How To Get Life Coaching Clients Like Crazy
Asking how to get life coaching clients is probably one of the most asked questions to anyone in the coaching industry. If you are currently trying to build a coaching business you know how difficult it is to get quality coaching leads. There is so much misguided sales and marketing information out there that it can make knowing who to trust a real challenge. Even if you are able to find some trustworthy information it may not necessarily be geared toward small businesses, and especially not specific to life coach marketing.
If you are growing a small or medium sized business you simply don’t have the resources to invest in a lot of the marketing tactics that larger companies might. It’s important to know where to start and in what order you should implement which marketing strategies. The good news is, that’s what we are focusing on today! So refresh your coffee, grab a snack, and let’s talk about how to get life coaching clients.
How to build a coaching business
One of the most important elements to consider when setting out to build a coaching business is your niche. This is probably the most important element that will determine your success or failure. Many people set out to find their niche based purely on a topic area they are passionate about. Unfortunately, being passionate about a particular area doesn’t get you paying clients.
What actually gets paying clients is demand for a particular niche. Furthermore, the competitive landscape in a particular niche will have a huge impact on your success. If you are new to life coach marketing or even still trying to perfect your craft, it’s imperative to make sure demand, competitive landscape, and the passion to help people in a particular niche all align. This might seem complex, but thankfully, there are some tools out there to help you. Before you throw your hands up, keep in mind it’s possible that these align more than you realize. It’s simply a matter of finding the right angle to communicate your services.
Free Tools That Keep You Sane When Perfecting Your Coaching Niche
Google Trends
Determining whether demand for your particular niche is trending up or down can be very important as you evaluate how to get life coaching clients. It is also something Google Trends is perfect at. This tool enables you to see how many people are searching for particular keywords that relate to your particular niche on Google Web Search, Image Search, and YouTube. You can also compare the trends of different time frames to see the seasonalities of different topics.
Google Keyword Planner
Just in case you are not completely sure which keywords you should be researching Google’s Keyword Planner can give you some recommendations. It allows you to enter your website or focus keyword, then it will give you a list of similar search phrases you might want to consider.
Ubersuggest
A great alternative keyword recommendation tool is Ubersuggest. Many of topical research features will overlap with the two mentioned above. However, it provides suggestions in a very different format and provides additional context that could especially be helpful in designing the right coach marketing strategy. Let’s say you did a search for ‘How to get life coaching clients’. It would not only provide you with additional key-phrases but would also give content suggestions and show potential websites already competing in that topic area.
Udemy
If you are already familiar with Udemy you know it’s one of the most popular ways to find online classes. However, it’s also a great way to do some niche marketing research. You can do a quick search on your topic area to see if any classes are being offered as well as how many people have purchased them. Discovering how to get more coaching clients starts with making sure there is in fact a high enough demand within a niche.
If there are only a few classes being offered with low demand you might want to re-think building your coaching business on that particular niche. You may also just want to know how to promote coaching classes if this will be a big part of your business. Quick tip, if you’re going for health coach marketing this is particularly a helpful resource to consider.
Eventbrite
Doing research on Eventbrite will have the same benefit to searching on Udemy. However, instead of courses you will be looking for how many virtual events and webinars are being offered within your niche. Eventbrite is also just a really great way to drive awareness for your life coaching brand. This is actually something we can help you with as well. When you do a Video Podcast Recording with us we’ll automatically submit to Eventbrite for you, as well as several other places. You can sign up for a video podcast recording here.
Starting a coaching business checklist
Now that you’ve done your research on perfecting your niche you’re ready to evaluate starting a coaching business checklist. This checklist could vary depending on where you are in your journey as a coach, but we’re going to assume here you’ve already taken the steps above in choosing a niche and are ready to start focusing on getting coaching clients.
- Choose your coaching business model (more below)
- Develop content outlines that speak ‘specifically’ to solving client problems.
