Marketing for Coaches: How to Get Coaching Clients

The most prominent online coaches on the internet typically have the best marketing campaigns. In today's digital age, a strong marketing strategy will help you rise to the top and gain more coaching clients. As a coach, you might not know the first thing about marketing for coaches — that's not a problem.

This guide will give you seven strategies you can use to market your coaching business. We'll give you examples and actionable steps to create marketing campaigns and start gaining more coaching clients today.

Marketing for Coaches: Seven Marketing Strategies for Gaining New Clients

Before you dive deep into your marketing efforts, make sure you spend time understanding your target audience. You want to know where your ideal clients typically spend their time online and how you can relate to them. By personalizing your messaging to your target audience's needs and pain points, your conversion rate will be higher, which means more coaching clients– and more money in your pocket. Let's get right into it. Here are seven effective marketing strategies for gaining coaching clients.

1. Utilize Content Marketing

A lot of online businesses revolve around this marketing strategy. Content marketing involves creating blog posts, videos, and social media posts that attract and engage the people looking for your products and services as an online coach.

The main purpose of content marketing isn't always to directly promote your online coaching business.

The most successful types of content aim to offer value to the person reading it. You want to create relevant content and publish on a consistent schedule to attract and retain your audience. With a consistent online following, you'll have more people turn into lifelong customers and more viewers for your marketing strategy.

A common way to start creating content is to start a blog. The blog should directly apply to your business — if you're a fitness coach, then your blog might include posts about proper weightlifting forms, the benefits of working out, and how to pick the best personal trainer.

A well-planned blog will get more people to look at your site. From there, it's your job to convert site visitors into paying customers.

While working on your online content, spend some time developing a professional-grade landing page. Many of your marketing strategies will direct potential clients here, and it's your best shot at converting someone.

The content you create should reflect your knowledge and experience as a coach to help establish your authority in your industry. You want to show how knowledgeable you are in the space without overtly selling yourself. Let the content speak for itself and sell you as a coach.

2. Leverage Partnerships and Collaborations

Coaches can grow their reach through partnerships and collaborations. This is when you work with other individuals or businesses to find a new audience through cross-promotion.

You should stick to businesses related to yours for this marketing strategy.

For instance, an online wellness coach might collaborate with a health food company to organize a wellness retreat. By doing this, the health food company gets to offer the retreat, and the wellness coach gets access to the customers of the health food company.

All of these collaborations must be a win-win for both you as a coach and the company you're working with.

3. Use Paid Advertising

Paid ads work wonders, especially when you know your target audience. The most commonly used paid ads platforms include:

• Search Advertising: Google Ads, Microsoft Ads

• Social Media Advertising: Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Advertising, Youtube Ads, etc.

• Related online blogs

These ads will drive traffic to your landing page. From there, you have to convince the viewer that you're the best coaching business for them. Make sure you're using the right ad marketing strategy to get the biggest results for every dollar you spend.

Another good idea is to ensure you know your target audience well. You can target them based on demographic, interests, and location. When you have a more specific audience, your message can be more personalized and result in better conversions.

Be sure to track the effectiveness of your campaigns to see what works and what doesn't. You should look at how many clicks your ads get and how many clicks turn into customers (called conversions).

Since there is so much online competition, it helps pay for ads and get more views on your site.

4. Nurture Leads with Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the best ways to nurture your leads and is one of the most popular marketing strategies. This involves sending personalized, targeted emails to your subscribers and walking them through the sales funnel.

You want to build a relationship together — you want them to trust you. Online coaches can use emails to promote their coaching services, discuss upcoming sales, share resources that might help, address recent news, and give quick tips.

Every time a potential client gets an email from you, your name suddenly pops into their mind, and they think about your coaching business.

Be careful not to spam your mailing list; that's a quick way to get unsubscribed and blocked. Another good way to get your emails opened is through effective subject lines.

5. Take Advantage of Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is promoting a product or service that other companies offer. You get a commission when someone follows your affiliate link and makes a purchase.

Here's how it works: a fitness coach promotes a set of dumbbells using a special affiliate partnership. They either make a blog post mentioning these dumbbells or add the link to one of their videos where they use them.

A viewer clicks the link and buys the dumbbells for themselves.

Just like that, the fitness coach gets paid a certain percentage of that sale.

As long as the product is related to your industry, this can work wonders. You can run affiliate management programs for books, courses, tools, equipment, and more. Amazon has a great affiliate program, and there will likely be companies within your industry that offer equally impressive programs.

6. Consider Podcasting

A lot of online entrepreneurs are starting their own podcasts to indirectly promote their businesses. For online coaches, it's a great way to reach a wider audience who is interested in your field.

During your podcast, a few things are happening. For starters, you're establishing yourself as a thought leader in your field. As long as you're knowledgeable about your industry, it will show, and listeners will respect you.

In addition, you can start bringing in more money through the podcast alone. Some celebrities are famous strictly because of their podcast, and they're making millions of dollars a year as a result. There's no promise that your podcast will hit it big like that, but it's certainly an interesting goal.

Even on a smaller scale, you can monetize your podcast by picking up sponsors or running ads (which is an industry-standard for podcasts). You can start and run a podcast for free; you just need to dedicate your time.

Before starting your own podcast, maybe you can ask to be a guest on other podcasts within your industry. This is a good way to try out the space and see if you like podcasting.

In addition, it's a good way to get people to listen to your message and reach out for your coaching service. If you're a financial coach, going on a podcast that focuses on managing personal finance is great. The audience is already interested in finance.

As they listen to your episode, they might get interested in what you're saying and reach out for your coaching service.

It's important not to be too sales-y during these podcasts. People don't want to listen to an hour-long ad — they want to hear an expert talk about a topic that interests them. Proving your expertise is enough of a sales pitch.

7. Advertise on Social Media

The sooner you make social media accounts, the sooner your online coaching business can start to grow. Social media marketing can work wonders for your coaching business.

Set up a coaching business account on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and TikTok to start gaining traction. Online coaching is easy to promote on these platforms.

Again, you don't want to be too over-the-top when it comes to selling yourself. You simply want to make thought leadership content that establishes you as an industry expert.

A health coach might make a post about five foods to avoid. It's as simple as that.

Within your bio, link to your landing page and include your coaching business email. If someone sees your content and wants to work with you, they'll reach out.

You can also use social media to speak directly to your customers — give them updates, talk about promotions, and remind them about upcoming events.

You should dedicate a few hours each week to writing and scheduling posts across all of your business social media accounts. It's a free way to connect directly with people who care about your industry.

Choose the Right Tools for Your Coaching Business

Putting together a strong strategy of marketing for coaches is so important. It's a great way to connect with a wide pool of potential clients and grow your business. Remember to use content marketing, consider paid ads, start a podcast, and work with related companies. Doing so can grow your audience and elevate your coaching business.

If you want some help, consider Simplero. We help coaches like you put together the best marketing campaigns possible. Try our free demo today.