#049: Marketing for Coaches
Building a successful coaching business is almost entirely about marketing.
And marketing is all about the quality of your core content…
In episode 49 of the Profitable Online Coaching Podcast, I’m breaking down the most efficient and proven marketing strategies for coaches to grow their business from $0 to $100k (or more) in about 12-18 months.
But before we get into the details… Do you know what’s common in every successful coach’s understanding of marketing?
Two things:
>> Marketing for coaches isn’t just about getting people to see what you’re selling. It’s also about building authority and trust.
>> Marketing for coaches is as much about planning as it is about ideating. Listen, measure, look, plan and oversee your marketing.
If you think social media is the best way to market your coaching business, you’re in for a surprise. Because the best marketing asset you can build is probably also the most underrated: your blog, for example.
In this Episode we talked about:
- The best way to go about your marketing is to measure and listen to what’s happening in your own marketing. Multiply the marketing effort that is giving the most reward.
- Blogging is a perfect way for coaches to advertise themselves. Because it does the advertising without explicitly showing they’re advertising. Blogging is a way of proving your authority and placing your content high up in Google search rankings.
- How to start a blog if you’re a non-writer? Start a podcast! Turn your audio content into pieces of writing or hire professional writers to do the writing for you.
- Do you need 1000 visitors to get your blog to support your business? Absolutely not. Even if you just have a few hundred people visiting your website, you will start selling if you’ve
- built your content plan correctly and are attracting the right people.
- Wait until you’re fully booked for a while before offering paid resources or courses. It will help you broaden your outreach instead of narrowing it down.
- Make sure your content is designed specifically for the kind of people that need you. And focus on the conversion rate.
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Marketing for coaches
Marketing for coaches is extremely important because it’s gonna put you in front of the right people and it’s gonna make sure that your business not only survives but thrives and grows in the long term.
There are two things that every successful coach knows about marketing:
The first is that marketing for coaches is not just about getting people to see what you’re selling. It’s also about building authority and building trust. Without these two things, you cannot become an influential coach. You cannot become a coach that people seek out to resolve our problems.
The second thing successful coaches understand is that you have to listen and measure and look and plan and oversee your marketing. You cannot just throw spaghetti at the wall and hope something sticks. I mean, you can start that way for sure. And we’re gonna talk about this in more depth in just a minute, but measuring to know exactly what’s working so that you can focus on what is working and multiply.
Those efforts are gonna be extremely important. What works for one coach is not necessarily gonna work for another. Even if your target audience looks similar, even if you seem to have really similar packages, it’s not going to necessarily work in the same way. Audiences behave in different ways.
You marketing competitors
People have different strengths, coaches attract slightly different kinds of people. Even if on the outside we look like we’re kind of selling the same thing. And I have worked with especially a lot of life coaches that seem to be on the surface. They seem to be selling the same thing, but it’s always a slightly nuanced, slightly different kind of audience. So never take it for granted and just copy the competition. If you measure and listen to what’s happening in your own marketing, and then focus on what’s working, you will be successful. You will take your business where it needs to go.
(03:12):
But of course, before we can measure and improve what we’re doing, we need to make sure that we have the right basics and that we have tried those marketing strategies that actually work for coaches. And that’s what we’re gonna go through today.
Blogging for coaches
The first strategy I wanna cover is blogging. And you’ve definitely heard of this.
Of course, blogging has been around for a couple of decades at least. And it’s one of those key strategies that a lot of coaches who are the millionaire coaches today have actually used to start out. Now you’ve probably heard contradictory opinions about this. Some people may say that it’s been around for very long and it doesn’t work as well as it used to.
There are millions of blogs out there and other people might say, oh, it’s really worked for me. And I got leads. Blogging is a perfect way for coaches to advertise themselves because it’s advertising without advertising.
(04:06):
Becoming an Authority
You’re building your authority. You are becoming known. You have content for social media. And at the same time, you’re ranking in Google and attracting people who are actively looking for you. And these are the kind of leads that convert the fastest. So blogging. Yes, I can definitely assure you. It still works. It still has a lot of results. I actually had three discovery calls yesterday. I met three new people, I didn’t know before.
And that’s gonna happen again today. And it all happened because I have articles that rank on the first page of Google. And it’s gonna happen for you as well if you do the right work, but blogging is a strategy that like many other marketing strategies, it can only work for you if your foundations are right. In fact, this is one of the things that I really go into depth with, with my clients, getting the foundations, right?
(04:56):
This means aligning your ideal client with your packages and also verifying with keyword research and SEO strategies for your blog. So that when you write that content, you already know there are people out there waiting for it. And then of course, when you’re gonna share that content on social media, it’s gonna make much more of a splash. It’s gonna get more attention because you have already checked. People are looking for it.
