Life coaches often get their certification because something in their own lives inspired them to change other people’s lives (not to learn life coach advertising!). If you’re a life coach it’s very likely that this is your life’s work and you didn’t choose it – it chose you.

This makes for a wonderful career, but often, it makes marketing harder. And no coaching practice can survive in the long term without effective marketing.

However, as a life coach, you got into this, to spend your time changing lives not marketing – only to discover that around 50% or more of your time needs to be spent on marketing. This is why picking the right short-term and long-term strategy is invaluable.

In the first year or two of your business, you will need to build your marketing systems, but if you play your cards right and pick the right strategies somewhere along the 18-month mark you will be able to focus more on your practice and less on your marketing.

Life coach advertising methods

 

There are hundreds of advertising strategies out there, but not all are suitable for life coaches. As a life coach the most effective marketing and advertising strategies are going to be the ones that build up your reputation and trust facto whilst freeing up as much time as possible for client sessions.

The main challenges life coaches face are:

• Lack of money to invest
• Lack of time
  

Both can be overcome.

If you don’t have much money, you want to work on a unified short-term and long-term strategy like Social Media, Blogging and SEO combined.

If you don’t have much time, you want to focus on Social Media Advertising and Search Engine Marketing (mainly Facebook Ads and Google Ads.)

 

 

 

 

Traditional Marketing for Life Coaches

You can also use basic local traditional marketing strategies such as speaking at events, going to networking events, working through a local well-known clinic or organising your own events.

 

Local Marketing for Life Coaches

You can also extend local traditional marketing into the digital sphere using Social Media events and organic sharing in your community to promote your programs and services.

You can also use Local SEO strategies to tap into local search. This will happen much quicker for you than international SEO.

Local SEO is becoming increasingly important for small businesses, with 72% of consumers who performed a local search visiting a store within five miles. (BrightLocal, 2021)

 

International Online Marketing for Location-free Advertising for Life Coaches

You can also aim high from the start and start building an online coaching business while you get your first clients locally. You can work on your Local SEO and local networking while you build a website and a blog that will generate international traffic for you over the next 4 to 12 months.

It’s true that SEO takes time but it’s the best way to create an online business that generates leads without costing you an arm and a leg. You always have the option to use ads. However it is much harder to make ads work if you haven’t done your homework right.

No matter which audience, market or strategy you choose, efficiency is the name of the game. If you want to get a good return on your investment you need to build a ‘marketing engine’ that runs on reasonable/affordable input and gives you a lot in return.

 

 

Here’s how to maximize your ROI from life coach advertising:

 

1. Get your own life coach website to advertise your life coaching services

Yes, we’ve all heard the ‘gurus’ say you don’t need a website. But that often comes from the gurus trying to sell you something that replaces a website.

A website is, today, what a business card was in the eighties – if you don’t have one people will doubt you even really do what you say you do.

What’s more, having your own website is the only way to have control of your marketing. Content on other ‘borrowed’ platforms is technically not yours. You cannot complain about lack of visibility when you’re using a social media platform for free. And you can’t complain when your group disappears or they block your IG profile because it was hacked.

You have no control over these platforms and building your business on them is highly risky.

This is why you need your website. If you’re writing blogs on social media and/or creating video content for youtube. It’s likely very few people get to see what you post before it disappears. But when you have your own website you can use it as a repository and with a bit of SEO, your blogs and videos will give you search engine visibility and bring ‘free’ google traffic to your website.

You can always repurpose these automatically on social media, but passing on getting your own website can slow down the growth of your practice.

Your website’s visibility is part of your long-term plan and also your short-term plan. In the long run, you will rank on the first page for some of your most important keywords. In the short term, you will get social traffic and offer a freebie to get people on your email list. You can then use your email list to kickstart your practice.

Email marketing has an average ROI of $44 for every $1 spent. (Campaign Monitor, 2020)

 

2. Create life coaching content regularly

Creating content regularly will help you increase your visibility on Google and on social media. A combined strategy of content on your website cleverly repurposed on social media will start feeding your business with regular leads.

Your content should come in the form of blogs or videos. If you start with videos you can transcribe them and turn them into articles. If you start with blogs, you can create videos or podcasts later when you’re ready to uplevel your visibility.

What matters most is that you get your strategy right so that you’re not creating content on the fly without a clear goal. Content will not give you ROI without a clear strategy – and no it’s not as simple as sitting down and coming up with content over 4 categories. This approach is a little too simplistic for coaches, because coaches deal with complex pain points that the client often doesn’t verbalise very well. Potential life-coaching clients also have a lot of blind spots and this makes them a little more complex to target.

This is why in order to create your life coach marketing strategy you need to first:

1. Pick the right niche [add link]

2. Hone in on your ideal client [add link]

3. Do some keyword research [add link]

4. Conduct some client interviews

 

3. Be Social – it’s the core of advertising in today’s world

Use social media but be smart about it. Use it to help your best content reach a wider audience. Whether you do this organically or with social ads is entirely down to budget. Both can work successfully but you’ll need to invest more time if you have no advertising budget.

Short-term strategies such as engaging in groups, creating your own Facebook group, doing Facebook or IG lives, reels etc. They all work, however, you need to keep in mind that these strategies take a while to convert.

The fastest way you can convert a prospect is through a blog post or a video. Because these two mediums give you space for persuasion and conversion. So the most efficient way to convert social leads is to lead them to your content. Now I can hear you saying that social platforms don’t like showing people links that take people away from their platform – this is where you should consider advertising budgets. A small budget of $10 a week can help you reach thousands of targeted people.

 

4. Focus on one main strategy

It’s ok to get social but focus on ONE Strategy.

I’m a big believer in efficient marketing. I’ve seen so many companies and individuals waste time and money on inefficient marketing. You will get ROI if you keep it efficient, AND if you take the time to build a lead generation system that works.

Focus on creating your evergreen core content every week. 1 – 3 pieces of highly valuable content that can be repurposed and recycled.

Repurpose on social.
Send to your email list.
Amplify with Ads if you have a budget
Turn into a video or podcast

 

5. Test your funnels organically

One of the most important things you can do for your life coaching business is to get your funnels right. Your funnels are responsible for capturing and warming up your leads.

Create simple funnels at first. Ideally simple two-step funnels. Keep your funnels short so that you can easily improve their performance. Test them with organic traffic, build the conversion rate. Then focus on driving more traffic to these funnels using SEO, social media, and ads.

 

6. Rinse and repeat

Once you’ve thought about all the elements you want to use in your coaching advertising strategy make sure that you align all of the strategies efficiently and logically. You want to make sure that your strategy is doable with your current resources – especially if that is just you for now.

If you’d like some help designing a marketing strategy that works for you with your current resources, we should talk. You can book a free consultation with me so we can build your free strategy.

Book your strategy call at www.stephaniefiteni.com/call

 

———————— About the Author: Stephanie Fiteni

Hi, I’m Stephanie, a Digital Marketing Coach and Business Mentor for Coaches. I’m the creator of the Profitable Content Marketing Method™ and help coaches generate more leads and clients through their blogs and websites whilst helping them build a business that makes good money with ease. My clients get fully booked with just a handful of enjoyable marketing hours per week!

I have over 15 years of experience creating websites, building businesses, writing blogs, and creating social media campaigns, and funnels. As well as ranking articles, videos, and podcasts on the first page of Google. I also managed the content and web dev team in my own agency for over 10 years.

I can teach you how to create content that will convert your visitors into discovery call bookings, every time. Let’s Talk