What Coaching Clients Actually Want to Hear (It’s Not What You Think)
TL;DR: Most coaches create content around what coaching clients want to achieve. Goals, transformations, outcomes. And it’s not wrong, exactly, but it misses the thing that actually makes someone stop and pay attention. Your audience doesn’t want to hear about the destination. They want to hear that you understand where they are right now, in the stuck place, in the three-in-the-morning place, in the “I’ve tried everything and I’m still here” place. The content that connects isn’t the content that promises a result. It’s the content that describes a feeling so accurately the reader thinks you’ve read their journal. This article breaks down why coaches get this backwards, what your audience is actually responding to when they engage, and how to find the gap between what you think they want and what they’re genuinely looking for.
The coach who couldn’t understand why her best content flopped
If you’ve spent any time wondering what coaching clients want to hear from you, there’s a good chance you’ve been looking in the wrong direction. I know because I watched a business coach learn this the hard way.
She spent a whole weekend on a carousel post. Polished design, five slides, strong call to action. The topic: “Five steps to hitting your first £10k month.” It was technically excellent. Clean framework, logical progression, the kind of post you’d put in a portfolio.
Twelve likes. Two of them from other coaches.
That same week, she’d written a quick text post on a Tuesday evening. No graphics. No framework. Just three lines about how she’d spent forty minutes staring at a blank Google Doc because she couldn’t work out what to say to her own email list. She almost deleted it before posting.
That one got 94 comments. People saying “this is literally me right now.” People sharing their own versions of the same paralysis. Three DMs from people asking about her coaching.
She told me afterwards: “I don’t understand. The good post got nothing. The throwaway post got everything.”
I understood. Because I’d seen it happen dozens of times. And the pattern always points to the same misunderstanding: a gap between what coaches think their audience needs and what actually makes someone pay attention.
Why do coaches keep getting this backwards?
Because the training says to lead with the transformation. Every marketing course, every content template, every “how to sell coaching” programme says the same thing: talk about the outcome. Paint the picture of their future self. Show them what’s possible.
It’s not bad advice. It’s incomplete advice. And for most coaches, it’s the only advice they follow, which means every piece of content sounds like a promise.
The problem is that people who need coaching aren’t sitting there dreaming about outcomes. Not most of the time. They’re sitting with the problem. Living in it. The £10k month post asks them to imagine a future they don’t believe is possible yet. The “staring at a blank Google Doc” post meets them exactly where they are.
This is a version of what I wrote about in The Translation Gap. Coaches translate their clients’ experience into professional language, and the clients walk straight past it because they don’t recognise themselves in it.
What coaching clients want, before they want a solution, is to feel understood.
What your audience actually responds to
I’ve watched this play out across dozens of niches now. Through building Pain Point Pulse and reading thousands of conversations where people talk about their real struggles, a pattern shows up so consistently it’s almost boring.
People don’t engage with content that teaches them something new. Not first, anyway. They engage with content that describes something they already feel but haven’t been able to put into words.
There’s a study from the Harvard Business Review that found customers are more loyal to brands that reduce the effort of decision-making than to brands that “delight” them. The same principle applies to content. Your audience isn’t looking to be delighted by your framework. They’re looking for the relief of recognition. The feeling of “finally, someone gets it.”
The three things that actually make people stop scrolling
1. Accurate problem description
Not “are you struggling with imposter syndrome?” That’s a label. Your audience doesn’t use that label at 2am. They write things like: “Everyone in the meeting seemed to know what they were talking about and I was just nodding along hoping nobody asked me a question.”
The more specific and concrete your problem description, the more it sounds like you’ve been eavesdropping on their internal monologue. That’s what stops the scroll.
2. Evidence that you’ve been where they are
Not a rags-to-riches story. Not “I was once broke and now I’m not.” Something smaller and more honest. The business coach’s blank Google Doc moment worked because it was specific, unglamorous, and current. She wasn’t describing a past self she’d conquered. She was describing a Tuesday.
3. The thing they haven’t said out loud yet
This is the hardest to get right and the most powerful when you do. It’s the observation that goes one layer beneath what your audience says publicly. They say “I need more clients.” The thing they haven’t said out loud is “I’m terrified that I’m not actually good enough at this to charge money for it.” Content that names the unspoken layer creates an almost physical reaction: a sharp exhale, a screenshot, a DM.
