Ultimate Marketing Guide For Business Coaches

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As a business coach for other small business owners, you’re most likely wearing many hats.

You’re providing advice and support to your clients. You’re developing strategies and plans. And, you’re also doing all the tasks it takes to run your own business. This includes the huge task of marketing your business.

Marketing is a full-time job in itself, and requires a lot of insight, effort, and – for many business coaches – some trial and error.

But it doesn’t have to be an uphill battle.

In this guide, we cover everything you need to know about how to market your coaching business with the goal of getting more clients. We include traditional and digital marketing tactics that are well suited for business coaching practices, as well as ideas to help you get more results in today’s online world.

Marketing Your Coaching Business: 5 Steps to Follow

Successful marketing for business coaches takes some effort, but it doesn’t have to be complicated. By blending the right digital marketing and traditional marketing tactics, you can increase brand awareness, attract new customers, and drive more business.

Here are 5 steps to market your business coaching practice:

1. Identify Your Target Audience’s and Their Pain Points

Whether you’re a new business coach, or you’ve been coaching for years, chances are you have an idea of the types of business owners you enjoy coaching. And, although each of your clients probably have their own unique needs, they’re likely facing similar challenges.

The first step to successfully marketing your business coaching practice is to take stock of who your ideal clients are and what pain points they’re dealing with. This will help you target your marketing and messaging to those people and problems.

To do this, consider who some of your best clients have been. (Or, if you’re just starting out, who you’d like to work with most.) Are they owners of retail stores? Healthcare practices? Agencies? Or, alternatively, do they use specific management practices? Are they looking to exit?

You get the idea.

Once you’ve mapped out who your ideal clients are, it’s time to identify their pain points. What are the worries that keep them up at night? What questions do they wish they had answers to?

As you’re working through this process, try asking yourself the following questions:

  • How old is my target audience? What stage of life are they in?
  • Where do they live?
  • What industry do they serve? Who are their customers?
  • What questions are they asking?
  • What problems do they need solving?
  • What are their motivations for being in business?
  • What is their spending power?
  • How can I help them?
  • What value do I bring to the table?


Armed with this information, you can better tailor your marketing efforts. Ultimately, you want to speak to your audience in a way that resonates with them, and show them how you can solve their problems painlessly.

2. Choose the Right Marketing Tactics

After you’ve identified your target audience and their pain points, the next thing to do is consider what marketing tactics you’ll use to access these business owners.

When it comes to types of marketing tactics, there are two main buckets: organic marketing and paid marketing.

Organic Marketing

Organic marketing refers to any efforts designed to bring clients to you naturally without paying an advertising spend to access them.

Organic marketing – and specifically inbound marketing, which is a type of organic marketing – works with the express purpose of building a loyal customer base, cultivating authentic relationships, and fostering a community. This bolsters trust and brand loyalty, and can pay off in spades in the long run.

Since the idea is to build long-lasting relationships with your audience, organic marketing requires you to show up consistently to develop trust and authority over time. It typically involves tactics like blogging, posting on social media, creating a newsletter, publishing articles, and so on.

Together, these tactics can generate social media shares, visits to your websites, word of mouth referrals, and so on – all organic ways to bring more awareness to your business coaching practice and ultimately new customers.

Paid Marketing

Paid marketing is just what it sounds like: marketing you pay for through an advertising spend in order to push your content to new target audiences.

Paid marketing strategies usually serve a specific purpose, and you can have more than one paid campaign running at a time.

Some paid marketing tactics can include:

  • Search engine marketing, such as Google Ads
  • Ads on LinkedIn, Facebook, or other social platforms
  • Website banner ads and pay-per-click ads
  • Outdoor advertising, such as billboards
  • Traditional advertising, like radio commercials or print ads

Oftentimes, business coaches will start by using some paid marketing tactics while they’re building their organic strategies and content. Ultimately though, organic marketing tends to be a more sustainable approach, and will continue to work well after paid campaigns are shut off.

With that in mind, let’s take a deeper dive into some of these organic marketing channels.

3. Explore Different Organic Marketing Channels

There are many ways to market your business coaching practice. Here are some popular organic marketing channels, and a summary of the pros and cons of each.

Blogs

Blogging is one of the most popular organic digital marketing tactics used to raise awareness about your coaching business.

With blogs, you can offer helpful information and insight, showcase your expertise, and build your online presence.

Coupled with a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy, your blogs may even rank highly on search engine results pages (SERPs) when people are searching for related keywords. Don’t forget, search engines love fresh and value-rich content, so if you’re going after SEO, make sure you aim for a regular publishing cadence.

If you don’t have time to write blog posts yourself, there are tools available like Value Builder’s Smart Content that will equip you with high-quality content you can share with your audience.

Pros of blogs:

    • Can be cost effective

    • Showcases your knowledge

    • Provides content you can repurpose for other means

Cons of blogs:

    • Can be hard to rise above the competition

    • Can require SEO expertise

    • Writing is time consuming

Social Media

Social media can be another effective way to market your coaching business online. But with a plethora of social media options and strategies, it’s hard to know where to begin.

Start by identifying which platforms your audience frequents, when, and what messaging they gravitate towards, and then cater your content around that.

LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram are popular platforms that clients of business coaches frequent. You can repurpose content across all platforms, but make sure to adapt the captions to fit the tone of the platform – and use relevant hashtags for more reach.

