Category: Uncategorized

A Beginners Guideline To Online Coaching

by Chris Ward, posted in Social Media Marketing, Uncategorized

Intro to Online Coaching

With the current condition of COVID-19 in the world I have started to think of ways that I can continue on with one of my biggest passions; coaching golfers. With social distancing becoming the norm for the foreseeable future I recently took part in an online seminar from CoachNow to learn remote coaching best practices from their founder Spencer Dennis. With a major trend of online coaching in golf blowing up over the last few years this post will provide you with some well needed information if online-coaching is for you and what you can do to get started.

One of the quickest ways to learn about a new topic is to follow some of the industry leaders of online coaching and find what makes them successful. Some of the coaches I’ve looked at are:

The above coaches vary in creating their own platform to utilizing established apps and coaching companies such as V1Golf, CoachNow, and Skillest.

CoachNow Webinar Takeaways

The CoachNow Online Coaching Best Practices webinar was designed for any coach looking to start or add to their remote coaching.

Their description was “The option for remote coaching has never been more important than it is today and we feel very fortunate that we’ve been able to help thousands of coaches stay connected and still generate income even when they can’t meet in person. With that in mind, our Founder Spencer Dennis will be hosting this webinar to ensure you fully understand the best practices we’ve learned over the years.”

Basics of Getting Setup

My main takeaway from the the webinar was structured into two main areas: How to market your remote coaching and how do you structure your remote coaching package.

How To Market Your Remote Coaching?

  1. Clearly list who this is for and use this in your marketing efforts
    • Are they an out of town student
    • Looking for more frequent check ins between sessions
    • Completely new students looking for a coach
  2. Come up with your own Hook, Story, and Offer.
    • A example used in the webinar was:
      • Hook: Fix your slice in 20 swings.
      • Story: This is how we do it
      • Offer: Normally this is (set $ amount) and now its 20% this week only!
  3. Utilize CoachNow on Instagram
    • Tag @CoachNow_App
      • This gives you the opportunity to highlight what you are doing on a larger platform than your current one
  4. CoachNow also offers a media kit on their website which can be found here.
  5. Create a video covering what your offering and all of the above points.
    • Give the students a call to action by a direction to direct message or link to your website.
    • Once you have a CoachNow account you can create a welcome video for your students along the lines of “Hi this is (YOUR NAME) and welcome to our remote coaching reply to this video with a down the line swing and a face on video!”

How to Structure your Remote Coaching Package?

  1. Remember that this is remote coaching and not an online lesson.
  2. CoachNow allows for a team mentality so build a team if available. This collaboration consists of mental coaches, technical coaches, fitness trainers, and parents.
  3. Typical remote coaching follows the process of:
    1. Student Adds Video To CoachNow
    2. Coach makes Comments & Provides Drills
    3. Student Puts in Work
    4. Student Post A Video For Reassessment
      • If this is done correctly you pass the development on to the athlete and it provides them with the proper tools for success
  4. CoachNow has preset templates that will allow you to scale up your content and give you a structure that best fits your needs
  5. Individual or Teams
    • You can work with individual players in CoachNow which allow a private space between coach and student
    • You can also work in a team atmosphere which allows you to reach all at once and provide group coaching
  6. Pricing and Billing
    • What do you charge?
      • This varies on the services provided, look at other coaches in the area and find something that works with your skill set and clientele.
    • How does billing work? CoachNow doesn’t do billing but they suggest Venmo, Zelle, or PayPal. You also can offer a recurring product that may be offered in a platform that your club or current charging systems uses.

Most Successful Business Models

  1. Altus Performance utilizes effective language used and showcases versatility in offerings (Cameron McCormick-Jordan Spieth’s Swing Coach). They have a pdf which features their pricing and offers here. 
  2. Wil Fleming – Weight Lifting utilizes CoachNow’s teams system very effectively by offering a community workout setting that allows him to reach many people with the same content. Wil charges $199 per month and currently has 65 members in one of his teams, doing some quick math that’s a total of $12,935 a month through remote coaching. He also requires a minimum 3 month commitment to show effective results.
  3. Lance Gill Performance showcases the simplicity of buttons needed on a website and strong marketing video showing what he offers. Remote Training Protocol
  4. Martin Chuck utilizing segments for bulk messaging. Martin Chuck has user base of over 20,000 students which is why he offers segments to help personalize his messages without sending 20,000 separate messages. For more information on segments click here.

Videos and Image Analysis Best Practices

CoachNow’s Video and Image analysis tool allow students to send in content for the coach to analyze. Some of the CoachNow features include Slo-Mo and Scrubbing, Drawing on portions of the media, Snapshots, Recording of analysis (Screen capture), and comparison tools. For a more in depth analysis on how to use CoachNow’s analysis tool click here.

Provide something like this for your students to improve the quality of videos.

Promotion

One of the most important aspects of building up your student base is having a strong social media presence, check out some of my past posts below on effective ways to promote yourself and brand:

Thanks for Stopping By!