The gap between what they say and what they mean
This is where most audience research falls short. Surveys ask people what they want. People answer with what they think they should want. The gap between those two things is where all the useful content lives.
I wrote about this in Beyond Surveys, but the short version: when you ask someone “what are you struggling with in your business?”, you get answers like “lead generation” and “time management.” Clean, categorical, safe.
When that same person posts anonymously on Reddit at midnight, they write: “I spent three hours today making a Canva graphic for a post that got two likes and I honestly want to throw my laptop out the window.”
Same person. Same struggle. Completely different language. The survey gives you a topic. The anonymous post gives you a piece of content that could make someone cry with recognition.
When you strip away the professional veneer, your audience wants someone who understands the midnight version. Not the survey version.
How to find the real version
You’ve got three options, roughly in order of effort.
Read where they write honestly. Reddit, Facebook groups for the problem (not the solution), Amazon reviews of books in your niche. I covered this in detail in Conversation Mining. The 1-star and 3-star book reviews are particularly revealing, because people describe exactly what they needed and exactly how the book failed them.
Listen to the language in first sessions. Not what clients say in testimonials after they’ve worked with you. What they say in the first ten minutes, before they’ve adopted your vocabulary. “I just feel like I’m spinning” is first-session language. “I’ve improved my boundary-setting” is post-coaching language. Your content needs the first version.
Use a tool built for this. Pain Point Pulse pulls real conversations from online sources and maps the language patterns. It finds the 2am posts, the raw descriptions, the things people say when they’re not performing for anyone. It’s the difference between manual and automated research, and both approaches have their place.
The content shift: from promising to describing
Once you understand what your audience actually responds to, the content formula changes. You stop leading with the outcome and start leading with the problem. Not because outcomes don’t matter, but because the problem is where trust gets built.
Think of it like this. If someone’s drowning, they don’t need you to describe the beach. They need you to describe what drowning feels like accurately enough that they trust you can help them swim.
What this looks like in practice
Before the shift: “Ready to build a six-figure business? Here are five strategies that will transform your marketing.”
After the shift: “You’ve posted consistently for three months. You’ve followed the advice. You’ve done the Canva templates and the content calendars and the hashtag research. And the needle hasn’t moved. Not really. Here’s what’s actually happening.”
The second version doesn’t promise anything. It just describes a situation with enough accuracy that the right person feels seen. And feeling seen is the precondition for everything else. Before someone will trust your framework, they need to trust that you understand their problem. Before they’ll believe in your transformation, they need to believe you know where they’re starting from.
This is what your audience is looking for from you. Not education. Not inspiration. Recognition.
More examples across different niches
A health coach writes: “Discover the power of intuitive eating with my 5-step framework.” Her ideal client, scrolling Instagram at 11pm after eating a whole packet of biscuits, doesn’t click. That same coach writes: “Last night I ate standing up in the kitchen with the fridge still open. Didn’t even taste it. If that’s where you are right now, I get it.” That one gets saved and shared.
A career coach writes: “Unlock your leadership potential with proven strategies.” Her ideal client, sitting in a car park before work trying to breathe normally, doesn’t recognise herself in that sentence. The same coach writes: “You’re sitting in the car park again, aren’t you. Thirty minutes early because you need the time to prepare your face before you walk in.” That version gets a DM that starts with “How did you know?”
A parenting coach writes: “Build stronger connections with your children through mindful parenting practices.” The parent who just screamed at their six-year-old over a spilled drink and is now crying in the bathroom feels nothing reading that. But “You lost it over something small again. You shut yourself in the bathroom. You’re googling ‘am I a bad parent’ for the third time this week.” That version reaches through the screen.
The pattern is the same every time. Precision about the problem beats promises about the solution. Not because solutions don’t matter. Because your audience needs to trust that you understand before they’ll trust that you can help.
Why “being helpful” isn’t enough
There’s a particular trap I see with coaches who are genuinely knowledgeable. They create brilliant educational content. Tips, frameworks, how-to guides. All accurate. All useful. All getting modest engagement from other coaches who appreciate the craft.
