You’ve come to the right website if you want to discover how to gain customers as a life coach in 2023. A lot has changed in the last few years, and attempting to figure out how to acquire customers as a life coach today might lead you down a number of diverting pathways that will only waste your money and time.
So, we’re going to clear the air for you and tell you where you should focus your efforts in order to obtain coaching customers quickly and establish a profitable life-coaching business that feeds your spirit. When it comes to attracting coaching clients, we know what works and what doesn’t, and we genuinely care about your success. Okay, let’s get started.
If you wish to attract your first coaching customers quickly, the simplest and most disregarded technique is the old-fashioned way: word of mouth. It’s incredible how many individuals are fighting to acquire life coaching clients – getting sidetracked with funnels, course development, and social media – yet haven’t informed a single soul what they’re doing! And word of mouth is more than simply a means of obtaining your first life coaching client. If you can provide exceptional outcomes for your clients and get them to refer you to their friends, family, and coworkers, word-of-mouth marketing may be the only marketing approach you ever need to use to attain the accomplishment you seek.
So, before you dive down the rabbit hole of advertisements, funnels, and content development, consider the following:
New coaches are sometimes too shy to inform their friends, family, or coworkers about what they’re doing. But this is a tremendous blunder! Your current network may be the greatest approach to quickly attract your initial coaching customers. You almost certainly know persons in the specific niche that you want to assist. If you don’t know anyone in the industry, your friends, family, or coworkers will. Tell them what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, and we promise they’ll jump at the chance to work with you or suggest someone to you.
Since your personal network is a great location to get your first coaching client, tapping into your professional network is an excellent approach to finding clients in the long run. Your massage therapist, acupuncturist, hairstylist/barber, or anyone who sees a lot of people on a regular basis could be a good source of numerous referrals. Tell them what you’re doing, and what category you’re in, and request that they suggest new clients to you. You can also partner with another professional to refer customers to one another or build up a collaborative care model in which you both deal with the same customer.
You might also organize a workshop or event with another expert or in partnership with another firm to obtain access to a new set of potential clients. If you know how to lead a guided meditation, you may offer to teach courses at a local yoga studio or community center. The crucial thing to realize is that there are many other Entrepreneurial Empaths like you who would jump at the chance to assist you in building your coaching business, particularly if the agreement is mutually beneficial.
If you lack direct ties to individuals in your sector and have a restricted personal and professional network, you can attend trading events or training seminars to make your own contacts. If networking events aren’t for you, how about support groups or local communities? Consider which groups and activities your ideal customer would attend, and then go to those events, meet people, and tell them what you do! This method is a simple and successful way to attract coaching customers quickly; however, it works best when you are already in the area you want to service. Otherwise, you may be unable to attend some meetings or support groups.
So, before you dive into funnels, digital marketing, or social networks, remember that you are most likely only a few chats away from a new customer. Not only is this the quickest and easiest approach to attract your initial coaching clients, but if you can provide exceptional outcomes for your clients, it may be all you ever need to do to develop a profitable business.
Life coaches are often reserved, individuals. They prefer to support and assist others behind the scenes rather than be the focus of attention. But you owe it to your future customers and yourself to be brave, to get out there, strike up conversations, network, tell everyone what you’re doing, and begin establishing your business now!
Before we dive into how to obtain coaching customers online utilizing advertisements, we strongly advise you to put the techniques described in the preceding section into action. While creating a funnel and running advertising is an extremely efficient strategy to obtain coaching customers, there is a lot to understand in order to do it correctly. And after you’ve fallen down the marketing rabbit hole, it’s easy to get seduced into spending thousands of dollars on business coaches and courses that provide rehashed material that will only waste your money and time.
However, if you have the necessary persistence, understanding how to market your coaching business might provide you the capacity to attract customers on demand and allow you to expand beyond the restrictions of 1-on-1 coaching in the future. Since we can’t possibly cover everything in one post, we will cover the basics and send you the direction for some resources to assist you to understand how to attract coaching customers online.
There are a few advantages and downsides to determining where to market coaching services, so let’s start with the advantages:
Some disadvantages:
It’s normal to become sidetracked by marketing tricks while attempting to find out how to advertise your coaching business. Marketing gurus and funnel-building software will sell you on the virtues of front-end courses, upsells, tripwire offers, and a million other stuff that will waste your time and drain your energy. To advertise your life coaching business, you don’t need a convoluted funnel, mini-courses, or a comprehensive email marketing approach.
Luckily, the most effective marketing method for driving revenue into your private practice, group coaching, or high-ticket courses is also the most straightforward. So, let’s break down the elements of the call application funnel, the most successful marketing & funnel method for life coaches.
The call application funnel is a straightforward funnel intended to get your target clients to join you on a sales call. It is made up of many pages: a landing/opt-in page, a video sales letter (VSL), a schedule/application page, and a thank you page. It’s simple to construct, and because of its simple, linear shape, data analysis to evaluate how effectively your funnel is functioning is straightforward.
