Online marketing coaching: for the business owner or for the in-house marketer?

If you search for online marketing coaching, you get two types of offers mixed together. One coach thinks along with an entrepreneur who decides for themselves what happens. The other guides a marketer who carries out the work themselves. Those are different conversations, different frequencies and different results, and virtually nobody makes that distinction on their own website.

That is a shame, because it is precisely the question you must start with.

Business coaching: help with making choices

Here the coach is a sounding board. Where is your target audience, which channel suits your offer, what is a realistic budget, and does what you are doing now actually work? You talk about direction, not execution.

That is valuable if you make the decisions yourself and need someone to keep you on your toes. It is also where it goes wrong if you expect something to be built afterwards. At the end of such a conversation you know what needs to be done, but nothing has been built yet.

Do you recognise this: you don't employ a marketer, you outsource it or do it yourself on the side, and above all you want to make better decisions about what you outsource.

Coaching for the internal marketer: assistance with execution

Here, someone is sitting next to your marketer while they are building. The questions are more concrete: is this campaign structure correct, why is this result dropping, has this conversion been measured properly, should I intervene here or not.

That is only going to work if there is someone who actually does the work and has time for it every week. Without that person, you are coaching in a vacuum: great conversations about a channel that nobody is building.

Do you recognise this: you have a marketer or team that wants to take advertising in-house, but the specific expertise is still lacking.

Why the distinction matters

Anyone who buys the wrong variant only notices after a few months. An entrepreneur who takes on implementation coaching without anyone actually implementing pays for advice that goes unused. A marketer who gets directional coaching while getting stuck on setting up a campaign gets answers to questions they didn't have.

The practical test question is simple: who will be in the advertising account after this conversation? If that is not you and there is no one else either, then you don't need coaching, but someone to execute it.

What to ask before hiring someone

• Do you work in accounts yourself? Someone who only advises misses what has changed on the platforms over the past few months. Ask for figures from their own practice, such as click prices per channel.
• What is the destination? With training that is knowledge, with coaching it should be a working channel. If nobody can name the end point, it is a subscription to conversations.
• How much time will it take me? Coaching without personal effort doesn't exist. If you aren't asked that question, that's a bad sign.
• What happens if it doesn't work? Ask when the coach would say you need to stop doing this. Whoever doesn't have an answer to that won't be telling you later either.

How we do it

We do not offer coaching as a standalone service. The guidance is woven into our in-house training programme Customer Journey Advertising: six sessions spread over eight weeks, with a video call after each session to monitor progress and tackle questions. Your marketer builds the campaigns themselves, we watch along and correct before a mistake costs months of budget.

That is a deliberate choice. You learn this trade the moment you hit a roadblock somewhere, not in a classroom and not in a conversation detached from your own account. If the process comes to an end and you want to continue the guidance, that is possible by consultation.

And if you don't have a marketer with available time, we'll tell you that too. Then outsourcing is a better use of the same money than coaching someone who never gets around to it.