Summary: Being a coach is a rewarding career, but building your business and finding clients in the age of the internet is tough. Luckily, if you learn how to leverage digital marketing to build your brand, you will create a steady flow of customers in your pipeline, even push some away.

Reading Time: 6 minutes

Key Points
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Social media marketing is the quickest and easiest way to build your coaching business and find clients.
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Having your own website will give you the ability and power to experiment with different service types, even create your own products.
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It is easier than ever to build your coaching business and generate passive income online.

 

These days, anybody can become a coach, but what most new coaches (and existing coaches) don’t know how to do is find coaching clients online.

Coaching is easy, all it takes is for you to be better than anyone else at something very specific and charge them for your experience and expertise.

This is where the old cliche of “knowledge is power” comes from.

If you’re good at preparing healthy meals, you can do the same for people and help them become healthier.

If you’re really good at organizing things, maybe you can offer your organizational skills to help people organize their homes.

But here’s what most rookie coaches fail to understand….becoming a coach is not the problem, the problem is being able to effectively market your coaching services to bring in enough clients and actually generate a profit.

Good news! Marketing and growing your coaching business is easier than you think, here are 5 marketing tips to help you find new clients and grow your coaching business.

 

1. Have a professional website.

Build a professional website - InsoyMedia
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Buffer

If you want to be a coach (or you’re one already) and you don’t have a website to promote your services, you will NEVER grow your business. At least not to the level that you want.

But, what if you have multiple social media accounts, is that enough?

No is not, here’s why.

Social media platforms are just channels for you to promote your products and services, find and connect with prospective clients, etc.

Those leads are not yours, they belong to those social media platforms.

Your goal is to use those platforms to direct traffic to your website so you can build trust and a relationship with them.

Now that you have a flow of traffic coming to your website, is your website professionally built? Is your website loading fast?

Does it look great on any device, especially mobile devices?

Here at InsoyMedia, we offer complete digital marketing services at very reasonable prices, from web design, graphics design, email marketing, to social media marketing. Check out our Solutions page to learn more.

Remember, if a prospective client is browsing through your website looking for answers to their questions and they can’t find it, or your website looks terrible and loads super slow, they’re going to click away.

If your website looks crappy, most likely they’re going to think that your services are crappy as well.

 

2. Explain the benefits, NOT your services

Sometimes we tend to get carried away with big words and flashy stuff that add absolutely zero value to your brand.

Instead, focus on solving the problem, on the benefits that your clients will get from working with you, and that is how you convert someone just browsing looking for information, into a paying and happy customer.

If you’re a personal trainer, tell them how you can help them lose weight and create a healthier lifestyle, not how good you looked at your latest NPC competition.

If you’re a dating coach, explain that you help men and women find that one perfect person that is a perfect match for them.

If you’re a career coach, tell your website visitors that you help them figure out the perfect career, and then you help them find a job that reflects their career choice.

And if you’re a business coach, tell them how you can help their business grow and compete at a global scale by carefully executing a plan to get them where they currently are to where they want to be.

Again, focus on benefits, not services.

 

3. Publish an awesome newsletter.

Not everyone who comes to your website will immediately become a coaching client.

Not everyone who comes to your website will buy your products and services immediately.

So how do you convert them from looking around to becoming paying customers? Y

By building trust with them, by offering them a ton of FREE resources and insights, and the way to do that is through your newsletter.

Over time, if you’re consistently giving them a lot of value through your newsletter, they will be more inclined to hire you, because you broke down that initial barrier they had.

The newsletter is a great tool to keep in touch with your website visitors, share information with them and educate them about your products and services.

Make sure that you have a newsletter subscription form on every page of your website, and that you offer a compelling reason for your website visitors to subscribe to it.

 

4. Optimize your website for search engines.

SEO Services - InsoyMedia
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Buffer

 

Search Engine Optimization commonly referred to as SEO is the process of crafting everything on your website to follow a set of standards that help improve how search engines see your content.

In other words, SEO is the practice of optimizing your website’s content so that when someone is searching online for your products and services, your website appears at the top of the search results page.