So blogging still works. This is why there are millions of blogs. This is why there are more and more blogs each day, but not all blogs are created equal. There are blogs that have thousands of articles and they come from companies that are selling hundreds and hundreds of products. And then there are blogs from service providers like coaches and these work in a little bit of a different way.
And most people will tell you that it’s harder to rank a smaller website that has less content, but I beg to differ because what my experience has shown is that if you do your SEO really meticulously, you actually don’t need thousands of visitors a month.
(05:58):
My practice was fully booked with one-to-one clients when I had 450 visits a month. So that is how little you actually need. You don’t need so much. As long as all the people who visit your website from search engines are coming there for the right reason because people who come from Google are action takers. They’re really trying to resolve their problem somehow.
So when they come to your website, all they’re doing is trying to gauge whether your solution might be what they’re looking for. You don’t have to warm them up. Like when you do social media posts and cannot put that much information and you need a lot more posts. Now, I’m not saying that social media is a bad strategy or strategy. You should never use it. Social media does have its place, but as a coach, you’re gonna benefit more from writing articles that show people your expertise.
(06:51):
Social Media for Coaches
You’re gonna warm up your audience much faster than if you had to write a lot of different social media posts. You know, you also have the advantage with blog posts of actually going back and improving those posts. So social media does not give you this opportunity. If you write a post a day, thanks then. Yeah. You know, you kind of start tomorrow again with a clean slate.
If you stop your social media, the algorithm kind of punishes you for it. You have to start your consistency again. And it takes you time to get better with blogging. You don’t have any of these problems. Plus you have the advantage that when people come to your website, you have their undivided attention. There’s no adverts or friend notifications popping up. So definitely I would advocate. If you can write, start with blogging, if you don’t like to write, you can always start with video or podcast and then have the written version of that on your website, you can turn them into blog posts and you can still leverage the same strategy.
(07:51):
So it’s not just for people who love to write. It’s also for people who can hire writers and people who can do videos on podcasts. So blocking is a great thing to start with, especially if you’re just starting your practice. And then the next thing to move on to is to start thinking in the long term, because it’s great. You know, you can start off with organic marketing in terms of blocking.
And what happens is that people will come to your site and they will start booking your discovery calls. This is ideal for booking one to one in the beginning, and then you’re going to want to have that extra traffic. And you wanna collect the sector traffic, cause you’re gonna get maybe two to 6% of people who come to your website, who actually book that call. And the other ones you’re gonna have so many people that are just gonna visit and they are maybe not ready.
(08:39):
They don’t decide to jump on a call with you. So it does help to have a popup with a freebie and a little funnel. That’s gonna help people in the long term, that’s gonna warm them up. They were already pretty warm. They were kind of looking to take some sort of action because they came from search engines. If they came through a blog, there might also be people who came maybe from social media.
When you share your blog posts, what you wanna do is you wanna harvest this traffic. You wanna have a funnel. You could have an entry point to this funnel, which could be a free PDF. It could be a free webinar. It could be a free mini course. And when people join, you are not only educating them and warming them up about the kind of things you help your clients with.
(09:19):
But you also take them to a place where you help them get to know you a little bit, and then you invite them on that call again. So you always want to make sure that you are growing your list. And at the same time, you are getting more people to jump on a call with you, especially in the beginning of your business. A lot of people advocate email marketing, and that’s great.
But the most important thing is that if you’re in the beginning of your business, your goal should be to speak to people face to face. So if you’re selling one-to-one, don’t get distracted and create all these $25 products that you can sell to your email list. Just invite more people onto the call until you are fully booked with one-to-one, you have no business getting into any other group packages or selling mini-courses.
(10:07):
Coaching Packages
The first thing you wanna do is make sure that you take your income to a level where you can then get support to be able to create more things. Because what happens is if you start selling all these other things through your funnels before you have actually gotten fully booked, you’re not gonna have a lot of income. You’re probably gonna try and wing it and do a lot of these things yourself. You’re gonna spread yourself thinly.
And when you do that, you’re going to really greatly reduce your earning potential. So what you wanna do is you wanna max out on your one-to-one calls, you wanna make sure that you are fully booked for at least two days a week. You wanna have packages that cost, ideally, I would say at least between one, five, and 6,000. So you wanna have a couple of packages, you book at least about five clients a month, or maybe even more, you could go up to 10 clients a month if you wanted to so that you can start making a healthy five-figure a month.
(11:08):
Once you have hit this goal, you will be over the hundred K-year mark. And at this stage, you can hire help to go to the next level and going to the next level might mean getting help, to generate even more leads so that you can channel people into a group program. It could also mean perhaps creating another program and creating an online funnel that you can work in a different way. So you could create a course that people just do without your help.
They just sort of self-run and you run ads to the funnel that sells this course. Now you’re gonna need help to build this funnel. You’re gonna need a budget to do ads. It’s a little bit like when you’re launching group programs. If you’re gonna use a launch model, like the challenge launch model, for instance, where you have free training and you need to market a lot, you need to inject a lot of money into these launches.