In addition, the call application funnel is the most successful technique for selling high-ticket services. And, if you’re advertising as a life coach, you should be selling high-ticket services; otherwise, you’ll have a tough time acquiring customers successfully.
To carry out this marketing plan, you just need funnel-building software, scheduling software, and email marketing software. Instapage is the funnel builder we suggest since it offers the easiest drag-and-drop builder of any funnel builder I’ve used. Calendly is the scheduling software we use, and it handles both scheduling and the intake form or application in one. ActiveCampaign is the email program or CRM that we utilize.
Google Ads, notably YouTube and Search Ads, are the finest platforms for advertising as a life coach. Don’t bother attempting after iOS14 because Facebook advertisements just no longer function for cold traffic. Facebook’s only utility as an advertising platform is to retarget visitors to your website or funnel. If you try to run Facebook advertising to cold traffic, you will discover that it is VERY costly to obtain leads, and the quality of the leads you do collect will most likely be poor.
Google Ads, on the other hand, are a different matter. With YouTube Adverts, you can position your ads right on videos that you know your target audience will view. And, with Search Ads, you may appear in search results when potential clients look for solutions to problems you can help them solve. People are in a completely different state on YouTube and Google Search than they are on Facebook or Instagram because they are looking to learn. As a result, the quality of traffic you’ll receive from YouTube or Search Ads will be far superior to that of Facebook.
There is no way we could handle the massive amount of knowledge required to correctly handle YouTube Ads in one post, but here is a collection of suggestions, training, and resources to help you start.
In order to conduct advertising, your website’s tracking must be correctly configured. This allows you to construct occasions around which to optimize your adverts. For a call funnel, you’ll want to focus on two conversion events: opt-ins and scheduled calls. If you’ve never done anything like this before, it might be really complicated, but thankfully, Julian from Measureschool is here to help. Julian’s YouTube channel is dedicated to properly configuring tracking for Google Analytics and Google Ads, and he lays everything down into simple, easy-to-follow stages. He taught us all we know about tracking. We like his content and hope it is as beneficial to you as it was to me!
Many people are unaware that some of YouTube’s most popular advertising is essentially slideshow presentations or animated films with no one on camera. So, even if you’re camera-shy, you can still make excellent YouTube Ads. If you can make a PowerPoint presentation and screen record it with Screenflow or Camtasia, you can make a YouTube commercial.
Kyle Sulerud is an excellent resource for understanding how to use the Google Ads platform. Kyle’s YouTube Channel, which focuses on YouTube advertisements, is jam-packed with useful advice on how to use the various targeting choices, how to build your campaigns, what key performance indicators to pay attention to, and much more. He also offers numerous informative tutorials on how to organize your advertising and create great hooks.
If you desire to save time and get all-in-one YouTube Ads training, Foundr provides excellent YouTube Ads training prepared by Tommie Powers – the marketing expert’s guru when it comes to YouTube Ads. This webinar will teach you all you need to know about landing page design, the Google Ads platform, YouTube Ad structure, and much more if you’re beginning from scratch.
When focused on the correct keyword prospects, Search Ads may be extremely powerful and profitable. Google Ads Keyword Planner is a terrific free resource for finding questions that your niche is searching for, which can then be utilized as keywords in your YouTube Ads. SEMRush is another fantastic tool for locating keywords, search queries, and much more. We frequently recommend SEMRush for researching blog themes, but it’s also a useful tool for finding keywords to target for search ads, as well as spying on rivals’ search efforts to obtain ideas for material that could work for your firm.
When it comes to attracting life coaching clients online, having an educated organic content strategy is the finest long-term investment you can make. While the law of attraction has its role in the client acquisition process, we feel that the law of action is more important. And one of the most impactful things you can do for the long-term viability of your coaching business is to create content that naturally attracts targeted visitors at an increasing pace.
In business, you should concentrate on high-leverage tasks that create outsized outputs or advantages in comparison to the time and resources invested. The same may be said for content production. Creating content requires time, and time is your most precious and scarce resource. So, in order for content to be worth creating, it has to be worth the time it takes to produce. We prefer to analyze three factors to decide whether a certain content approach is worthwhile.
Any piece of material that is relevant, valuable, and visible to your niche can attract life-coaching customers. We highly recommend the previously stated tool, SEMRush – especially, the Keyword Magic Tool – for coming up with appealing content ideas. You may use this tool to find out what queries your niche is asking Google and, by extension, YouTube. The two metrics Keyword Density and Search Volume may also be used to measure the amount of competition and interest.