Let me explain it another way…

Let’s say you Google: “personal trainer in Miami, FL.”, those results that come up on the search list are pages that have been optimized around that particular keyword and Google has rewarded that page by listing it.

SEO helps your page move up the search results so more people click on your link and land on your website.

A successful SEO strategy will greatly increase the number of visitors that come to your website since over 70% of people who are looking for products and services use search engines to locate them.

For more information about SEO and how InsoyMedia can optimize your website, check out our Solutions page for more information.

 

5. Offer pro-bono (FREE) work.

If you’re just starting out, the best way to gain experience, generate positive feedback and word of mouth is to offer free services, and do such an incredible job that those people recommend you to their friends and family.

When InsoyMedia was started a few years ago, our team offered free website analysis (we still do), free web design for small projects, free advice on how to set up an email marketing campaign, etc.

The point is, pro-bono work allows you to build your infrastructure and generate great testimonials without having the burden and pressure that comes with actually paid services.

There are generally 4 reasons why as a coach you would undertake pro-bono work:

1 – You’re a new coach and want to build your confidence and coaching hours. As a new coach, it’s very important to build your confidence. Your confidence (or lack thereof) will play an integral role in your success or otherwise.

With this in mind, offering pro-bono sessions in the early stages of your business can be worthwhile.

2 – You’re a coach that has been practicing for some time and perform pro-bono work for benevolent reasons. Offering free coaching sessions for benevolent reasons is simply a matter of personal choice.

As a coach, you should have a clear vision of what you want to achieve. If delivering free sessions for benevolent reasons fits into your vision, then go for it.

3 – You offer a free session as part of your sales process. Many coaches offer free introductory sessions as part of their sales process.

A free session upfront assists the potential client to understand the coaching process and builds rapport. If you go this route, be sure to offer the free session as part of a longer-term contract with a guarantee.

For example, You get your prospect to sign up for a 3 or 6-month coaching contract, and as part of that contract you provide a free introductory session.

This will ensure the prospect is serious and upsells them into a larger contract that may otherwise be difficult to achieve later. This strategy can work well when used in conjunction with a guarantee.

You simply say to your prospect that if they enter into the contract, you will provide them a free introductory session, and if they feel for whatever reason that coaching will not assist them to achieve their goals, they can opt-out of the contract at any point.

4 – You’re a practicing coach that performs pro-bono work as a strategy to build your business. Many coaches provide pro-bono sessions to assist them to build their business. They achieve this by very carefully selecting their pro-bono clients.

A pro-bono client can assist build your business if they’re well networked within your niche and willing to provide referrals or can assist you in other business-building aspects of your business.

 

6. Delivering Pro Bono Services.

When delivering pro-bono services, here are 6 important things to keep in mind:

1 – Treat all pro-bono clients as paying clients. There is nothing worse for word of mouth than undervaluing the coaching relationship with a pro-bono client.

Remember, word of poor service spreads 10 times as far as word of good service!

2 – Find them, don’t let them find you. Make sure you’re always looking for ways to connect with people that need your services. Network, build relationships, and always offer to help.

3 – Get testimonials. Testimonials are a very powerful endorsement of your service. When prospects consider contracting your services they can be dramatically influenced by testimonials.

Even more so if the testimonial is from a recognized leader, expert or acknowledged person within your niche.

4 – Get clients from your niche. Preferably, you want to find someone that can help you get into networking events and can help you build your own network.

If you can do this, it will be a powerful leverage for your business.

5 – Get paying referrals. Always get referrals from pro-bono clients. And don’t offer pro-bono work to referrals of pro-bono clients.

6 – Don’t overload. This stands to reason. Your time is your commodity. If you spend all your time providing services for free, you’ll have no time left for paying clients.

RECAP: If you’re struggling to generate new clients for your coaching business, remember that marketing is the key to finding and closing new clients.

I strongly suggest providing pro-bono services to a few initial clients, or if you’re an established coach, offer pro-bono work sometimes, that should generate great testimonials and a positive word of mouth.

 

 

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