- Start determining where people will interact with you, website, social media, etc.
- Prove your model, by talking to potential customers or other life coaches.
- Turn your outline into fully developed content as it applies to your business model.
- Start promoting your coaching content (we help with this)
- Develop a sales funnel for your coaching business (we also help with this)
Online coaching business model
There are a ton of ways to bring in revenue, but we are specifically going to focus on what would be relevant to an online coaching business model. Perhaps think about starting with a coaching vision statement. Although it may not be directly tied to revenue it can be a great daily reminder of what you set out to accomplish, and believe me, you will need daily reminders.
Next, grab a pen and paper to start brainstorming which revenue generation methods you will actually enjoy doing the most. Below are several revenue models for coaches you can choose from.
- Offer private coaching sessions
- Sell group classes
- Charge monthly fees for membership community
- Provide free content and collect affiliate revenue
- Provide free content that sells your own products
You can also, of course, do a combination of any of the above. Keep in mind this is not an exhaustive list, so feel free to be creative and come up with some other options. However, these are probably the most common revenue generation models to choose from. So if you are wondering how to get coaching clients online, this is a really good place to start. Conveniently, they are also ranked in the order of easiest to implement.
Offer private coaching sessions
If you are just starting off, going with the private coaching session model is by far the easiest route for you. This will also give you direct access to client feedback as you build and scale your business. This also requires little to no startup costs, as you can start by taking clients by phone and bill by the hour with Square or PayPal. At most you could get a conferencing software account with Zoom or GoToMeeting, but there are free options for that as well.
Sell group classes
The next step up would be to sell group coaching classes, which is really the same model as private classes, you are just inviting more people. This can be a benefit to you and clients as you can charge each client less, make more revenue, and use all the same content you produced for your private sessions. There are many great software solutions out there offering group class management for coaches, but one that we recommend is Acuity Scheduling.
Charge monthly fees for membership community
In determining how to get coaching clients for your business you have to weigh effort vs reward. Building a membership community is one of the most time intensive business models. However, in the long run it can be very rewarding for you and your clients. One huge advantage from an income perspective is once you have a successful community in place it can provide a recurring monthly revenue stream. In addition, as the value comes from having access to a community it can require less of your time and resources in the long run.
Provide free content and collect affiliate revenue
Developing free content may not have crossed your mind as a heavy income generator, but it absolutely can be. However, this model can take a while to put in place as well if you are starting from scratch. Your income will be directly tied to how much traffic your content attracts. However, once you are generating traffic you can align with affiliate products that matches the content you produce. Every time someone purchases those products after reading your content you will get paid a commission.
Provide free content that sells your own products
This revenue model works exactly the same as the one above. Except here, instead or relying on income from affiliate products you are actually developing your own products to sell. This can take a decent amount of investment and research so it’s probably best for coaches a little further along in their journey. You can even use affiliate products as a stepping stone to get to this model as it would allow you to test different products without having to develop each one yourself.
How to get coaching clients fast
Assuming it is part of your business model, learning how to get coaching clients efficiently as possible is a crucial part to running a life coach business. A mistake a lot of coaches and consultants make is trying to sell coaching services rather than selling specific solutions to problems. If you have narrowed down your niche you should be very aware of the specific problems your potential clients are dealing with.
When we think about how to get life coaching clients we know we have to develop content that talks about how to solve the specific problems of a particular niche. Creating content allows you to develop a relationship with new clients without having to pitch your services to each person individually. The best way to accomplish this is with a Webinar, Podcast, or Webcast. These mediums allow potential clients to develop a personal connection with you and the value you bring.
Each Webinar or Podcast you produce should point to your paid services as the next step. This gets people into your coaching sales funnel, which is really just an automated way of filtering out the people that can benefit the most from your services. Doing webinars and podcasting on a consistent basis might seem complex, but thankfully that’s what we’re here for. We make it super easy to create webcasts for your coaching business, schedule your first webinar.
