Why is polished marketing not getting you coaching clients, and how does unrehearsed, unfiltered marketing attract the right ones?
You rewrite the script, refine the funnel and polish the post, and the people you most want to work with still stay on the other side of the screen. Unrehearsed, unfiltered marketing is marketing that shows your real voice, your real thinking and your real energy as they are, with no script standing between you and the person watching. Polish can make a business look flawless and still leave out the one thing a soul client came to find, which is you. This article looks at what polish protects, what a classic study of likability shows about letting your humanity show, and how to show up unrehearsed while keeping your work accurate.
What polish protects you from
Polish is built to avoid mistakes. It removes the pause, the half-formed thought and the word you reached for and almost lost. For a woman who has spent decades in careers where an error carried real cost, this instinct is understandable, and it is useful in the places where accuracy matters, such as a price, a date or a promise.
What a classic study of likability shows
In 1966, the psychologist Elliot Aronson and his colleagues Ben Willerman and Joanne Floyd tested what a small blunder does to the way people see someone. Forty-eight university students listened to one of four recordings of a student answering quiz questions. The student in two of the recordings was very able and answered 92 percent of the questions correctly, and the student in the other two was average and answered 30 percent correctly. In one recording of each pair, the student clumsily spilled coffee on his new suit near the end of the interview (Aronson, Willerman & Floyd, 1966).
The most able student who spilled the coffee was the best liked of the four, and the average student who spilled it was the least liked. The blunder alone had no significant effect, and the effect came from the combination of ability and blunder. Aronson's explanation was that a person of great ability can seem too good and too distant, and that a blunder makes her seem human and approachable.
A person of great ability can seem too good and too distant. Letting your humanity show makes your expertise approachable and believable.
What that means for a coach
The condition in the study matters. The blunder helped the person whose competence was already clear. A coach with decades of experience is exactly the person this finding describes, which suggests an order of work. Make your expertise unmistakable first, through precise claims and accurate details, and then let your humanity show in the places where she is deciding whether she can trust you. The study is nearly sixty years old, it used a small group of students and a recorded mishap, so it is best read as an illustration of a dynamic and never as a rule. It also gives no reason to stage a mistake. A staged mistake is a performance, and performance is the opposite of what a soul client came to find.
What polish costs you
The cost shows up in connection. Every line that has been smoothed and every funnel that has been tightened adds distance between you and the person watching. A soul client is looking for someone she can trust with something tender, and trust forms when she sees how you think in real time. When everything arrives perfected, the human being she came to meet is hard to find.
Credibility is part of this as well. Jakob Nielsen's research on writing for the web found that readers disliked promotional language with boastful claims, and that credibility suffered when they saw exaggeration (Nielsen, 1997). Marketing that has been smoothed until it sounds like an advertisement can invite the same reaction.
Where to keep the polish
Keep it where precision serves the reader, in dates, links, prices and the clear instructions for taking the next step. Loosen it in the places where she is deciding whether she trusts you, which are the places where you teach, answer and respond.
How to show up unrehearsed
Choose one real question a client asked you this month, with no names or identifying details, and answer it on camera in one take, speaking as you would to a woman across a table. Begin with a one-sentence answer, give one example, and close with one thing she can do this week. Publish it with a plain title and no editing beyond trimming the start and the end. Do this weekly for a month, and watch which pieces draw conversation. Confidence comes from repetition, and it grows each time you say what you think and discover that people respond.
If you want to build the credibility that lets your humanity land, my earlier episode, How To Boost Your Authority as a Coach: 7 Ways to Start Now, is a good place to begin. And if you would like help with the messaging and systems behind your marketing, that is the work I do with women coaches at badassbutterflyalchemy.com.
Today's conversation
Rachael Lenzmeier Jencks, an attorney, CPA, MBA and business confidence coach, joins me live at 2:00 PM PT today to talk about this, and you can watch the live or replay here. Rachael also offers a free three-part audio training, If I'm So Smart, Why Can't I Make Money as a Coach?, for coaches who want to begin there.
Where is your marketing most polished and least like you?
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References
- Aronson, E., Willerman, B., & Floyd, J. (1966). The effect of a pratfall on increasing interpersonal attractiveness. Psychonomic Science, 4(6), 227-228. https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/BF03342263
- Nielsen, J. (1997, October 1). How Users Read on the Web. Alertbox. Archived copy: https://www.chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/links/pdf/chapter4/4.17c.pdf
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Crystal Lynn Bell
Founder of Badass Butterfly Alchemy
Visit www.badassbutterflyalchemy.com →Crystal Lynn Bell is a Spiritual Business Mentor, visibility coach, and founder of Badass Butterfly Alchemy Coaching. Her work sits at the intersection of deep inner transformation and serious business architecture. Since 2011, she has guided more than 800 women through the process of building coaching businesses grounded in their genuine experience and designed to produce real, sustainable income.