Pros of social media:

    • Allows prospects to get a sense of who you are

    • Allows you to reach new audiences

    • Builds long term relationships

Cons of social media:

    • Need to post regularly

    • May require trial and error

    • Can lead to burnout

Online Communities

Creating an online community around your business can bolster your presence, authority, and trust. It’s about building long term relationships with prospects who will hopefully turn into loyal clients.

In your online community, you can also promote your various services (though do so occasionally to avoid people tuning out) and bonus offers such as workshops, seminars, eBooks, and so on. You can also pose questions and conversation starters to foster community amongst members.

Pros of online communities:

    • Builds meaningful relationships

    • Builds trust and authority

    • Maximizes growth opportunities

Cons of online communities:

    • Requires continual monitoring and engagement

    • Takes considerable effort

    • Can increase your risk of burnout

Email Marketing

While you’re working on your other online marketing endeavors, it’s also a good idea to be building an email list.

You can power up the speed at which you build your list by offering gated content (content such as eBooks or webinars that can only be accessed in exchange for the person’s email address) or exclusive community access.

Once you’ve built an email list, you can email your subscribers on a regular basis to share valuable content, insights, tips, and occasionally information about your service offerings. If you need help automating this, check out Value Builder’s Nurture Cycle which also offers pre-loaded email content that performs 5x better than the average email.



Pros of email marketing:

    • Affordable way to build and engage your audience

    • You own your email list

    • Can ask for direct responses and feedback

Cons of email marketing:

 

    • Risk of spamming recipients

    • Requires consistency

    • Requires unique and thoughtful content ideas

Podcasts

Podcasts have been on the rise over the past few years, and it’s easy to see why. Podcasts are a great way to showcase your expertise, make connections with other professionals, and give your listeners a strong sense of who you are.

If hosting your own podcast is a bit out of reach, you can instead connect with other podcast hosts to become a guest on their show.

Pros of podcasts:

 

    • Accesses new audiences

    • Showcases your expertise

    • Shows the person behind the business

Cons of podcasts:

 

    • Requires time and planning

    • Can be expensive to host your own

    • Accessibility for some audiences may be an issue

Remember: finding the right marketing channels for your coaching business isn’t about choosing one and sticking with it. Many business coaches use a mix to achieve the best results.

4. Play to Your Strengths

It’s clear you have many valuable things to offer your clients. That’s why you’re in business and that’s why your clients keep working with you.

But what’s something unique you can bring to the table to make your marketing and your brand stand out? Are you a great public speaker who should be on the stage at conferences? Are you a proficient writer who is well suited to blogging? Are you passionate about podcasts and want to try your hand at hosting one?

Whatever your skills and passions are, use them to your advantage. After all, you can outsource other aspects of your marketing efforts to professionals or use powerful sales and marketing platforms.

Let’s look at an example: public speaking.

If you’re a natural born speaker, public speaking can be a great way to get more attention for your business coaching practice.

In today’s digital world, public speaking doesn’t necessarily mean in-person conferences (though this is a great way to get brand awareness). Public speaking today can also mean live events on Instagram or LinkedIn, YouTube videos, podcasts, or online AMAs (ask-me-anything).

Through public speaking, you can carefully curate a narrative around your niche and share useful information. Whatever aspect you focus on with your clients, that’s what you should showcase in your public speaking efforts.

After you’ve spoken at an event, you can reuse clips, soundbites, pull quotes, or scripts to create additional social media content, blogs, email newsletters, eBooks, and so on.

5. Automate Your Marketing Efforts

One of the most challenging aspects of marketing – particularly in a digital world that requires constant engagement – is delivering your marketing efforts in a consistent manner.

However, there are ways to tackle this challenge, the main one being automation.

Every smart marketer relies on tools to speed up the process and get better results. Some are free and some are paid services, but finding the right ones allow you to deliver your marketing content consistently and effectively.

Here are some top digital marketing tools to consider:

Value Builder

For business coaches, Value Builder is a game changer. Designed to help find, win, and keep more clients, Value Builder combines all the sales and marketing tools you need into one platform.

Powerful yet easy-to-use, it helps generate leads by equipping you with over 500+ ready-made eBooks, articles, webinars, email templates, and more. It automates your email marketing and tracks users’ interactions with your content. And you get out-of-the-box coaching tools, complete with 50+ videos, exercises, and tutorials.

Canva

Designing your own marketing materials can be challenging, so finding a tool to help is invaluable.

Canva is one of those tools. Canva allows novices to create graphics, videos, and images for their marketing needs, easily and with a shallow learning curve. Canva also offers stock images, many of which are included for free in the paid subscription.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a social media management platform that allows coaches to create and schedule posts across different social media platforms. It also offers social media metrics so you can assess performance and make adjustments.

Hootsuite features an easy-to-use dashboard and it can be used to automate posting on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, and TikTok. 

Google Analytics

Although this isn’t an automation tool, it’s still an important platform because it can help monitor the success of your marketing efforts.

Google Analytics is a free tool offered by Google that shows your website’s analytics and visitor behaviours. As one of the most widely used analytics tools online, the learning curve isn’t too steep, making it accessible for business coaches.
Market Your Business the Smart Way

Want to put your marketing on autopilot – and find, keep and win more clients for your coaching business?
Check out Value Builder today, and take advantage of its marketing tools for business coaches.

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