A coach is an external intervention that every individual, organization, team, etc., requires to excel or do significantly better than they can currently accomplish. People seeking brilliance in different walks of life, both professional and personal, realize that and are, therefore, looking for mentorship from someone who knows better than them. But how do you, as a coach, find these people?
To get coaching clients, it’s imperative to:
The above pointers are merely the blueprint, quite clearly. To tread the path, digging into the specifics is essential. Read on to find out what they are.
Life coaches are wellness professionals helping people succeed or make progress in various walks of their lives. They can assist with building or restoring careers, relationships, personalities, etc. A life coach can also help their clients navigate everyday life.
Life coaches help their clients by:
People with the following concerns will find a life coach extremely helpful:
The above are a few of the myriad issues a life coach could help their clients negotiate. It’s pretty common to see executives, entrepreneurs, artists, etc., associating with life coaches and attaining success or accelerating their growth in their respective fields.
There’s no universal method or course of action to pull in clients for your life coaching service. Different coaches do things differently. But there are certain basics that no life coach can afford to ignore or sidestep, irrespective of how creative or out-of-the-box their thinking is.
Kindly note the following are the fundamentals or help build a proper foundation. Though they do not guarantee an inflow of clients within days, not scoring a customer is unavoidable if you do not adhere to them.
A key aspect of grabbing your target market’s attention is creating a presence online. The best life coaches have been successful because they possess excellent networking skills and intelligent sales and marketing strategies for the web, besides their unique selling propositions.
Social media and online presence go hand in hand. Like how it’s essential to have your website, it’s equally critical to have a social media profile page(s). A LinkedIn, Facebook, or Pinterest page would come in handier than your website or blog to build a network and create new relationships.
You can interact with your target market a lot more seamlessly online through Facebook Messenger or the built-in messaging tools of other social networking sites than the Contact Us page of your website.
Not to mention, trying to prove or tacitly communicate to people that you indeed are an expert at what you do becomes a lot easier with a social media presence. An excellent social media standing also facilitates reaching out to and partnering with influencers.
You cannot afford not to have a blog if you want to come across as a professional or be considered seriously for the services you provide. In other words, doling out valuable pieces of information to your target audience is a proven strategy to help people know more about how good of a life coach you are.
Disseminating information through texts and videos is a way to hook in potential clients and convert them into paid clients or subscribers.
If you cannot write or do not have the inclination/motivation or time to write, hire writers to do it for you. Work with high-quality authors and be willing to pay a decent sum as remuneration. Else you might end up with copies that you’ll either have to edit extensively or not be able to use in any shape or form.
Writing helpful articles and posting them on your blog is one way of creating content. Another method is making videos. In this day and age of YouTube, Facebook Videos, IGTV, etc., video marketing is as important (if not more) as churning out plain texts.
As a life coach, you are likely to have multiple topics to create videos on. But, similar to writing blog posts, you must have a strategy or focus when creating videos for the web. There must be some symmetry or commonality between your videos for them to resonate with your audience.
Zero in on a sub-topic that’s niche but broad enough to talk about at lengths and from different perspectives. Most importantly, ensure it’s a subject that people would like some advice on.
If you are a business coach or want to brand yourself as one, ensure your videos cater to working professionals only. You cannot have a couple of videos talking about work-life balance and time management and then discuss relationships and happiness in the subsequent videos. While you can touch upon things outside of your realm, they should never be the main point of discussion.
Also, the videos need not always be scripted and pre-recorded. Try out live, extempore videos now and again to sprinkle a personal touch to your videos. Let your target market also get a glimpse of the “vulnerable you.” Live video can turn out quite effective if executed well.
We’ve talked about texts and videos. Naturally, the next most important and obvious thing you must take on is audio. In other words, start podcasting. People like to listen to people talk. Audio-only services such as Audible have capitalized on that reality and are making billions.
Spreading the word purely through audio is in its nascent stages – which is good news as it allows you a bigger opportunity to stand out from the crowd and have your voice heard louder (no pun intended). Video marketing is quite relevant and still ruling the roost, but it’s also a very crowded space, rendering visibility a lot more difficult.
Not to mention, podcasting contributes to your credibility quotient in a way that perhaps video and, certainly, audio does not.
Like with your blogs and videos, it’s imperative to be consistent with your podcasts. Suppose you do not give it the attention that you’re likely to exhibit with producing text and video content. In that case, the sporadic podcasting won’t create any real dent in your prospects.
You can either host your podcasts and/or partake in the initiatives of influencers in your domain. If you’re not sure about podcasting, participating in other people’s episodes will help you get familiar with the space and give you some much-needed confidence when you try to do it on your own.
Once you’ve created a base for yourself and your offering, go ahead and start to build a clientele. Reach out to people and let them know what you offer, how you are better than others in your industry, etc.
Unless and until you’re part of the crème de la crème or the upper echelon of life coaches, potential clients are not going to come to you by themselves. You would have to go in search of them.
Though you’ll not be knocking on people’s doors, some real work is undoubtedly in the offing.
But before casting your marketing net, know who and where your target audience is. Adopting a blanket approach would mean a lower rate of return or a significant waste of marketing funds. Social media websites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter, etc., have millions of active users. But not all of them require life coaching.
Trying to find your target user base would not work if you don’t know what you’re looking for. In other words, learn more about the kind of people you’d like to offer life coaching services to so that you could find them in the right places.
