How to find clients as a coach, living from your coaching practice and prosper
How to find clients as a coach? Finding clients is essential for any coach who wants to live from his coaching practice and prosper as a coach. If you are a new coach or experienced coach, you will find useful tips in this article to further develop your clientele.
In this article you will discover:
- how to find more clients for your coaching practice
- how to live from your coaching practice
- how to prosper as a coach
How to find coaching clients
Finding coaching clients require following a marketing strategy that is not the same for all coaches.
Your skills, your specializations, your professional experiences, your personal life experiences, and your personality make a strategy more or less suitable and effective.
Before defining and deploying a marketing strategy for coaches, you must first take into account:
- your character
- your skills: what makes you unique or even better than other coaches
- your marketing knowledge
Let’s look at each of these factors as they are all essential to defining a tailored marketing strategy.
Your character
Your character is the starting point of your strategy to find the first paid coaching client.
Are you more extroverted or introverted or in between?
Some people have easy contact and feel very comfortable with a group of people.
Others are moderately comfortable but they are able to communicate effectively with others with good preparation.
Other people still feel uncomfortable in relationships with a group of people and feel more comfortable with one person at a time.
This does not mean that a person who is less comfortable communicating is not able to become a good communicator and develop his clientele.
But each coach has his personality and it is preferable that on short/medium terms he acts in coherence with his true nature.
Doing this will make you feel more comfortable and convey your business message more effectively to your future customers.
Concretely, this consists of privileging different communication tools.
If you are extroverted you will be very comfortable in the networking evenings, in the group workshops and most likely in the video.
If you are halfway you can be comfortable in video and writing but you will be less successful in networking evenings and in group workshops.
If you are introverted you will feel more comfortable writing articles, you will be able to become good in the video with a lot of work but you will probably avoid group workshops and networking.
Your skills
Your skills also influence your marketing strategy to find coaching clients.
How are you unique?
What are some of the skills you have acquired that you can offer as a coach?
Have you ever faced and solved a major problem in your life?
Have you had life experiences that give you an edge over other coaches?
What do you have more compared to your competitors?
Answering these questions is not easy and often requires a lot of thought.
But it’s essential to understand your uniqueness in order to build a communication that targets the potential customers you want to target.
It is also important to start with something you like to do that is related to one of your competitive advantages.
But most importantly, it is essential to meet at least one specific need of the customers you are targeting.
Your marketing knowledge
The majority of coaches have no knowledge of marketing and web marketing.
The purpose of this article is not to give you a marketing course but it is important to define basic concepts to avoid mistakes that prevent you from finding coaching clients.
Most coaches are general practitioners of coaching and do not have a real specialization.
This is not their fault because many coaching schools convey the image of a coach who can coach everyone and can easily live coaching just following a certified training more or less expensive.
That said, the development of the coaching market requires coaches to specialize in market niches and therefore in very specific needs of the clientele they target.
That’s why to find coaching clients today and even more in the coming years, you need to focus on at least a very specific market niche.
This will not prevent you from occasionally coaching people on different needs.
But a prospect who contacts you must understand immediately what you are specialized in and what you can bring him more compared to your competitors.
But it is not enough to choose a niche or several market niches.
You must make sure that the niche you have selected is large enough to allow you to have a regular clientele for coaching.
To check the breadth of a niche market you can go on google or even better use web marketing tools to check the number of monthly searches on a given expression.
But making sure the right size of your niche is not enough.
You must also check the status of the competition.
Who are the competitors already positioned on the same keywords that you have targeted?
Are they bigger, smaller or like you in terms of financial and human resources?
Do you think you can challenge them?
Do you have the resources to try to gain some of their markets?
Answering these questions objectively is essential in deciding whether it is worth it or not to invest your time and money on a given market niche.
How to find your coaching niche?
Now we will see how to find your coaching niche.
You have several options but you need to analyze some aspects including the competition and your own skills. I am going to propose you 3 advices to find and choose your niche or your niches in coaching
1 – Choose a market niche that interests you or that you are passionate about
Your goal as a coach is not only to help your clients achieve their goals and increase your revenue.
Your goal is to be fulfilled in your work and that’s why the essential and often overlooked step is to choose your market niche based on your preferences.
If you choose a niche only because of the opportunity to make more money, you will be dissatisfied no matter how much money you make at the end of the month.
Choosing a portion of the market that you are passionate about is also important to be able to implement an effective marketing strategy.
It is much more enjoyable to wake up every morning producing content on topics you are passionate about rather than forcing yourself to deal with topics that you are not interested in at all or not enough.
By consistently covering topics that are motivating to you, you will be able to convey your enthusiasm to your potential customers and they will be more willing to contact you to take advantage of your expertise and energy.
2 – Choose a niche where clients are willing to pay you
As you probably already know, just because people have a problem doesn’t mean they are willing to pay you to solve it.
Before you enter a niche, make sure that it is profitable and that the people you are targeting are able to pay you for your services.
Many coaches offer free coaching to allow their prospects to test their services.
This is a good method but it should be used sparingly because you risk losing time and motivation to people who just want to take advantage of a free session.
Before you produce a lot of content on a niche, do some research and see if other coaches are making a living helping these clients.
For example, check the testimonials page of these coaches. If there are no testimonials, then either the coach is not a good entrepreneur or the niche should be avoided.
3 – Choose a niche that you have the potential to dominate partially or totally
Now that you are sure you have chosen a niche that interests you and in which people are motivated to pay a coach to solve their problems and achieve their goals, it is time to check if you have the potential to become a major player in this market.
First, you need to analyze who your competitors are and how strong they are in marketing and sales in this coaching market.
