Marketing for coaches: How to inspire others and still stay true to yourself

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Marketing for coaches: How to inspire others and still stay true to yourself

With your training you have taken the first step. Now you want to help other people to follow their path to self-realization. Your challenge: In order to assert yourself on the ever-growing coaching market, a clever marketing strategy is indispensable. We reveal how successful marketing can work for trainers and coaches.

Why effective marketing is so important in the coaching business

You, too, have probably chosen to become a coach to help others improve their Discover potential and to get the most out of their lives with the help of their skills. As good coach you know that in counselling the focus is not on you, but on your coachee. 

Exactly the opposite, however, is what is required when it comes to to present yourself as a specialist in your market. You may have had the best training and have a proven technical aptitude for a coaching job, but you will only succeed if you are target-oriented marketing. Don't worry: Even far away from hope marketing or manipulative sales strategies there are proven ways and means, to market profitably as a coach.

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Marketing process in coaching business: 5 steps for your success

There is disagreement among experts about what elements of the marketing process in detail. What all approaches have in common is that they are assigned to different phases, with the division into five steps being the most common. 

Step 1: Analysis

The first phase is elementary for the success of the process, as it lays the foundation. The analysis is about you as a coach taking stock and critically evaluating yourself and your coaching offer. What are your strengths and weaknesses? You compare the information you have gathered in the course of this analysis with possible competitors, i.e. the services offered by other coaches. Based on this, you formulate your business goals.

Step 2: Goals 

From your business goals, you now derive possible marketing goals. This can be the number of customers or your targeted sales.

Step 3: Strategy & Measures

Ambitious goals are of no use if you don't know how to achieve them. Therefore, you now develop possible measures for your marketing as a coach based on your goals.

Step 4: Implementation

Now it's time to get down to business, because in the fourth phase you put your strategy into action with the selected measures!

Step 5: Control

Even in the implementation phase, you always keep an eye on how successful your measures are. The goal is to measure your successes and also identify wasted potential that you can then optimize. While some success factors, for example the number of new customers or your revenues, are measurable, others are not directly apparent. The good news is that today there are numerous tools that help you measure and evaluate the success of your online activities.

For you as a coach the Phases of analysis and development of concrete measures most interesting. For this reason, we will go into more detail about these steps in the marketing process for coaches below.

coaching marketing

Most important step in marketing for the coaching business: Find your personal branding 

The challenge for you as a coach is that you yourself are the product that needs to be marketed. So your job is to, your own Positioningto find your personal branding and to become aware of it, in which niche you want to be active. Because: If you are looking for help from a coach, you are usually not looking for a generalist, but a Specialists for the individual problem. 

For an honest and promising positioning within the coaching market you should deal intensively with the following two questions in your analysis process: 

Which target group do you want to coach? How do you imagine your ideal coachees? 

Maybe you have already counseled coachees and in one target group you have particularly many experiences or you bring in private interests understanding of a specific target group. The important thing is that you empathize with the challenges of your coachees and thus consult at eye level can. For example, not every coach feels up to advising high-ranking members of society, and not every coach can identify with young women who want to develop their potential in the balancing act between family and professional life.

What topics do you want to focus on with your coachees?

Even if coaches learn the same methods and acquire the same expertise in their training, each coach has favourite methods or may be particularly enthusiastic about some problems.

"For potential coachees, the market is very confusing. Since they look at the coaches' homepages for comparison, you should formulate here to the point who you want to advise and what your coaching is about."

coach business

Increase visibility: suitable marketing measures for coaches

You have your staff Branding and your website is already up and running? Now you need to as much visibility as possible get and more widely known as a coach ideally both in professional circles and with your coachees of the future. You can underpin your status as an expert in your field with the following measures:

  • Presence in social media
  • Publication of technical articles in (online) magazines and blogs
  • Contribution to relevant podcasts
  • Participation and in particular presentations at conferences
  • Offer webinars
  • Sending newsletters

You should be clear about one thing: Success does not come by itselfrather, it is a long and especially time-consuming wayto hold your own in the coaching market. If you start from scratch, every new request and especially newly acquired coachees are a success. 

As soon as you have your first coachees Satisfaction advised, the Referral Marketing become an important instrument of your new customer acquisition. Besides word of mouth, it also includes references and reviews.

Paid visibility: advertisements as a suitable tool for coaches

Less time-consuming, but for a fee, is another marketing tool for coaches: Advertisements, so-called ads, on Google or in social networks. For you, especially the latter area should be interesting, especially since you can acquire the necessary skills on your own or even better in a course. Provided you have your Target group selected appropriately and the displays designed to be appealing in terms of content and appearance paid advertisements bring you the following advantages:

  • Increase in Notoriety and construction of Trust in relevant target groups 
  • extraction of new coachees
  • construction of Partnerships/Networks
coach online marketing

Social media: central to online marketing for coaches

In addition to a website, social media should also be part of your online presence. They offer you not only an image surface for the Presentation of your mission as a coachbut also give you the Possibility to get in touch directly with (potential) coachees

Registration in the networks is free, so you "only" have to invest time here. Depending on the platform, you provide different content to which other users can react. The simplified rule of thumb is: The higher the quality of the content you provide and the more users react to it, the better known you become. Suitable social media for coaches are especially the following:

Facebook 

The network has worldwide most active users - and that at all ages. On the platform you can Videos and pictures upload or other exciting sources like Blog articles or articles from trade magazines Link. Facebook is ideal for connecting with your community and providing insights into your coaching practice. The switching paid advertisements is particularly promising here, since you can address exactly the target groups that could use your services due to the diverse user structure.

Instagram 

With pictures, videos and short text contributions you can inspire users, make them curious about your coaching with little glimpses behind the scenes and communicate your beliefs and coaching content. A special Business Profile gives you the opportunity to enter your contact details. You reach here mainly a younger audience.

YouTube

Many coaches use YouTube to present themselves and the core content of their coaching there. In their Online presentations they mainly give younger viewers concrete tips for dealing with daily challenges. 

XING and LinkedIn 

They are the networks of choice when it comes to the Establishing and maintaining business contacts goes. In your profile, you convince with the presentation of your career path with your expertise, furthermore you can Publish professional articles and in industry specific groups get in touch with your target group. The networks are particularly suitable for coaches who are hired by companies to advise their employees.

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Online Marketing for Trainers & Coaches: Your Bonus Course at Greator

You chose Training as Greator Coach and want to accept any support that will help you move forward? Want to learn all about how to market yourself successfully? 

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Develop yourself further and unfold your full potential!

At Greator Bonus Course "Online Marketing for Coaches you learn to assess your skills and position yourself in the market. In the online course you will internalize the the most important basic terms of marketing and get a Step-by-step guide how you're going to your own marketing process and build it up.

Since a good website is the basis for a successful activity in the coaching business today, we teach you the required know-how, in order to create a appealing and high-quality landing page to create. You will also learn how you can market yourself as a coach on Facebook - namely with Advertisementsthat appeal exactly to the target group you want to reach!

You will also learn how to convince your potential coachees of tomorrow to book you as a coach during the first contact on the phone. Because: While the homepage only functions as a business card, it is ultimately your personality and your skills as a coachthat stand for your quality.

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Reviewed by Dr. med. Stefan Frädrich

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