There are marketing strategies for coaches and course creators that I recommended for years, used in my own business and taught inside my programmes. In 2026, I’ve stopped recommending four of them.
None of it was bad advice. It worked, sometimes spectacularly. Buyer behaviour has shifted, though, and the playbook that served you in 2019, 2022 or even 2024 is producing very different results now. If what you’ve been doing suddenly feels like it’s stopped working, there’s a good chance it has.
The women I work with inside the Peace and Profit Mastermind are established. They’re making $5k to $20k a month and they know how to market. The most expensive mistake I see at this level is holding onto a strategy that served you at an earlier stage of business, long after the market moved on.
Here are the four things I’ve stopped recommending, and what I’m telling my clients to do instead.
Why the marketing strategies for coaches that used to work have stopped working
Something changed around 2024. Strategies that had worked reliably for years started returning less, and the gap has kept widening.
I see it across my clients’ numbers. Lead magnet ads are bringing in subscribers who are less likely to buy. Content that racks up follows isn’t turning into sales. Launches that ran beautifully one month produce completely different results the next, with nothing changed.
When that happens, most experienced business owners do what got them here and work harder at the same thing. More lead magnets, more content, more launches squeezed into the calendar. The better move is to step back and ask whether the strategy itself still fits the market you’re selling into.
1. Paying to promote your lead magnets
When I built launch budgets for clients, I used to recommend putting 50 to 60% of the ad spend behind lead magnets to grow the list before cart open. I’ve stopped.
I still love lead magnets. They build trust, they nurture, and they give your audience an easy first yes. What’s changed is how I want my clients getting them in front of people.
Lead magnets work best organically now
Between ManyChat, trial reels and the link in your bio, you can generate a steady stream of leads into your funnel without paying for them. You might notice fewer ManyChat comments than you got two years ago. I track every link in my Instagram bio, though, and a large number of people are still clicking through to grab free downloads.
Promote your lead magnets in your stories, your highlights, your podcast and on Threads, and they’ll keep doing their job.
Put your ad spend behind a sales engine
At a paid level, I now recommend that almost all of my clients’ ad spend goes into a sales engine. That might be a challenge or a webinar, free or paid. A smaller portion can go into engagement ads that keep nurturing your audience.
The reason is conversion. The path from a paid lead magnet, into a waitlist or sales event, and then into a purchase doesn’t convert the way it used to. The leads themselves are often lower quality too. Meanwhile, clients running webinar funnels are seeing exceptional show-up rates and strong application and purchase rates, because of the way we’re structuring those webinars and the emails that get people there.
There is one exception. A lead magnet can still earn its place in your ads when the time between download and purchase is close to instant. Someone grabs it, recognises a deep problem, and sees exactly how your offer solves it. That takes deliberate design.
Cost per lead is the wrong number to watch
It’s easy to get excited about a $2 cost per lead. On its own, that number tells you very little. The questions that matter are these:
- What does it cost me to acquire a client?
- How long does it take someone to go from subscriber to buyer?
- How many hoops are they jumping through on the way?
- What’s my return on ad spend through a lead magnet funnel, compared with a sales engine that leads straight into a sale?
In my free training I talk about lightning buyers and thunder buyers. Lightning buyers are ready now. Thunder buyers take their time. When your ad spend sits behind a sales engine, the lightning buyers buy and the thunder buyers still land on your email list.
You want buyers on your list, or people who will become buyers. A cheap lead who never purchases is the most expensive subscriber you’ll ever pay for.
2. Only running two to four live launches a year
Back in 2022, I would have told you four live launches a year was a lovely way to run a business. I loved it myself. You’d run a big launch each quarter through the traditional funnel of lead magnet, webinar and cart open. In between, you’d rest, recover, serve your audience with juicy nurturing content and grow.
In this market, I no longer think that setup is strategic.
Why fewer launches now means more risk
I’m watching clients run an exceptional launch one month, then change nothing and get a completely different result the next. When your whole year rides on two or three big moments, one launch that doesn’t go to plan puts enormous pressure on the rest. Sometimes you’ve done everything right and it still doesn’t land.
That cycle of launch, recover, underperform, panic and pile pressure onto the next one is completely dysregulating for your nervous system. It’s the opposite of peace and profit. If you have a strong offer and a warm audience, you should be able to make sales all year round.