If, like most coaches, you work alone and your competitors are coaches who, like you, work alone, then everything is possible for you.
If on the other hand, your competition is made up of coaching firms with several coaches, then everything becomes more complicated for you.
But since everything is possible in marketing, you can compete with any structure if you really want to.
But if you decide to do so, it is important to ask yourself about :
- your knowledge and skills
- the time needed to get there
- your motivation to succeed
My advice is not to launch yourself in too many niches at the same time.
You can choose a niche that is within your reach and for which you will be able to position yourself on the first page of Google in 3 months maximum.
Then, you can bet on a much more competitive niche, for which you will plan to reach the first page of Google in about a year.
The first niche will allow you to have a regular clientele in the short term while the second will bring you more important results in the medium term.
How to live from your coaching practice
Now that you have the basic knowledge to find coaching clients on a regular basis, you need to learn how to live from your coaching practice.
To live from your coaching practice, you cannot settle for just one market niche but you have to target several.
To start, you can follow the tips in the previous section of this article regarding how to find coaching clients.
But multiplying efforts in several niches may not be enough or can be difficult to implement.
To make things simpler, once you have chosen the right market niche, do not go to another niche until you have become the leader in a specific market niche.
You have to do a lot of work to overcome your competitors and expand your customer base.
It’s not enough to do a little better than others.
You must become at least 10 times better than your competitors.
This point is very important because dispersing your energies will prevent you from getting a regular clientele.
This is essential if you work solo. You cannot do everything at the same time so just do what is important to become a leader in your niche.
When your leadership position is established, it will not stop doing marketing because it would give the opportunity to your competitors to catch up.
You must always continue to produce interesting content to maintain your leadership position.
But now you will spend 10% of your time on your first niche and 90% on your new niche.
By doing so, you will be able to develop your customer base, receive regular leads requests, increase your revenue and live from your coaching practice.
What is important to remember is that living from your coaching practice should not be limited to making money through coaching sessions.
Think about what you can do and propose to meet the needs of your customers.
Here is an example that can help you to progress in your marketing actions.
Once you have created enough content to attract coaching clients to whom you offer coaching sessions, you can offer e-books at a competitive price.
This way, people who want to test your skills can do it more easily and those who have a low budget can still benefit from your expertise.
At the end of the e-book, you can also offer a discount on one or more coaching sessions to get additional sales.
This is just one example that can help you grow your customer base.
Prosper as coach
To prosper as a coach is to become a true entrepreneur.
Previous marketing advice remains valid.
But now they must be applied on a larger scale.
What impact do you want to have on others?
How will you contribute to the lives of your customers?
Which markets remain unexplored?
How can you innovate the coaching market?
What will you create differently?
What new skills do you need to develop to succeed as a coach?
Answering these difficult questions is essential to prosper as a coach.
You must continue to improve and innovate.
For this, we must develop a greater openness and an attitude to learning.
Keep learning everything you need to grow your coaching business.
Keep up-to-date with the latest coaching, marketing, and niche trends you’ve targeted.
Stay on the cutting edge and keep innovating.
This also applies to your coaching skills.
What is the evolution of the market?
What are the new tools?
What is the future of coaching?
What are the new niches?
From a marketing standpoint never lose sight of the marketing strategies of your competitors.
Test them to see if they are profitable or not.
Then continue to test new strategies.
Vary your contents. If you write short articles, start writing long articles.
Test videos and this in different formats.
Submit also infographics.
Your goal is not only to develop your customer base but also to show your expertise, create a reference site in your field and win the trust of the people you are targeting.
Some practical marketing and web marketing strategies for coaches
As for the marketing channels that allow you to develop your clientele, invest your energies and your time on search engine optimization because it will allow you to obtain good visibility in the long term and at very low costs.
As for your communication on social media, use tools that allow you to automate the distribution of your content on social networks. Then, discover the emerging networks and take advantage of their audience to develop your visibility.
For e-mail marketing, create interesting content to get emails from potential customers and sell tailor-made solutions.
Avoid or at least limit paid advertising because your budget may explode quickly and without getting in exchange for great results.
Constantly think about creative strategies that will help you stand out and further develop your business.
Offer services that complete your coaching services such as training, mentoring, counseling, etc.
Test face-to-face event creation such as meetings, workshops, and more.
For web marketing and content creation, if you are unsure about the length of your articles, opt for longer articles because they generally perform better than shorter ones that represent the vast majority of content on the internet.
Create a video for each article for which you want to improve your positioning on the search engines.
Also, try creating infographics to get backlinks and to further improve your positioning.
Finally, try to find ways to collaborate with other professionals who meet the needs of the same clients you are targeting but with whom you are not competing. Then, propose partnerships on the basis of a new offer combining as much their expertise as yours.
Conclusion on how to find clients as a coach, live from your coaching practice and prosper as a coach
Prosper as a coach is a final step in a marketing strategy that will allow you to dominate one market niche after another.
It’s about developing good habits that allow you to do what’s essential every day to develop your coaching business.
To prosper as a coach, you must continue:
- to learn what you need to improve the efficiency of your business
- to use the best strategies to find your customers
- to innovate
The purpose of this article was to give you as much information as possible to develop your coaching business. Now that you have this information, I would like to know your opinion.
What do you think about this article and especially how will you use what you have just discovered to find coaching clients, live from your coaching practice and prosper as a coach?
If you want to go further on the topic of marketing for coaches, write to us via our contact form or discover now how to find clients as a coach for your coaching business.
Read this article in other languages
Français : Vivre du coaching : trouver des clients et prospérer comme coach
Italiano: Come trovare dei clienti di coaching, vivere e prosperare come coach