Once you’ve mastered the skills of profession 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 though 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.
For example, 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.