There are many ways to measure success in coaching. Since many coaches get into the career because they want to help people, a big part of measuring success comes down to helping people change their lives for the better.
But at the same time, it’s impossible to ignore the fact that coaching is a business. And just as any business, a core part of launching a successful coaching business is having a reliable method for attracting the right clients consistently.
What’s more, attracting clients also means you get to help more people, scale your business, and transition into a group coaching framework that expands your reach and ability to leave a mark in your market.
But how can you consistently attract clients that are interested in your coaching services? And what are some of the most effective online marketing strategies you could use?
Let’s dive into the subject of how to get coaching clients below.
Build a Niche Brand
In coaching, your brand is a crucial part of running a business. If you want people to trust you and believe you can help them, you need to carefully develop a brand that aligns with the values and needs of your audience and separates you from other coaches in your field.
But many novice coaches make the mistake of casting too wide of a net because they’re afraid they won’t have enough people to work with. Instead, what ends up happening is that they appeal to no one and have a hard time developing the personality and unique proposition needed for getting noticed.
Therefore, when figuring out how to get coaching clients, one of the first things you should do is niche down your coaching brand as much as possible. Sure, the number of people who will be interested might be lower. But at least you’ll be speaking directly to them and addressing the problems that you know they are facing.
And having such specificity in your brand can be a powerful thing.
Once you niche down, you can go into immense detail about the ideal client you want to attract. And having that in-depth knowledge will help you make more informed decisions throughout your online marketing efforts.
You’ll know what type of messaging you should use, what offers to create, what benefits to emphasize, and where to find the best clients for your business.
What’s more, you will be able to separate yourself from the competition, becoming a specialist in a narrower niche that can help solve a specific problem instead of covering everything.
Finally, when you have a niche brand, you can actually deliver the best results for your clients. You’ll get really good at working with a segment of a broader market, seeing their problem from many angles, and knowing exactly what to do in any situation. And that’s what will propel the growth of your coaching business more than anything else.
Create a Content Marketing Map
As a coach, you’ll need to create content if you are going to become an authority in your field. And while it’s now easier than ever to publish content on countless channels, you need to have a sound strategy for how and when you create content if you want to achieve results and avoid wasting time.
And that’s where a content marketing map can be very effective.
It’s a process for looking at content creation from a broader perspective, which allows you to identify the best ways to reach your target audience throughout their customer journey. It’s the process of aligning every piece of content you create with your overall goals and making it a tool for educating, persuading, and reassuring your readers that working with you is the right choice.
To create a content map, you will first need to perform thorough audience research and understand the journey your target audience will need to take before becoming a client.
Once you know who you want to attract, you can start mapping out content based on the typical progression a potential client would take from not knowing anything about the problem they are facing to not just being aware of the problem but also knowing that there’s a solution and that you can provide it.
But at the same time, you need to consider where to post the content you want to use. To help you with that, let’s look at a few key channels you should use:
- Blog/Guides. A blog is the most basic form of content on the web, but it’s still just as powerful as it was a decade or two ago. You can use blogging or how-to guides to educate your audience and move them through the buyer journey. You can also leverage high-quality content into guest posting opportunities.
- Social media. No matter what niche you might be operating in, it’s all but guaranteed that your audience hangs out on one of the social media platforms. Whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or even YouTube, finding out where your target clients hang out and regularly posting engaging content on the platform can accelerate your growth like few other online marketing strategies.
- Leverage Facebook Groups. While social media is a great place to create your following, you can also tap into existing communities to grow your client list. By joining Facebook groups in your niche, you can showcase your expertise, help people with valuable insights, and attract them to learn more about your coaching services in the process.
- Provide Freebies. Standing out online can be a challenge, no matter how good your content might be. If you want to generate excitement around your coaching brand, consider offering high-value freebies in exchange for an email address or other contact information. That way, you can insert prospective clients into your funnel and educate them about the value of your services.
- Sales Pages. Finally, you should have a dedicated page for selling your services that you direct traffic to. By running split tests and continually optimizing, you can leverage various online traffic generation methods to create a consistent stream of new leads for your coaching business.
Grow an Email List
The ultimate goal for any coach should be to move away from trading time for money and build a more automated and sustainable business that can be scaled with ease. And for that to happen, you must have an effective way to capture prospective clients and engage with them without having to participate in every single communication.
And it’s hard to imagine a more effective medium for communicating well-timed, informative, accessible, and completely automated messages to your audience than through email marketing.
