Dear coaches, THAT marketing mountain is smaller than you think.

Three honest decisions, not a content calendar you’ll abandon by February.

Most tennis coaches we speak to have an odd relationship with marketing. By nature they’re skilled educators, brilliant communicators, active, energetic and always keen to improve, the ingredients of great marketing, you’d think. But in our experience, the word “marketing” becomes this big, lumpy beast that strikes fear. It gets built up in so many coaches’ minds as a mountain, one they need to begin an almighty climb to reach, and when you’re finishing on court at 7pm every day, exhausted, it never feels like the right time, or even possible, to start that climb. Much easier to hoard the beast away and not look at it.

There’s an idea, shared by millions, that if you’re going to “do” marketing, it has to be done right. You can see why people think that. Every time they open Instagram or YouTube, they’re served picture perfect content from someone with a few million followers, and the reason they’re being served that content is precisely because that person has a few million followers. What you don’t see is what that same creator’s content looked like six years ago, when they started. The frequency, the quality, the polish. Usually, it’s nothing like what you see now.

Time to dispel that myth. Comparing what you can achieve to what an established content creator achieves is comparing apples to pears, not because they know more, but because they’ve been doing it far longer and have far more resource behind them. Does that mean it’s not worth doing because you can’t hit their standard? Absolutely not.

We’ve spoken to thousands of coaches over the years, and they know full well how important marketing is. But what actually happens is they fall into one of two boxes: burnout, or silence. Either they think marketing means posting on Instagram every day, so they do it, exhausted, inconsistently, squeezed in between actual coaching, or they don’t do it at all and feel guilty about it. Or they wait for the perfect moment, the gap in lessons, the quiet week, which never comes, and they go silent instead. Easier to ignore the mountain than start climbing it.

Here’s the reframe. You have a genuinely limited amount of time to give to this. That’s simply the life of a coach. So the goal isn’t doing more, and it isn’t stressing about not doing enough either, it’s making sure the time you do have goes to the right place. That comes down to three honest decisions: picking the right platform, finding a schedule you can actually sustain, and building a content plan sized to your real capacity, not the capacity you wish you had.

1. Pick the platform your actual audience is on, not the one that feels right

This is the decision that matters most, and it’s the one most coaches skip entirely, jumping straight to “I should post more” without asking where.

If your audience is mostly parents of juniors, Facebook groups and local community pages often quietly outperform Instagram for real enquiries, even though Instagram feels more like “proper” marketing. If you coach adults, Instagram or a simple Google presence might do far more work. And don’t discount Google itself as a platform. Someone searching for coaching isn’t scrolling Instagram hoping to stumble across you, they’re typing “tennis coach near me” or “junior coaching in [their area]” into Google. That single search moment is often where coaches spend the least effort, despite it being where the most intent is.

A coach we worked with had built a genuinely strong Instagram following, hundreds of engaged followers, regular likes and comments. But when we searched “tennis coach” in his own town, he didn’t appear anywhere in the first two pages of Google. All that effort was reaching people who already knew him. It wasn’t reaching the parent searching for a first coach for their eight year old, who had never heard of him and never would, because Google simply couldn’t find him. One platform, chosen without checking where his actual audience was looking, had absorbed all his time.

Pick one primary platform based on where your specific audience already is, not where content creation feels most natural to you. You can always add a second later. You don’t need all of them now.

2. Find a schedule you can actually keep, not the one that sounds impressive 

Once you’ve picked where, be honest about how often you can realistically show up there. One genuinely useful post a week, done consistently for a month, beats daily posting for a fortnight followed by silence. Consistency is what algorithms reward and what people notice, even subconsciously. A sporadic burst of effort followed by nothing actually looks worse than doing less, but doing it reliably.

If you’ve got thirty minutes a week for this, plan for thirty minutes a week. Not the five posts a week you’ll manage for eleven days before it quietly stops.

3. Build a content plan that fits inside that schedule, honestly

This is where most plans fall apart, people build a content calendar based on the coach they’d like to be, not the one they actually have time to be. If you’ve committed to one post a week, that plan needs exactly one idea a week, not three. Keep a running list of simple, low effort content you can pull from: a quick tip filmed on your phone between sessions, a shoutout to a player who’s improved, a one line thought on something you noticed on court that day. None of it needs to be polished. It needs to actually happen.

This is also where comparison can be deadly. Worth repeating: the content you’re served online is pushed to you by an algorithm, which means it’s usually coming from a creator years down the marketing road. A sit down interview with two cameras and a proper lighting set up isn’t what you can achieve right now, and that’s genuinely fine. Be honest about what you can actually deliver, what ingredients you actually have at your disposal, and build the plan around that, not around what you’re being shown.

Whichever platform you land on, claiming and completing your Google Business Profile is worth doing regardless. It takes twenty minutes, it’s free, and it’s often the very first thing someone sees when they search your name or “coach near me.” Photos, a clear description, a review or two from happy parents or players. It works quietly in the background no matter where else your time goes.

The goal isn’t more effort. It’s the same, or less, effort pointed at the right target, on a schedule you’ll actually keep, with a plan sized to match. Most coaches are already doing more marketing than they think, they’re just spreading it too thin to work.

Pick your platform. Pick your schedule. Then just show up, on time, every time.