Sales Funnels for coaches
Creating efficient and easy sales funnels for coaches is one of the primary services we offer. We do this by helping coaches put together winning webinar and podcast content that is relevant to real world problems clients are trying to solve. We then package this into an Evergreen Webcast that creates an engaging experience, far past the initial recording.
Creating your initial Webcast/Webinar is what is refereed to in ‘sales funnel speak’ as your lead magnet. This simply means it is what initially attracts potential clients to opt-in to your content. After this, the rest of your coaching funnel is about building a relationship and rapport with the client. You can accomplish this by setting up a series of emails to go out after someone has opted into your webinar. This can all be automated by using an email marketing service such as MailChimp, GetResponse, or by setting one up with us that automatically connects to your webinar.
A great goal is to setup three follow up email responses. The first can be sent some time within 24 hours after watching your webinar, and a second can go out some time within 3 days after watching. Both of the first two follow up emails should focus on providing additional value in some way with a soft offer that allows them to purchase your products or services. The third email in the sequence can specifically focus on an offer or discount for people to start using your coaching services.
You can also setup a separate content funnel for people that don’t convert during your first series, but are still engaging with your content and opening emails. The longer term funnel can simply be an update on your new blog posts or a weekly/monthly newsletter you send out. The goal of this campaign is to continue to build relationships with people that can potentially gain value from your services, but are not yet in the market to make a purchase.
As you build out your service offerings you may find that some of the people in your longer term sales funnel is a better fit for something like a group coaching class, community membership, or something else. One thing is for certain, if you have been asking a question like ‘how to find coaching clients’ the answer is to be found in the success of your sales funnel.
Coach marketing strategy
You are now well on your way to creating your content sales funnel and are now ready to tackle your overall coach marketing strategy. Your sales funnel sets a focus to get coaching clients once people have exposure to your content. Now your marketing strategy will focus on getting the right people to your sales funnel. Although incorporating as many aspects into your marketing mix as possible sounds great, the reality of a small business is you have to set priorities.
The best way to decide how to approach your life coach marketing mix is to decide what aspects of marketing you may personally be talented at, in addition where you would like your clients to come from. For example, if you already have a strong social media following and you want to focus on local clients only spending more resources on local social engagement makes more sense. If you love writing and want clients from anywhere in the country, focusing more on SEO and content marketing makes a lot of sense.
For most people out there wondering how to market a coaching business, we have actually found that a mix of content and virtual event marketing is the best fit. Promoting virtual webinar events through Facebook Events, Eventbrite, and other similar places allows for great short term results in attracting new coaching leads. It is then fairly easy to follow up on that webinar with a good piece of long form blog content that uses the webinar as a call to action. This allows you to start gaining traction in search engines.
It is also super easy to turn your Webinar into a podcast or break it up into shorter snippets you can post on social media for weeks to come, all while pointing back to the webinar as the lead magnet. The biggest reason coaches and consultants are not utilizing this marketing strategy is because they don’t know what they should talk about in a webinar. Being able to produce, edit, or publish the webcast can also be a huge challenge. However, we make all that super easy for you with our guided webinar recording and hosting.
How to get life coaching clients summary
Alright, we’ve gone over all the details of how to get life coaching clients, and you should be ready to start putting some steps into motion. We’ve talked about how to define your coaching niche and some great tools to help you with this process like Google Trends, Ubersuggest, and more.
You can even build your own life coach marketing plan pdf from the checklist above that takes you step-by-step through what you need to do to create a successful coaching business. We also walk through several business model examples you can use to create revenue at different stages of your journey.
Once you’ve got your niche and business model down you’re ready to start focusing on your sales funnel and how to get coaching clients with the right marketing strategy. We believe webinars, virtual event marketing, and podcasting combined with the right, supporting, long form content is the best life coach marketing strategy out there. We are also dedicated to helping your through this process. If you are ready to start marketing your business through webinars we can help.