Here’s what we’re doing instead.
Build premium profit drivers behind the scenes
Premium profit drivers are behind-the-scenes offers. Your audience often won’t see them, and they might serve a completely different market. They piggyback off the messaging, credibility and authority your signature offer and its launches create, which makes them some of the easiest revenue you’ll ever make.
Their job is to bring in recurring revenue, say $10,000 a month, that sits separate from your signature offer. You start every month and every launch with money already secured, so nothing is make or break. Your front end stays simple and your revenue is diversified on the back end, without a constant circus of new launches, new sales pages and a mariachi band of moving parts.
Create more frequent sales engines
The second shift is giving people more opportunities to buy. A weekly or monthly sales engine works differently from an evergreen funnel, and it means you’re no longer pinning everything on a tiny window. Pair it with periodic live launches and you meet your lightning buyers and your thunder buyers where they are.
What happened when I had to step away for a month
Last year my mum had a ruptured brain aneurysm, which is a type of stroke. I took a full month off my business, right in the middle of a launch. I ghosted most of Instagram and definitely my stories.
The launch still made sales. It wasn’t my best launch ever, because I’d stepped back from almost everything. It also wasn’t stressful, because the systems kept running and recurring revenue was already coming in every month.
I want that for you. A business that keeps going when your life needs all of you.
3. Value content on Instagram
Five tips. Three mistakes. Eleven ways to do the thing, save this post. Sometimes that content is useful. When I work with clients who have larger audiences, I see a lot of it, and I call it “that’s nice” content.
People like it. They follow you for it. They eat up what you have to say. A lot of them are DIYers and tip seekers who were never going to invest, so you end up with a big following full of “that’s nice” people who don’t take the next step with you.
Swap value content for activation content
I’m now recommending far less value content on Instagram and far more activation and conversion content. That means content that shifts beliefs and moves people to act. You want someone to read your post, feel it, and follow you off Instagram into your email list, your sales events and your programmes.
Making the switch can feel uncomfortable. Your engagement will change, and that does something to your brain when you’re used to big numbers on a carousel. If you’re at $100,000 a year and you want to reach $300,000, your content has to change to get you there.
4. $197 offers
I don’t hate $197 offers. I’ve just never recommended them as a mainstream strategy. For years my baseline has been an offer priced at around $500 minimum.
Right now there’s a groundswell of people watching $197 and $297 offers, and even $37 ones, produce massive launches and deciding that’s the way forward. It feels more accessible. It feels like less risk and less putting yourself out there. Surely more people will buy if it isn’t $997 or $5,000.
My advice is to hold up and look at what your numbers are telling you before you jump on that bandwagon.
Who’s catching lightning at low price points
The people having huge launches at these prices generally have giant audiences. They also spend a huge amount of their time on audience growth and authority building. If that doesn’t describe your business, there’s every chance a low-ticket launch goes nowhere at all.
Offers under $100 can work. They’re a logical, add-to-cart purchase where the buyer only has to ask whether it solves an immediate problem. They need to be formatted in a specific way to generate revenue, and they’re hard to sell organically without a large, engaged audience. You still need offers at $500 and above to make meaningful revenue in your business.
Why $197 is the trickiest price point
At $197, you put in the full effort of selling a $500 to $1,000 product for less than half the revenue. The price is too high for an impulse purchase, so it needs a full sales process. It’s also too low to leave room to invest in ads and get a decent return.
The range I recommend is around $500 or $997, and up from there. You can go as low as $397, but you’ll struggle to get a good return on ad spend.
What the best marketing strategies for coaches have in common in 2026
The thread running through all four is leverage. I want my clients knowing their numbers and choosing what makes strategic sense for their business. More activity was never the answer, and in this market it costs more than ever.
Plenty of these strategies worked brilliantly right up until around 2024. Then the market shifted. What I’m recommending now is often simpler than what you’re doing today, and it’s how you get to be far more profitable with far less mental load. Business should work for your life, not the other way around.
There’s one more pattern I see constantly. Businesses reach a certain point and suddenly have so many things to sell that they’ve accidentally made everything far more complicated than it needs to be. That’s the focus of next week’s episode of Six-Figure Signature Offers.