Before I write a single caption for a client, I ask one question. It has nothing to do with hooks, nothing to do with what's trending on Reels this week, and nothing to do with the eleven content pillars someone told them they needed. The question is this: who are we actually talking to right now, and what would make that person feel seen?
That's it. That's the whole starting point. Everything else, the carousel design, the caption length, whether this is a story or a static post, comes after. Skip this question and you can still produce content. You just won't produce content that does anything.
The question you're asking instead
Most coaches sit down to post and ask themselves "what should I put up today." It sounds like the same question. It isn't. "What should I post" is a production question. It sends you hunting for a topic, a quote, a stat, anything to fill the square. "Who am I talking to and what makes them feel seen" is a relationship question. It starts with a person, not a slot on the calendar.
The production question is why you end up in Canva at 9pm, rewriting a caption for the fourth time, hating all four versions, and closing the laptop having posted nothing. You're not stuck because you lack ideas. You're stuck because you're trying to write to everyone, and writing to everyone always reads like writing to no one.
You are brilliant in the room. The page doesn't know that yet
Here's the gap I see in almost every coach I work with. In a session, you're precise. You know exactly what this client needs to hear, in exactly the tone they need to hear it, at exactly the moment they need it. Nobody has to remind you who you're talking to. The person is right there.
Then you open your content app and that person disappears. You're addressing a crowd called "my audience," which isn't a person and never will be. So the caption gets vague, because vague is what happens when you're not sure who's listening. You end up with something that could apply to anyone, which means it lands with no one.
If you can hold one specific person in your head while you write, someone going through the exact thing your best client went through six months before they hired you, the caption gets easier to write and harder to ignore. Not because you got better at writing. Because you finally had someone to write to.
This isn't the same person every time
The person you're talking to changes depending on who you actually coach, and the question has to bend with them. A hormonal-health coach writing to a woman who's tried the sleep checklist and the supplement drawer and is still exhausted needs a different sentence than a men's-health coach writing to a guy who won't admit out loud that he's burnt out, let alone post about it.
I work with both. The women in this field tend to under-post because they're worried about sounding pushy. The men tend to under-post because they're quietly wondering if anyone in a female-leaning industry will take them seriously, and going quiet feels safer than finding out. Neither problem gets solved by a better hook. Both get solved by the same question, asked honestly, about the actual person on the other side of the screen.
The order I build content in
Once you know who you're talking to, the next question is what order to say things in. Most coaches lead with education, because that's what they were trained to do: teach, explain, give value. It feels responsible. It's also the reason a lot of genuinely good content gets scrolled past.
People trust you before they learn from you. So the sequence that actually works starts somewhere else.
Empathy first: name the specific moment they're in, the Tuesday where the ad manager feels terrifying or the DMs stay quiet, before you teach anything. Then education, the thing you actually know how to do. Then proof, shown plainly, without dressing it up. Then, and only then, an invitation, something small and specific, not a blanket "DM me to work together."
Skip the empathy step and your education reads like a lecture from a stranger. Include it, and the same information lands as "this person gets it," which is the whole game.
What this looks like in practice
Say you're a hormonal-health coach and you want to post about magnesium. The production-question version says something like: "5 benefits of magnesium you need to know." True, informative, and instantly forgettable, because it could have come from any account with a supplement to sell.
The relationship-question version starts differently: "You've tried the sleep hygiene checklist. Dark room, no screens, chamomile tea. You're still staring at the ceiling at 1am." That's a real Tuesday. Now the magnesium information has somewhere to land, because you named the problem before you offered the fix. Same information. Completely different result, because one version was written to a slot on the calendar and the other was written to a person.
You don't need a bigger content plan to make this shift. You need to stop opening the content app first. Open a note. Write the sentence that describes exactly who you're talking to today, and what their week actually looks like. Then write the post to that sentence.
Every piece of content you've ever loved from someone else started with them knowing exactly who they were talking to. Copy that part before you copy anything else.
Before you open Canva again
You don't need eleven content pillars or a new posting app. You need one sentence, written before you touch a design tool: here's who I'm talking to today, and here's what would make them feel like I actually see them. Everything downstream, the hook, the caption, the call to action, gets easier once that sentence exists.
If building this into a system that runs without you sounds like relief rather than one more thing on the list, that's the actual work I do with coaches. You can see how the process starts over on the process page.