If SEMRush is too pricey for you, you may look into its rivals or utilize the Keyword Planner, which is a free tool available within your Google Ads account. Whichever tool you choose, go deep and investigate your niche’s problems/questions from as many perspectives as possible. This will undoubtedly inspire you to develop relevant and valuable content for your niche, with a better likelihood of visibility on Google Search or YouTube.
Creating a YouTube channel, or creating a blog on your website, is a high-leverage activity with long-term rewards that surpass short-term expenditures. Both YouTube and blog material have inverted half-lives and will grow in popularity and traffic over time. Furthermore, making effective YouTube or blog material is primarily about quality rather than quantity. That means you don’t have to be locked on the content hamster wheel like Facebook or Instagram. One high-quality blog post and/or video each week (or even month) is all you need to get traction over time.
Consider how one high-value YouTube video may create new life-coaching customers at a growing pace for years to come. Compare that to the time and effort required to post on Instagram. What is more worthwhile for your time?
We would be depriving you of a simple tip for driving traffic to your coaching company, blog, or YouTube channel if we did not disclose it.
TikTok is a fantastic technique for swiftly growing a following and driving visitors to an external social media network or your funnel. This is due to the possibility of virality.
Granted, your niche must be active on the site, but you’d be shocked at the ever-expanding age range of TikTok users.
To finally develop anything that becomes semi-viral, all you need to do is create easy short videos that answer questions, provide insights or quotations, and any material that your niche would find important enough to like, comment, or share with someone they know. We know some YouTubers who have used TikTok to grow their channels from 0 to +1 million followers in less than two years, so it’s definitely a high-leverage activity to generate a lot of output with little input.
If your category members are active LinkedIn users, reaching out to them directly on LinkedIn may be a very productive technique for acquiring coaching clients. However, it is not suitable for everyone. So, let’s go through everything you need to know to decide whether knowing how to locate coaching clients on LinkedIn is a worthwhile investment of your time.
Direct outreach is similar to cold calling, and many coaches just aren’t made out for it. We know numerous extremely successful coaches (primarily business coaches) who rely entirely on LinkedIn direct outreach to attract new customers, proving that it can be done. But make no mistake: it’s difficult to labor. It also demands two things from your niche: #1, they must be easily searchable using professional demographics, and #2, they must actually have a painful condition that is prevalent in the niche.
You must also enjoy sales to make this technique work for you, because you will be reaching out, establishing sales discussions, getting folks on a sales call, and closing them again and over. There will be a lot of rejection; it’s just the nature of this type of lead generation since people realize you’re attempting to sell them something. That is why, for this to succeed, your niche must have a really terrible problem. Finally, finding coaching clients on LinkedIn takes time. It can work quite well in the long term, but it may take several months to gain one customer, especially if you are not a strong salesperson.
LinkedIn coaching client acquisition may be broken down into four steps: connect, talk, chat, and close. Let’s go through the fundamentals of each stage.
The very first step is to identify participants in your field on LinkedIn and add them as connections. We strongly advise you to use Sales Navigator for this, as it will offer you larger daily connection limits, improved search capability, and the option to create lists of potential clients based on demographic data.
Personalizing each connection text will result in increased connection rates, but we strongly advise against doing so. You want to utilize the same messages again so that you can assess the success of your strategy and compare it to other connection messages. You need as few variables as feasible in order to iterate and improve your technique over time. Set aside time each day to send out your daily quota of connection requests, and stick to it.
You should plan one or two times every day to check LinkedIn or Sales Navigator to see who has accepted your invitation to connect. Send identical one or two messages to each individual who has accepted your connection request to engage them in the discussion. The goal of your first message is to thank them for connecting with you and encourage them to react to you in the conversation. It is critical that you have a systematic approach to this, otherwise you will not know what is and isn’t functioning.
Text chats consume a lot of time. So, once they’ve answered, your objective should be to keep texting to a minimum and get the prospect as rapidly as possible to step 3.
The next step is to move the conversation away from LinkedIn and into a fast 15-minute conversation with your potential customer. This is NOT a sales call; rather, it is a qualifying discussion. Its sole objective is to assess whether or not the prospect is a viable future client.
This is accomplished by addressing their primary issues, ideal scenario, how much they wish and/or are prepared to invest in finding a solution, delivering your high-level pitch (I help [niche] to [overcome challenge] so they can [get the desired outcome]), and other such things. If they satisfy your qualifying criteria at the end of the discussion, the next step is to schedule a 45-minute sales to call with them.
On a sales call, the prospect is converted into a client. We won’t even attempt to outline any techniques or tactics in this piece because there have been numerous books published about sales. We would, however, recommend a book called Fanatical Prospecting, which was really useful in explaining the method of direct contact. So that’s the fundamental procedure. It takes time, and in order for it to succeed, you must be tenacious and constant. However, there are various tools and pieces of training that may help you save time and boost the number of potential clients you can approach.
