There’s a lot of information out there on how to market small businesses to attract more clients, but which methods work best for life coaches? Different strategies are optimized for different industries, so it can be difficult to know what you should do to get results.
When I was trying to get more life coaching clients, I tried a lot of generalized marketing techniques with disappointing results before I found the ones that really work. As a life coach, you need to connect with your clients on a personal level, so you need specialized promotion strategies that showcase your coaching style and appeal to compatible clients.
To help you save time and money, I’ve come up with a list of the methods I successfully used to get more life coaching clients. With these simple strategies, you can gain new clients quickly, without needing a huge budget.
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11 Ways to Get More Clients as a Life Coach
1. Upgrade Your Website
As a life coach, your personality and methods are a large part of your business and an important factor in landing clients. A website is a professional and efficient way to display all the information a potential customer needs to decide they want to work with you, so if you don’t yet have a website, that is my first recommendation.
If you already have a website, consider expanding and improving what you have. How clean and professional does your site look and how well does it run? Try putting yourself in the shoes of a potential customer and think about the impression your website gives you and whether you’d want to work with the person behind it.
It can also help to look up some competitor websites and see what kind of website building service they use and what kind of content they include. Some specific upgrades to think about could include adding social share links, a chat box or alternative methods of contacting you, and a video introduction or any other video content you’ve created.
Your website is often the deciding factor in a potential client’s first impression of you, so it needs to look clean, modern, trustworthy, and professional.
2. Expand and Clarify Your Service Descriptions
Life coaching is prominent enough now that most people have heard of the concept, but the practicalities of how life coaching is carried out are less widely known. Even potential customers who are actively searching for a life coach to work with may not know a lot about what you’ll do to help them achieve their goals.
To help prospective clients understand what’s involved in working with a life coach, it’s a good idea to provide detailed information on the services you offer. If your website currently lists how much you charge by the hour or session, try adding some explanation and clarification of what you and your client will spend that time doing.
You can also go into more detail on this subject on a separate page of your website with an introduction or guide about what you do as a life coach and how it can help people.
3. Improve Your Payment System
Another way to improve your professional image and make your process smoother for clients is by improving your payment system.
Consumers are becoming more used to having easy ways to pay for products and services and often expect high quality even from the smallest businesses. Living up to these expectations can help keep your clients satisfied and reduce the amount of time you spend attending to payment-related problems.
When I was planning my payment system, I wanted something easy and convenient for both myself and my clients. Pay.com is the best merchant service provider I’ve found for life coaching businesses because you can offer a variety of payment methods to your clients.
Once you complete the simple sign up process, you can choose from popular payment methods like Visa, Mastercard, Apple Pay, or Google Pay, and add them to your checkout page in just a few clicks.
To provide your clients with access to these payment methods, you can send them a Pay Link over text or email that will take them to a personal, secure checkout page. Alternatively, you can also take their card details over the phone and input them into your Pay Dashboard to receive a payment.
Click here to get started with Pay.com now!
4. Participate in Online Communities
When a potential customer decides they want to improve their work-life balance or reduce the stress in their life, hiring a life coach probably isn’t the first thing they think of.
Many people will try to confront and solve a problem by themselves before they commit to hiring a professional. Instead, it’s common for people to start by seeking advice from health and wellbeing-related online communities.
To raise awareness of your business in these kinds of groups and forums, it can be a great idea to join and post valuable content for its members. By having direct conversations with users about their problems and posting general advice and tips for improving quality of life, you can establish yourself as a trusted figure and known life coach.
This can help increase the chances of a community member coming directly to you when they decide they want professional guidance, rather than searching on Google for something along the lines of “life coach near me.”
5. Guest Post on Relevant Websites
If you don’t have a blog yet, I highly recommend starting one. One of the best ways to promote your services is by offering some of your expertise for free, because you can spread the word about your business and build trust and reputation at the same time. Blog content can also help your social media marketing strategies, which I’ll cover later on.
A specific method I find particularly effective for driving traffic to my website is guest posting on other health and wellbeing blogs. By pitching an idea to a reputable website, you can be offered the chance to publish a post on one of your areas of expertise. To help bring more potential clients to your site, all you need to do is link to one of your own blog posts within your article, and include a link to your website in the “About the Author” section.
6. Start a YouTube Channel or Podcast
Blogging is not, however, the only way to create valuable content that can help promote your life coaching business. Depending on your skill set, preferences, and the clients you work with, starting a YouTube channel or podcast might work better for you.
Podcasts are especially popular within the life coaching industry because they’re easier for busy people to consume while traveling or working out, and the discussion format of a podcast better suits the topic of health and wellbeing.
Similar to blogging, you can also appear on someone else’s podcast as a guest speaker. This can be a good way to promote your business, as a podcast guest will always be introduced to the audience before the conversation starts – anyone who listens to the episode will hear who you are, what you do, and where they can find you.