If your target market is business professionals, LinkedIn should be integral to your social media marketing efforts. Similarly, if you are keen to serve hobbyists, bloggers, etc., Pinterest would be a better bet. For a universal audience, look at Facebook and Twitter.
The two platforms also work great when you haven’t clearly defined your target market as yet.
By knowing your target audience, you’ll also be better positioned to devise a content marketing strategy. In other words, you would know the topics to discuss through your videos and blogs and the titles to use.
Whether through your website or social media pages (preferable), chat with your customers regularly to learn about them and show you genuinely care. Blogs and videos are great communication tools, but they are one-way. Emails, on the other hand, do facilitate two-way conversations, but they aren’t instant.
Nothing beats the intuitiveness and responsiveness of a real-time text or video chat.
Use your live interactions to gain first-hand information about your clients, identify loopholes (if any) in your content, etc. If there are specific issues you haven’t talked about before, your patrons will bring them to your notice so that you could incorporate them in your future articles or videos.
The more you host live conversations with your clients, the more your user base will like you and resonate with you and your offerings. Most importantly, the word will spread, and your number of followers will gradually go up.
Another method to personally connect with your audience is responding to their comments on your posts or videos. Make sure your responses are value-adding or, at the least, genuine. The last thing you’ll want to do is post a generic message without reading a follower’s comment. Or worse yet, copy-pasting the same message under different user comments.
People like to hear stories, especially when they are honest and have takeaways.
If you’re running short of tales and anecdotes to share, throw out some personal stuff. For instance, you could talk about how your advice helped your past/current clients succeed. Those stories would be akin to seeing live demonstrations of a service or product.
If you don’t have the knack to tell stories, you could skip this part or only share personal reports that are so inherently interesting that even a person who’s terrible at storytelling can pull it off. Irrespective of where you are at your narration game, make sure the real-life tales you share are anything but drab. They mustn’t be too long either.
Before you start to attract high-paying coaching clients, make sure you’ve reached a point in your career that makes you worthy of associating with high-profile clients.
In other words, if you are still busy in the weeds, sending emails to prospective clients or reaching out to them on social media by yourself, you are not there yet. You must have a good team in place before you could go after big-ticket clients.
The term “high-profile” or “high-paying” is pretty broad and could mean different things. For instance, a client that pays $1,000 a month for your services may seem “high-ticket” to you, but that may seem standard to another individual whose monthly cash flow is in the hundreds of thousands.
Therefore, define “high-profile” for you and look for clients that fit into that description. Once that’s done, know what their problems are and how you could be of help.
The client should also be someone you know you’d get along and stay associated with for a long time. Learn more about what they do, their goals, personality, etc., before getting on a phone call with them. Interactions with cold leads are things you certainly don’t want to be a part of. You’ll come out of it exasperated and discouraged.
If an application or form can help you learn more about the individual, send one across. If the prospect doesn’t fill out and send the form back, they are not people you should reach out to through the phone.
As mentioned earlier, a social media presence is imperative to succeed as a life coach. Of all the platforms out there, a LinkedIn profile page is arguably the most important to have. You cannot expect people to take you seriously if you are not on the largest networking site for professionals in the world.
High-paying clients don’t just expect you to have a page on LinkedIn, but also one that’s flourishing. For starters, you must have hit the “500+ connections” threshold just to exhibit you’ve got “connections”. Connect with as many potential clients as possible to hit that number.
And SEO the living hell out of your profile page.
If a potential client looks for a life coach on a search engine, your LinkedIn profile page should feature on the first page (if it’s not the first link). Getting there is not easy as the competition is fierce. But with time and persistence, you’ll reach that point. High-paying coaching clients know that well.
People do not get on board with anything without having a hint about what’s in store. And high-profile clients would require more than just a hint. They need something more substantial to feel convinced. A freebie in the form of a guide, mini-course, checklist, planner, etc., could tilt the balance in your favor.
You need not provide value as a bundle, however. Using your social media pages and doling out nuggets of information over there is also a way to show a prospective client what you’re made of.
Showing up for your patrons (high-profile or not) through social media posts, live streams, other varied pieces of content, etc., is a sure-shot way to connect with prospects or grab their attention. You just need to keep the buzz going.
With high-profile clients, a strong presence online alone may not cut it. At times, they need to see you in the flesh to take serious note of you.
Show up at public events that your “rich” clients are likely to attend. Even better, make your presence felt at those gatherings. You could do that through conducting seminars, giving a speech, demonstrating your service or a product, etc.
Kindly note, entry to such events is usually not free. Therefore, be willing to shell out some money just to get your foot in the door. Consider the money spent as an investment in your business and yourself. Even if you do not score leads in the initial meeting or two, you’ll learn more than a thing or two about your prospects by simply being close to them.
It’s a lot more effort to score high-profile clients than winning over regular leads. But once you bag a few, it would be worth the wait and effort.
If you’ve just gotten started with your coaching stint, you must enhance or hone your skills and get better before you go out and fish for clients.
Premature marketing can easily damage your reputation and make it extremely difficult to bag clients when dissatisfied patrons start sharing their grievances around. It’s, therefore, critical to wait and prepare before monetizing your coaching skills.
Once you’re ready to roll, put the tips mentioned above to work.