(12:01):
This is why I’m explaining. So these things are great to go to the next level, but they can be a very hard first step because you don’t have the money yet. So your first stage should definitely be about getting as many people on calls as possible. You want to use Google as much as possible to rank your articles, rank your videos, and rank the content on your website.
You want to take them to a place that is your website that has no distractions because they’re going to convert really well. You also wanna make sure that you do your content plan properly because when your ideal client is aligned with your program it is aligned with the right keywords and the right content. All the people who jump on the call are going to be ideal clients. And it’s going to be so easy for you to close that discovery call.
(12:51):
It doesn’t even need any sales experience. It’s just a matter of understanding, Hey, is this person a good fit for what I’m doing? Can I give them the results? And the next question would be, when do you wanna start? And literally, it’s that easy because people are ready to work with you. My closing rate is extremely high.
Certain times of the year, when people are raring to go, it’s really close to a hundred percent. It tends to change a little bit towards the middle of the year, but the beginning of the year and end of the year, when people are super in their driving force to really work on sort of the next level of their marketing. I mean, I, I practically close every client I talk to because people are ready to go. And they were looking for my content because they were looking for someone to work with.
(13:38):
And this could happen to you and your practice. If you create the right content plan, you aligned the messaging of your packages because very often your packages are not gonna need changing at all. What’s gonna need to change is that you have the right math that you have, especially the right messaging.
So it’s all about the packaging, what the present looks like from the outside. It’s all about the wrapping. If the wrapping is the right kind of wrapping, then you can sell this program because you know that they need it and they have understood that they need it. Thanks to your content. Thanks to what you talk to them about on your discovery goal. So it’s gonna be way easier to get clients. And of course, the great thing about using search engine optimization for your content and getting a do out there is that you have a lot of content to reuse on social media.
(14:31):
So you can be as active or not active as you want on social media. I say not active because I love to automate. And when you have all that content, it’s just really easy to automate. And the best thing of all is that it accumulates, it’s not like social media. You know, if I post something on social media today, and maybe I get a bit of interest, I post tomorrow, I could get crickets and it just keeps going on. Like this. It’s like an empty slate every single day.
But with blog posts, if you write a good blog post and it doesn’t make it to the first page of Google, you can actually go in and improve it. So every piece of content you wrote is an asset. And of course, you also have accumulation. So if I wrote eight articles this month and I managed to rank two or three, and maybe they’re bringing me one or two leads a month, next month, I can rank another one or two articles and get more leads.
(15:25):
Lead Generation for Coaches
And the month after that, I’m gonna rank another one or two or three articles, and I’m gonna get more leads. And this accumulates over time. I have articles that are bringing me traffic that I wrote years ago, and they still bring me leads every week. And this is great because if I decide to take a break from my content and have a few weeks off, I can because my traffic is not going to suddenly stop.
My leads only stop when I close my calendar. And I do that at least a couple of times a year when I buy a neck, I am of course at the moment, shifting and planning because there are ways in which you can still use these leads. And I will talk about this probably in another episode, but for today’s episode, this is the message that I wanted to bring to you.
(16:07):
That it’s important to have your core content and to have the written version of that on your website, you SEO it. You make sure your strategy is aligned and you’re good to go. You can really build your coaching practice from zero to a hundred K a year in 12 to 18 months. It is really, really possible. And if you already have a business that makes six figures, but you don’t use SEO. You’re not using articles. You’re not ranking them.
You’re not using the written word on your website. You can probably bring in an extra a hundred K in the next few months. So you are leaving money on the table. Okay? So that’s, that’s my message for you for today. As you probably realize, it’s something, I feel very strongly about my businesses built on this. It’s something that I live and breathe and teach. If you wanna know more about it, feel free to get in touch with me.
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About the Show
In the Profitable Online Coaching podcast, Stephanie and her expert guests answer the most common online coaching and coach marketing questions to help you unravel the facts and take the right next step for your coaching business.
On solo episodes and with guests, she talks about popular topics such as marketing for coaches, blogging, digital marketing strategies, pricing, mindset, and how coaches build successful businesses.
Stephanie is an experienced SEO Content Marketing Strategist as well as a Marketing Coach for Coaches. She talks about online marketing strategies, social media, search engine optimization (SEO), marketing tools, books, and much more.
She learned programming as a fresh graduate and has worked as a trainer, programmer, and web consultant for over 15 years before becoming an online coach. For the last 6 years, she has offered 1:1 coaching and Online Programmes designed for coaches, therapists, and online service providers. She also offers Content strategy sessions and SEO Content Consultancy services to 6, 7 & 8 figure coaches. Contact her on hello@stephaniefiteni.com.