This can be even more effective than guest blogging where readers need to click a link or pay attention to the “About the Author” section at the bottom of the page to find out about your services.
7. Promote Your Business on Social Media
Whichever form of content you choose to produce, an effective way to distribute your work and promote your business is by launching a marketing campaign using your social media. Expanding your influence on sites like Facebook, Instagram, and even TikTok is especially important for targeting the younger audiences that are very active on these platforms.
A social media marketing campaign doesn’t have to cost money, but it will require time and effort, so I recommend focusing on a single platform unless you have staff you can delegate to.
The key to this kind of marketing is to post valuable and engaging content, but also post it frequently. One of the reasons for this is the short lifespan of content on platforms like Facebook and Instagram. After about a day, the post will no longer get prioritized by the platform’s algorithms, and it won’t get shown to more users.
To stay on top of the algorithms, you can craft posts that encourage readers to engage and contribute, as an active comments thread can help extend the life of your content on the platform.
You can also supplement your longer posts with short-form content such as tips, advice snippets, facts, or small success stories covering the topics you specialize in. Some common topics for life coaching content include:
- Effective time management
- Healthy work-life balance
- Ways to reduce stress
- Ways to break bad habits
- Overcoming creative blocks
- Improving your mood
You can also link out to the long-form content you produce, such as blogs, videos, or podcasts.
8. Collaborate With Other Well-Being Professionals
Your clients hire you because they have parts of their life that they want to improve, which means they might be interested in other areas of improvement too.
You can take advantage of this by setting up referral agreements with other kinds of well-being professionals like dietitians, nutritionists, personal trainers, yoga teachers, mindfulness experts, or physical therapists. In this agreement, you refer clients to your associate, and they can return the favor.
You can also take this a step further by arranging discounts, benefits, or special packages for clients who work with both you and your associate. Alternatively, you can organize lifestyle events with other professionals where you can give talks or deliver workshops. Each guest speaker can invite their client base, and seek out new opportunities with the clients of their associates.
9. Consider Paid Advertisements
The recommendations on this list can help you promote your life coaching business on a small budget, and paying for advertisements is not essential for success. However, if you have the means and the desire to launch an advertising campaign, it can, of course, be an effective strategy.
There are many kinds of ad agencies you can work with, but my recommendations are Google Ads and YouTube Ads. By advertising with Google, you can take advantage of its precise algorithms and masses of data to help get your ads seen by the right people.
10. Ramp Up Your Email Marketing
Email marketing can be quite similar to social media marketing – the key to success is frequent, valuable content that’s easy to consume. Combining this with information about your services, updates, discounts, and links to your website and blog, podcast, or video content will form the basis of your marketing strategy.
While frequent emails can feel a little risky sometimes, data from Omnisend suggests that it’s best for brands to send 3-5 emails per week to customers. This will give you weekly opportunities to earn their interest and encourage readers to visit your website.
Email marketing also allows you to easily conduct A/B tests, where you send out two versions of the same email with slight differences in wording or content to see which performs better. This can help you develop the best-performing message to use in other places such as your website, social media, or paid advertising.
11. Reach Out to Past Clients for Referrals and Reviews
Displaying customer testimonials and positive reviews on your website is an effective way to encourage potential clients to work with you. Not only does it showcase your successes and provide legitimacy to your business, but it also helps readers learn more about you as a person.
Even if all the points covered in a review are also mentioned in other places on your website, hearing it from someone other than you really helps to build trust. When you ask for reviews, you can also encourage your past and existing clients to recommend you to friends or even post about you on their social media.
Due to the personal nature of your work as a life coach, always make it very clear that you intend to publish the reviews on your website and respect your client’s boundaries if they would prefer not to contribute.
What's the Best Way to Accept Payments as a Life Coach?
The payment process is an important element of your customer service, and it needs to be secure, simple, and smooth. It also needs to offer your clients a choice, so they can use the payment method they prefer.
My recommendation for achieving this as a small business is to sign up for Pay.com. Not only can you provide customers with the payment options they want, but you can also do it simply and easily. With Pay.com’s simple sign up process, you can start accepting payments quickly and easily, even if you’ve never used a merchant service provider before.
The Bottom Line: How Should You Market Yourself as a Life Coach?
Successful marketing strategies center around creating content that promotes your services and distributing that content to the right kinds of people. This can be done in a variety of ways, from collaborating with other well-being professionals and running a podcast, to leveraging email marketing and paid advertisement campaigns.
The other angle I recommend focusing on is refining your customer experience and public image with a sleek website and a robust payment system. Remember to check out Pay.com for payment solutions that cater to a range of client preferences, including Pay Links they can click to go to an online checkout page right from their phone, or using the Virtual Terminal to input card details into your Pay Dashboard.
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