Chapter 1: Creating a Solid Coaching Marketing Foundation

• You got into coaching for all of the right reasons.

• You trained and studied from the best coaching mentors out there.

• You made the commitment, cut your teeth and made the leap into coaching as a career.

And, if you’re like most of us, you quickly found that the world did not form an orderly line to your doorstep the moment you hung a coaching sign on your door.

All of coaching skills and passion in the world won’t add up to squat if no one know you exist. This is where the rubber meets the road.

As a coach, you’re learning already the same lesson as others in the professional services sector such as accountants and dentists have to deal with: In addition to being a great coach, you absolutely have to become great at coaching marketing in order to become successful.

The chances are that you were led into the coaching job market by an instinctive impulse toward helping others, probably others who are facing a very particular type of challenge.

Because of this, marketing your coaching services should feel like less of a chore than unfortunate individuals who have fell into a line of work that they are not passionate about. Instead of struggling to motivate yourself to market a bland service, your natural passion for coaching can serve as the push you need to share why you do what you do with the world.

Once you’ve mastered the skills of professional coaching and have started helping clients improve their lives, you’ll soon find that the majority of your new business is going to come through referrals. Although generating referrals through your existing base of coaching clients is arguably the best place to start, the most successful coaching practices generate a large portion of their referrals through strategic partners that they have found in their niche.

When it comes to coaching marketing, it’s crucial that you establish yourself as a thought leader in your coaching niche. Whether you do this on a local, regional or national scale is up to you, but the key to becoming a respected voice for your niche is to network beyond your coaching clients with other professionals who have established themselves in relevant fields. Through interacting with these individuals at conferences, social gatherings and online, you can create meaningful professional relationships that are mutual beneficial to your business and theirs.

Let’s say that you are a life coach who has chosen to focus on a promising coaching niche like lifestyle design. This means your target market are potential clients who are looking for a healthy, balanced life and are probably more motivated by personal aspirations than professional goals. By creating strategic partnerships with other professionals that serve this market like fitness coaches, nutritionists, yoga instructors and the like, you’ll be in a position to reach a much larger swath of your target coaching market.

This same basic principle can be applied to any other coaching niche as well. Executive coaches might network with motivational speakers and management consultants, while career coaches could create strategic partnerships for coaching referrals with resume consultants or locally owned temp agencies. Either way, the key is to get out their and expand your professional network so that your practice is the first thing people think of when they meet someone in need of your services.

Once you have a solid understanding of who you are as a coach and the niche target markets that you want to serve, it’s time to start creating an authentic brand identity that will ring true with types of clients that you want to do business with. In order to understand how to get coaching clients, you have to begin by understanding what clients are looking for when they are researching potential life and business coaches.

When it comes to coaching marketing, it’s particularly important that your brand identity is an accurate self-expression of who you are and why you do what you do. This is due to the fact that authenticity is a critical factor in separating yourself from your competitors in the coaching industry. Because the coach/client relationship is such a personal one, potential clients are in the market for professional coaches with a personality that resonates with them on a personal level, and it’s tough to relate to the public in this manner when you are not being yourself.

Creating a brand identity for your coaching business is considerably easier than most other professional services due to the very nature of coaching itself. Because authenticity is so important to coaching marketing, your ability to be honest with yourself and others plays a huge role in how well you will be able to present an honest, likable representation to the public of who you are as a professional coach.

Your brand as a professional coach should be centered around what motivates you to devote your energy to this line of work, as well as how your service helps people improve their lives. Before you begin working on traditional marketing materials, spend some meditating upon how you came to realize that you were meant to help others as a life or business coach.

• What was the number one factor that caused you to view coaching as a profession rather than a personal pursuit?

• What is it about coaching that defines you as an individual?

• How has coaching changed the way that you view the world?

The answers to questions like these should be the basic building blocks to your personal brand.

As you start to wrap your mind around your personal identity as a coach, you will come to find that coaching marketing will seem much less like a chore and more of a point of pride. After all, the services that you are marketing are nothing other than your noblest intentions and a passion to help people make their inner potential a reality.

Twitter is one of the easiest and most effective social media platforms when it comes to coaching marketing and getting more coaching clients. Here are a few practice marketing tips to get you off to a good start.

 As social media services like Facebook and Twitter continue to become a permanent fixture in a growing number of people’s lives, knowing how to promote your services as a professional life or business coach is an increasingly important part of reaching the right potential cIients for your business. If you are not promoting your coaching practice on Twitter, the chances are that you are missing out on one of the most effective methods of building your business and getting more coaching clients.

You can start putting Twitter to work for you with a minimal investment of time and energy, and the chances are that you’ll start seeing some positive results almost immediately. Here’s a few coaching marketing tips to make sure you hit through ground running with your Twitter marketing campaign.

If your primary purpose on Twitter is marketing your coaching practice, it’s important not to spread yourself too thin when you are thinking about content and reaching out potential clients. Choose a few topics that are hot with your target market and use your account to establish yourself as a thought leader for your particular coaching niche.

As with so much else with online marketing, you’ve got to give love to get love when it comes to promoting your coaching practice on Twitter. When you are sitting down to spend some time with your coaching account on Twitter, don’t forget to focus on the “social” in social media. Share interesting posts you come across with the rest of your followers and jump into the fray when you have something to add to relevant conversation. The more open you are with your followers on Twitter, the faster you will create meaningful relationships that result in getting more coaching clients.

Remember, your social network on Twitter chose to follow you because something you have to say resonated with them, not necessarily to hear you drone on endlessly about your coaching practice. As a general rule of thumb, split your posts up into about 20% promotional material and 80% killer content, and you’ll build a loyal fanbase without alienating potential clients.

LinkedIn can be a great mining ground for finding more coaching clients, especially with business coaching niches.

When it comes to online coaching marketing, many experienced life and business coaches are overlooking one of the most promising platforms for creating relationships with new potential clients: LinkedIn. In fact, a surprising number of professionals don’t get much further than creating a profile and connecting with a few existing colleagues, due largely to the fact that LinkedIn appears at first glance to be:

• Less Fun than Twitter or Facebook
• Fairly Inactive Compared to Similar Services
• Disturbingly Similar to Homework

Like so many other things in social media and practice marketing, however, all three of these perceived faults are complete misconceptions. Once you scratch the surface of LinkedIn, you’ll quickly find that the platform is packed with potential clients talking shop in various groups, as well as other coaches in your niche you may want to connect with.

The biggest mistake that users make when they are creating and managing their accounts is to treat their profile like a standard resume. Just because LinkedIn is built around giving professionals a place to connect doesn’t mean that you need to throw your street smarts out the window. Instead of presenting yourself as some sort of job applicant, use your LinkedIn profile to explain how your professional services can help improve potential clients’ lives.

When it comes to finding new coaching clients on LinkedIn, the best place to focus your energy is on LinkedIn Groups. Depending on your target coaching niche, your target market will either be located in one central group or spread across a few different spots on the service. Once you have found a couple of groups that are active with potential clients, simply jump into the fray and join the conversation. By spending 10 to 15 minutes a day creating new relationships within your target market, you’ll soon start seeing some positive conversions from users who have discovered your coaching website on LinkedIn.