy life and training!

Next, we need to tell them how our products and services can help them reach their goals and overcome their challenges and concerns.

4. How can your products and services help them overcome those obstacles and get where they want to go? how will your products make their life better?

Here at <company name> we have the knowledge and experience to overcome these challenges. Through years of coaching hundreds of athletes just like you, we've developed our <plan/coaching/e-book> to help you maximize your time and effort and reach your goals while maintaining a healthy career and family life! Let us guide you through your Ironman campaign.

And now finally we want them to act. We now use a Call to Action (CTA) for whatever we want them to do next. What that is will depend on the product or service. it could be downloading an e-book and collecting their email address, it could be purchasing an online membership or training plan or it could be contacting you or filling in a form for one-on-one coaching. The examples below are for different types of products and services but you only want one call to action that is the main goal of your landing page.

Apply for Ironman Coaching Now
Download our E-book
Start your Online Plan Today!

Conclusion and Example Page

and there you have it, you've created your message for your niche customers that will hopefully resonate with them, alleviate their concerns, break down the obstacles that have been stopping them and prompt them to take action. You should now use these landing pages when sharing your services online or in your paid marketing campaigns.

There are also a few other elements you should add to your landing page to build trust and for "social proof" like testimonials from other clients in your niche explaining how you've helped them with the very problems you are proposing to solve on the landing page.

You don't need Training Tilt to be able to create landing pages on your website but running your website through the Training Tilt Platform will make it fast and easy to setup. Check out the live example landing page here or take a look at the screenshot below. Here's our guide on how to easily create a landing page in your Training Tilt site.

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