Their ideal clients scroll right past it.
The reason is something I explored in The Feedback Loop Problem. When your content is educational, it attracts people who value education, which tends to be peers, not clients. Your clients aren’t looking for a lesson. They’re looking for someone who understands their situation well enough that they trust them with money.
Being helpful is necessary. But it’s not sufficient. The content that converts isn’t the content that teaches the most. It’s the content that demonstrates understanding so precisely that the reader thinks: “If they understand the problem this well, they probably know how to fix it.”
That’s a different kind of helpful. Less “here’s what to do” and more “here’s what you’re going through, and I recognise it.”
The expertise signal your audience actually trusts
Coaches often think expertise is demonstrated by sharing knowledge. But your audience evaluates expertise differently. They’re not scoring your frameworks. They’re asking one question: “Does this person actually understand what I’m dealing with?”
The coach who describes the blank-Google-Doc paralysis with perfect accuracy signals more expertise to a struggling business owner than the coach who shares five steps to a £10k month. Because the first one proves she’s been in the room. The second one proves she’s read a marketing playbook.
Your content doesn’t need to be less expert. It needs to signal expertise through understanding rather than instruction.
The sales call paradox
There’s a related pattern that shows up on sales calls. Coaches who lead with understanding in their content report shorter, easier discovery calls. The prospect arrives already feeling understood. They don’t need the first twenty minutes of the call to be convinced you know what you’re talking about. They’ve already read three posts that described their exact situation. The call becomes about logistics, not persuasion.
Coaches who lead with expertise in their content have the opposite experience. Longer calls. More objections. More people who are impressed by the knowledge but not sure whether this particular coach “gets” their specific version of the problem. Teaching builds respect. Understanding builds trust. And people buy from trust.
How to find what your specific audience wants to hear
Generic advice about “speak to their struggles” isn’t enough. You need the specific language, the specific frustrations, the specific three-in-the-morning thoughts of your particular audience.
Here’s a process that works.
Step 1: Find three raw conversation sources
Reddit, Facebook groups, Amazon reviews. Search for the problem, not the solution. A relationship coach searches “my partner doesn’t listen to me,” not “relationship coaching.” I mapped this out in detail in The Weekend Audience Research Sprint.
Step 2: Collect 30 sentences in their exact words
Copy and paste. Don’t paraphrase, don’t clean up the grammar, don’t translate into your terminology. The raw language is the whole point. You’re building what I call a pain-language map, and the accuracy of the source material determines how well your content will land.
Step 3: Sort by emotional intensity, not topic
Most coaches sort their research by subject matter: “mindset,” “practical,” “relationships.” Try sorting by emotional temperature instead. Which quotes made you feel something when you read them? Those are the ones that will make your audience feel something when you use that language in your content.
Step 4: Write one post that starts with their words, not yours
Take the most emotionally intense quote and build a post around it. Open with the feeling. Describe the situation. Let the reader sit with the recognition for a beat before you offer any perspective at all.
If it feels uncomfortable to post something that vulnerable and specific, that’s usually a sign it’s going to work.
Step 5: Watch what happens differently
Pay attention to which pieces get DMs versus which get likes. Likes are public. DMs are private. The content that makes someone message you directly, rather than just tapping a heart, is the content that hit the right nerve. Track this. Over a month, the DM-generating content will tell you more about what your audience actually responds to than any engagement metric.
If you’re creating content for other coaches by accident, you’ll notice it here. The likes will come from peers. The DMs will come from clients. If you’re only getting likes, read Stop Creating Content for Coaches for a deeper look at that specific problem.
The uncomfortable truth about what coaching clients want
I think there’s a reason coaches default to transformation-focused content, and it’s not just because the marketing courses told them to. It’s easier. Talking about outcomes is comfortable. You know your process works. You’ve seen it. Leading with the pain, describing the stuck place with real accuracy, requires sitting with the discomfort of that stuck place yourself.
It also means your content might not look “professional” in the way you’ve been taught to value. The three-line post about the blank Google Doc doesn’t look like marketing. It looks like a diary entry. And yet it outperformed the polished carousel by a factor of eight.