Be Sure To Follow @WardoGolf On Instagram, Facebook, & Twitter!

Social Listening: Why it’s a Must Do For Marketers

by Chris Ward, posted in Uncategorized

What is Social Listening?

Social listening is the idea of gaining business intelligence by listening and researching customers, media, employees, competitors, and other influencers. Active social listeners are provided with ideas for new products and services, as well as new opportunities to reach business goals. Social listening is also useful for identifying poor customer feedback as issues or crises.

“Social listening keeps you plugged into all the right channels” (Waxman, 2017, Section 1, Paragraph 3)

Most relevant places to start social listening for your business:

  • Using relevant hashtags through Twitter 
  • Using keyword searches to find relevant terms for your business through Google Trends
  • Customer service reps and sales reps are also a wealth of knowledge for social listening business intelligence

Using Social Listening to Understand Your Customers

One of the most effective uses for social listening is to use it to understand your customers. By having an up to date understanding of their needs, it is much easier to have fresh new products and services available to keep your customers involved and keep your business relevant. Social listening can be used to monitor feedback for your business, but also it can be used to hear feedback about your competitors and things they are missing that you can provide.

An example of this for a golf course perspective would be looking at feedback for a nearby golf course from a millennial golfer; the feedback may read “@ABCGolfCourse had an extremely narrow beer menu, get with the program it’s 2018 and #CraftBeer is everywhere! (except @ABCGolfCourse).” Now your course can use this feedback to see the demand for craft beer at your golf course. Another effective action would be to reply to the disapproving customer of ABC with your extensive beer list to win their business.

Another great way to understand your customers is to imagine things from their perspective. In Martin Waxman’s video “Social Listening for Marketers” he identifies some key questions to ask yourself about your customers:

  • What motivates them?
  • What is their day like?
  • What are their challenges and goals?
  • What is your relation? (Transactional or Aspirational?)

(Waxman, 2017, Section 2, Paragraph 2)

 

Image result for social listening for new product ideas example
Spotify using social listening to gain positive feedback and reinforcement of a service offered by them.

 

 

How to Get Started With Social Listening

The first step to social listening is searching for places to listen. At this point, it is important to narrow your results to find customers more related to the product or service you sell. This can be done by using hashtags and keywords pertaining to your business’ geographic location or specific words that relate to your business. An excellent search for a golf professional in Edmonton looking to find information about golfers in the area would be #EdmontonGolf or #YEGGolf on Twitter.

Each search network uses their own algorithm related to you to filter results; the best way to get real results when finding information through search is to log out of all related search accounts and clear your cache. By doing this you will be closer to seeing what your customers are seeing about your business. Other great search tools discussed in Martin Waxman’s video “Social Listening for Marketers” would be:

With all of these search options, the key things they allow you to filter results by are: time, sentiment, keywords and phrases, demographics, and geography.

With companies branching out to so many different social media platforms nowadays it is inefficient to monitor each individually.  Now there are dashboards available to allow you to monitor all aspects of your social media presence from one page. The top dashboard used by small and large businesses is Hootsuite; it allows you to schedule posts, measure interaction, and manage your social media presence in one place.

Social Listening in Action

Social listening in action represents three key uses: social listening for research and insights, social listening for customer service, and social listening for an issue and crisis management.

Social listening can improve your capabilities for collecting research and insights about your customers. A great use of social media polling through Twitter would be to find services that your customers may want to be included in the price of your services. By posting the question and listening to the feedback you can gain a wealth of information about your customer’s expectations. It is important to use social listening before, during, and after key events in your industry; this is generally when ideas about your company and competitors are most discussed.

Social listening can also improve your business’s customer service capabilities. By making your posts public it allows your responses to issues to be available for others who may be having the same issue. By doing this it shows that you are there for support and also takes some of the work off of your hands because it allows others to self-troubleshoot. It is important to reply quickly and provide valuable content to your followers in order to build trust and gain their loyalty. If your business utilizes social listening correctly for customer service it will showcase how responsive and caring you are as a company.

The last use of social listening is to help identify an issue in comparison to a crisis. The biggest difference between the two is the threat of long-term damage to your company associated with a crisis. Both situations are equally important and social listening acts as the early warning tool to allow a business to act quickly. When identifying an issue “early enough you can take responsibility, apologize sincerely and try to resolve it as quickly as you can” (Waxman, 2017, Section 4, Paragraph 3). 

How Social Listening Will Benefit Golf Professionals

Social listening is a marketing must for all golf professionals; it allows you to monitor your customers and follow conversations throughout the golf industry. This social listening will also have both positives and negatives, but how you utilize the insight gathered will be what sets you apart. It is important to tread quietly on the social media network and pay close attention to the customers, media, employees, competitors, and other influencers that you interact with.  By being an active social listener it allows golf courses and professionals alike to get that much closer to achieving business goals.

References:

Waxman, M. (2017, June 5th ). Social Listening for Marketers [Video File]. Retrieved from https://www.lynda.com/HootSuite-tutorials/Next-steps/546104/621995-4.html