Apollo is one example of such a tool. io is a fantastic piece of software that allows you to create automated sequences and follow-ups with individuals you’ve connected with. Furthermore, the application can harvest email addresses from LinkedIn, allowing you to move the interaction with potential clients away from LinkedIn, resulting in far greater response rates, more chats, and more customers.
If you already know that LinkedIn direct outreach is the greatest approach for you to engage with your niche and you enjoy the sales process, check out Executive Advantage. Their training is really detailed, and it is without a doubt the greatest instruction for acquiring coaching customers on LinkedIn. They also offer a proprietary bot that you can use to automatically connect with people and start conversations using automated sequences in both LinkedIn and email.
Building relationships with as many individuals in your field as possible not only allows you to engage them in the discussion but also allows you to contact them organically through LinkedIn postings. LinkedIn’s algorithm is excellent for organic reach, and if your niche members are active on the network, they are likely to view some or all of your postings. Until you begin on a posting binge, it’s critical to define your goal.
The goal is to demonstrate to your audience that you are an authority they can rely on to deliver a solution to a painful situation they are experiencing. So, only post when your content is related to the goal, gives value to your niche members, and/or proves that you care about and understand them, possibly more than they do.
Furthermore, you should ensure that your LinkedIn profile is completely focused on your life coaching business and clearly indicates what you do and the niche/problem for which you offer a solution. Many of the individuals who linked with you will likely forget why they did, so when they click on your profile after viewing one of your postings, make sure the route to becoming a potential customer of yours is as plain as day.
You must be able to continuously obtain clients if you wish to create a profitable coaching business. That is self-evident. More significantly, you must be able to keep those clients. Otherwise, you’ll be in the arduous business of client acquisition, not client success. So, in order to gain and keep clients, you must accomplish two things.
Being nervous about sales and not understanding how to sell is a huge barrier to getting customers for most life coaches. We see this all the time with the coaches we work with inside The Guided Meditation Framework, and there is a clear difference between those who are confident in what they are selling and those who are not. Students who excel at selling their services are often those that believe in and appreciate the value they can bring to their consumers’ lives. These pupils have no trouble charging $1,500 to $3,000 for 6 to 12 meditation coaching sessions and do so on a regular basis.
We offer a regular course called “Sales Uncringed” that helps Entrepreneurial Empaths erase the negative connection they have with sales and reframe the sales process so they may sell their offerings with total comfort and certainty. I’m telling you this because if you have a bad connotation with the word “sales,” it will severely limit your capacity to attract coaching customers. It is critical that you study books on selling and analyze any subconscious training you may have about charging money that may be holding you back.
It makes no difference how many clients you have if you can’t provide remarkable outcomes. Because if you don’t produce regular outcomes, you won’t be able to keep your clientele. And if you can’t keep clients, you’ll be trapped in the client replacement industry, always attempting to figure out where your next customer will come from.
To be perfectly honest, most coach training does not provide you with the abilities essential to achieve the transformational outcomes required to retain clients and create recommendations. When my mother initially started her coaching company, she only used standard techniques like motivational interviewing, the wheel of life, and so on. However, it was not working. She’d receive customers, but half of them would drop out halfway through, and she wasn’t getting referrals.
She knew she needed to connect with her clients on a deeper level, so she combined her decades of experience leading guided meditations with additional pieces of training in clinical hypnotherapy, NLP, HeartMath, guided imagery, and therapeutic imagery to create a one-of-a-kind modality that allowed her to consistently facilitate long-term transformations for her clients. This strategy laid the groundwork for her success, and when paired with her mentoring, she was able to develop a successful business with more customers than she could handle.
Your first coaching customer is not required to pay you. You may provide free life counseling sessions and then charge afterward. People who are unfamiliar with you have the opportunity to learn how much value you can bring to their life through a free coaching session, which might lead to long-term paying customers.
You can arrange a free consultation with a potential client. Keep it within 30 minutes and, at the conclusion, ask for comments on the experience. If they do not become a long-term coaching client as a result of the free coaching you provide, you may regard those coaching sessions as a learning opportunity or incentive to improve your life coaching methods of fulfilling the requirements of your coaching clients. Finally, your free coaching sessions will assist you in providing the greatest coaching services, which will indirectly benefit your coaching profession. It’s also a terrific chance to give back to the community in modest ways.
Sorry to disappoint, but we have yet to find a secret recipe for rapidly creating a large customer list. Our best piece of advice? Avoid gimmicks that promise unbelievable outcomes. It all boils down to two essential factors if you want to know how to actually obtain life coaching clients: discipline and hard effort. Begin with a firm understanding of your niche and messaging. If you need assistance defining these terms, there is a renowned selection of excellent training programs available to assist you.
This concludes this lengthy article. Thank you for taking the time to read this far down. We hope you found this post useful, and we wish you success in finding life-coaching clients so you may establish a profitable company that nourishes your soul.
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