It isn’t polish they’re after. It’s proof that you understand.
And there’s something else underneath that discomfort. Writing about the stuck place means admitting you know what it feels like. Not from a distance. Not from a case study. From having been there yourself, recently enough that you remember the specific texture of it. That honesty is what gives the content its power, and it’s also what makes it hard to publish.
The coaches I’ve watched grow the fastest aren’t the ones with the best frameworks or the fanciest graphics. They’re the ones whose audience says “it’s like you’re inside my head.” That response doesn’t come from teaching. It comes from listening. From doing the work of understanding your audience’s actual language, their actual feelings, their actual 2am thoughts, rather than the cleaned-up version they share in public.
The Invisible Audience I wrote about in that earlier article exists in the gap between what people say and what they feel. Your content lives or dies by whether it reaches into that gap.
What changes when you get this right
The shift isn’t dramatic in the way you’d expect. You don’t suddenly go viral. What happens is quieter and more important.
You start getting messages from people you’ve never spoken to who say things like “I’ve been following you for a while and I just wanted to say thank you.” You start getting enquiries from people who already trust you before the first call, because your content made them feel understood months ago. Your discovery calls get shorter because there’s less convincing to do. The person already knows you get it.
The Australian marketing researcher Jenni Romaniuk describes this as “mental availability,” the degree to which your brand comes to mind when someone is ready to buy. For coaches, mental availability isn’t built through advertising. It’s built through recognition. Every time someone reads your post and thinks “that’s exactly how I feel,” you move a little closer to being the person they contact when they’re finally ready.
That’s the compounding effect of understanding what coaching clients want. Not one post that performs well, but a body of content that consistently makes the right people feel seen. Over weeks and months, that builds something no amount of teaching or tip-sharing can replicate: trust at scale.
FAQ
What if I’m a new coach and I don’t have clients yet to learn from?
You don’t need clients to learn what coaching clients want. You need conversations. Reddit threads, Facebook groups, Amazon reviews of books in your niche. The people in those conversations are your future clients, describing the same problems your coaching addresses. Start with Conversation Mining and build your language bank before you create a single piece of content. Ten hours of reading anonymous forum posts will teach you more about your audience than a year of guessing.
Isn’t leading with pain manipulative?
There’s a line between describing pain accurately and exploiting it for engagement. The distinction is intent and follow-through. If you describe someone’s situation with precision and then offer genuine help, that’s empathy. If you describe it to trigger anxiety and then sell a false promise, that’s manipulation. Your audience can tell the difference. The coach who writes “I sat staring at a blank Google Doc for forty minutes” isn’t manipulating. She’s being honest about a shared experience. The follow-through matters: your content should help, not just hook.
How do I balance problem-focused content with showing results?
You don’t abandon transformation content entirely. You change the ratio. Most coaches run about 80% transformation, 20% problem. Flip it. Lead with the problem. Demonstrate understanding. Then, once you’ve built trust through recognition, the transformation content lands differently because your audience already believes you know where they’re starting from. Social proof and results matter, but they matter more after someone trusts that you understand their starting point.
What if my audience says they want tactical content?
They probably do want tactical content. But they engage with emotional content first. This is the difference between what people say they want and what actually makes them stop scrolling. Tactics serve people who already trust you. Recognition converts people who don’t know you yet. Give them both, but understand which one does which job. The coaches who grow fastest are the ones who use recognition to attract and tactics to retain. I wrote about a related version of this problem in The Hidden Cost of Audience Growth.
How often should I be doing this kind of audience research?
Once properly is better than ongoing half-heartedly. A focused weekend of audience research gives you months of content direction. After that, spend ten minutes a week reading one or two Reddit threads in your niche to keep your language current. If even that feels like too much, Pain Point Pulse automates the ongoing monitoring. But do the manual version at least once. Reading those threads yourself changes something about how you write that no report can replicate.
This article is part of The Complete Guide to Audience Research for Coaches and Consultants, a 29-part series on understanding the people you serve well enough to create content they actually respond to.
Pat Kelman. Come and look at this.
Image: Photo by RDNE Stock project on Pexels