With emails, you can interact with a virtually unlimited number of subscribers, providing them with relevant content that moves them closer to becoming a paid client. You can also introduce them to the main principles of your coaching, the type of coaching framework that you like to use, what they need to get started, and why it makes sense for them to join your coaching.
But how can you get started with building an email list?
Well, the first step in the process is figuring out how you’ll attract customers. And that means offering something valuable in exchange for their email address.
Here are a few options you could consider:
- Free checklists. When someone is interested in a subject, offering them resources that make the knowledge they gain more actionable will always be appealing. Because of that, checklists are a great way to incentivize sign-ups to your email list, as they provide a clear action plan that prospective clients can follow right now.
- Cheat Sheets. Another powerful tool you can use to grow your subscriber list are cheat sheets. Basically, they’re a comprehensive resource of distilled information that helps people better understand the subject and quickly apply it in their situation.
- Templates. One of the most valuable things a coach can provide their clients is a proven framework they can work through. And while most of that is reserved for the coaching sessions, you can offer templates to new sign-ups that offer a fill-in-the-blanks process for overcoming a challenge or accomplishing a task.
- MP3’s. Not all people are avid readers. Some like to consume information by watching or listening, and that’s why repurposing your content into an MP3 format can be such an appealing proposition. It’s not a lot of extra work for you, but it can be very effective for getting people to sign up.
Make Your CTAs Clear
If you’re going to figure out how to get coaching clients online, you will need to use CTAs (Call-to-Actions). Without them, it’s virtually impossible to get even the most eager prospects to take you up on your coaching because they won’t know what steps they need to take.
Calling your readers/subscribers/followers to action is the process of prompting them to act in a very specific way. Usually, it’s a prompt to buy your coaching services or subscribe to your list.
And because it’s such a direct request, you must try to make it as clear as possible. You’ll spend a lot of time educating and guiding prospective clients towards a decision to work with you, so you don’t want to risk preventing the purchase from taking place because of unclear or ambiguous CTAs that don’t clearly emphasize the value and the step that needs to be taken.
Another crucial aspect of designing effective CTAs is making them specific. Many coaches make the mistake of creating very generic call-to-actions, such as “learn more” or “read more,” which don’t have any urgency or specificity that would drive action.
Instead, experiment with action-packed CTAs, using first-person sentences such as “I want to X,” which clearly showcase the value and help the reader associate with the action they are about to perform.
Use Ads
Up to this point, we explored strategies for getting clients online that revolve around building a brand, creating high-quality content, and getting people to take you up on your offer. But for any of that to matter, you must have a reliable process for generating traffic to your content, landing pages, and sales offers.
And while some of that can be achieved with SEO through content marketing, that can take a long time to produce consistent results. Because of that, you need to create an effective and diverse strategy for using ads that can start driving targeted traffic to your offers as soon as today.
Google Ads and Facebook Ads remain the stapes of online advertising, providing numerous opportunities for coaches to generate high-quality leads and scale their business. But as you increase your presence and learn more about your audience, expanding to other social media platforms such as Instagram and also using YouTube ads might become viable options as well.
Leverage Events
As a coach, you will probably be attending many events. Whether it’s your own coaching seminars or conferences for coaches, there are plenty of opportunities to meet clients and peers, discuss ideas, and grow as a professional in your field.
But these types of events are not just great for learning more about coaching; they can be incredible networking opportunities as well.
When you’re surrounded by others who are in the same field and passionate about the same things, there’s no limit to the types of ideas you can develop, which might evolve into powerful partnerships or growth opportunities for your business.
By partnering up with other coaches, you can gain access to audiences you couldn’t reach otherwise, finding new ways to leverage relationships into being able to charge more, have more free time, and expanding your business into a group coaching model that makes the most sense.
Even though most connections you make will be in person, you can then use them to grow your digital presence by creating courses, content, and joint ventures that you would not be able to put together otherwise.
Bottom Line
By this time, you should have a clear understanding of how to get coaching clients online. The internet is the perfect place for growing your coaching business because you can leverage your expertise and high-value content into an endless stream of opportunities.
Whether it’s niching down to a narrow group of target clients, creating top-quality content on various platforms, or promoting your business with ads or in networking events, there’s no limit to what your business can achieve if you are willing to embrace the digital possibilities available to coaches today.
But if you want to get the most of the digital marketing opportunities, you must also have a way to manage clients. Upcoach offers a comprehensive all-in-one coaching platform where you can control every aspect of your coaching business and provide the best possible experience for your growing list of clients.
