Mar 30, 20225 min read

Marketing for Coaches: Your Guide to Getting Seen and Hired

Updated: Oct 7, 2022

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Investing in the right coach marketing strategy in the beginning will save your practice time, money, and your sanity. With so many marketing options available, it can be difficult to decide where to spend your time and money. In this article, we are going to discuss our top marketing recommendations when it comes to building a strategy to get new clients to find you and hire you. Without further ado, let's dive in to the top marketing for coaches.

Your Brand Strategy

Before you even start building out marketing strategies, you need to have a strategy for your brand. I'd recommend starting by answering these questions:

What type of client do you serve? Be specific
Which industry do you serve? You may not want to hear this, but it's easier to build a strategy when you focus on one specific niche of industry
What do you have to offer this niche?

To demonstrate the above, let's fill these out with my main niche:

Men and women over 35 years old in the United States, not too tech savvy
Mental Health
Mental Health Marketing Services

To further show that I practice what I preach, here is my main brand that brings in most of my company's revenue, a mental health marketing company called TherapistX.

You should strongly consider focusing on one main niche, or create several brands to target different niches. Speaking from experience, you'll find that narrowing down will open up more doors than helping "everyone".

If you target everyone, you target no one.

Your Website

After you figure out your brand strategy, your website strategy is crucial for success. If you know your niche and what you can offer your niche, creating a brand that reflects that you specialize in that niche is super crucial. Here are some aspects you should spend time to implement:

Create a page for each service on your site.
Make sure you set up a blog
Make sure your site reflects you as the expert with your niche
Use case studies as much as you can, which help you sell your coaching services to prospective clients.
Make it easy for your prospective clients to contact you: Have a form, telephone number, and maybe even a live chat function.

Let's explore some real ideas to get in front of your target niche:

Creating to Get In Front of Your Target Niche

This topic goes hand in hand with your coaching website above. You should be thinking about ideas such as:

"What does my niche care about?"
"What types of questions are they asking?"
"What types of resources are they looking for?"
"Where are they searching?"

While each niche is different, here are some ideas for my mental health niche:

My niche cares about streamlining their practice, so mental health templates are an awesome way to get in front of my target audience. In fact, I used to give these away for free on my marketing site for mental health pros in exchange for their lead information
When it comes to searching for questions people in your niche are asking, there are plenty of resources, such as: Answer the Public, Reddit, Google suggestions (at the bottom or top of search results), and other SEO tools.
In the case of mental health professionals, mental health templates were one way for me to get leads. I also created whitepapers such as "marketing strategies for psychologists" and any more similar to this. I even went as far as creating an entirely new brand for a mental health directory to capture more of my target niche's lead information.
Finally, where are your target customers in your niche searching? If you serve the entire U.S. like my company does, you need a strategy to get in front of them. One great way to do this is what I call the "city strategy." I build a page for each major city in the United States targeting a key service + location + my niche. So for example, Psychologist Marketing Company in Charlotte, NC, which you can see how I did it by clicking on the link ^.

Do you have some ideas now for your strategy? Don't forget blogging, it can play a major role in bringing the right people to your site. Blogs are a great way to answer questions or topics your target niche cares about beyond the above coach marketing ideas.

Creating Lead Collection Strategies

This section will piggy-back off the previous section. Once you have a brand and website set up, you then need to think about how to collect leads. Here are some ideas:

Create gated informational pieces, like whitepapers, worksheets, or other important information your audience cares about
Create templates that are gated
Offer giveaways, like a free hour of consulting to qualified prospective clients
Create a directory (while this is a much larger strategy, it's a great way to get in front of hundreds of prospective clients in your niche).

Creating A List of Prospects

After you have an oiled lead generating machine built via your brand, website, and lead collection strategies, you need to start collecting all those leads and putting them into a spreadsheet or CRM. Once you start doing this, think about ways to engage with these people.

A great way to engage with prospective clients is to create an email strategy. You can start by simply doing a newsletter that offers things to your prospective clients that they care about. That's an important piece of an email strategy, "THINGS THAT YOUR PROSPECTIVE CLIENTS CARE ABOUT." I've seen many companies blast out all kinds of information that won't be helpful for their clients such as: New hires, company internal news, company revenue information, and many more things that won't necessarily move the needle and may even get you new unsubscribes.

You can also use that list to create remarketing campaigns, meaning, you can advertise in a very targeted way to those prospects who have accomplished something that you want them to accomplish without yet being a new customer.

Tracking Everything

When you start to execute your coach marketing strategies, it's important to know where leads came from, how much they cost, and many more important coaching KPIs to ensure that you're running in the right direction. Jack's company, Pineapple Consulting, are masters at creating business coaching dashboards to help you create beautiful custom dashboards to track anything and everything your coaching business needs to track. I highly recommend reaching out to him.

Final Thoughts on Marketing For Coaches

I hope that this article was helpful for you in thinking about how to build a marketing strategy for your coaching practice. Nothing in marketing is "easy." It takes a lot of hard work and time to truly build a business building strategy, but it can be done. With a proper investment of time, resources, and effort, your coaching practice will be booming in no time!

Anthony Bart is President of BartX, TherapistX, and TherapyByPro, internet marketing companies that help mental health professionals and other service-based businesses grow their practices.