Marketing for Coaches: Succeed with These Strats

Rahul Mehta

on May 29, 2024

• 10 min read

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Whether you coach sports or assist people with their business, fitness goals, or love lives, you adore helping people. You have a track record of stellar results, yet the clients haven’t come streaming in like you were hoping. You would have figured they’d be banging down your door by now.

Marketing for coaches is what sets apart the highest-visibility coaching experts from those still struggling to build a client roster. That’s why today, we’ve boiled down the best strategies if you’re still wondering how to market your coaching business.

15 Efficient Coaching Marketing Strategies to Blast Off Your Business

Marketing for coaching businesses doesn’t have to cost a small fortune. You can propel your goals forward with free and freemium tactics, as seen below. Of course, if you have the budget, you also have plenty of paid options to explore.

1. Establish Yourself as an Expert

No matter your coaching specialty, I’m sure you’re part of a crowded market. With so many experts available, why should a potential client choose you over the competition?

You need the chops to win clients. If you have credentials like certifications or awards, list them. If you’ve worked with a high-profile client, don’t be shy about it. Building trust in your services will take your digital marketing campaign further.

2. Build Your Tribe

This is another strategy that may seem unrelated to your goals but is anything but. Your community doesn’t have to include potential clients exclusively. Get to know other coaches or industry professionals.

Once you’ve established a community, it can pay back dividends when marketing for coaching businesses.

How so? Well, for starters, you can let word of mouth naturally flow as your community's online presence mounts. You can sell products and services within your network or start an affiliate program.

You can also rely on the community to provide referrals, which are worth their weight in gold. B2B vendors report that referrals are their top marketing strategy.

People trust referrals more because they’re not coming from a sales perspective like you are. They’re from real users who have tried your coaching and benefited from it.

If you decide to use your community to start a referral program, you must build in a rewards system that incentivizes users to keep participating.

3. Post on YouTube

Marketing for coaches requires using social media, with YouTube as one of the top platforms for furthering your goals.

Up to 933.39 million people are projected to use YouTube in 2024, which would mean a growth rate of 7.5 percent between 2023 and 2024.

You won’t have to ask how to market your coaching business when you can begin building a YouTube presence with these pointers.

Cement your brand: Before writing your YouTube bio or uploading your first video, you must have a firm understanding of what your coaching business brand is. What is your logo? What are your colors? What are your values? What is your tone? Once you know these answers, you can brand your YouTube channel.
Insert keywords: YouTube allows you to tag your videos in the title and description. Using targeted yet popular keywords will help other users besides your subscribers see your content. Always ensure there’s relevance between your keywords and video content.
Write good descriptions: A YouTube description doesn’t merely have to explain what the video is about. You can add supplementary information about your topic, linking to other videos on your page. You can also link to your website, online storefront, and social media.
Share your videos: Today, it’s easier than ever to embed YouTube videos anywhere and everywhere, from comments online to blog posts, webpages, and your social media accounts.
Ask for shares and subscriptions: It’s not fun to ask, but most YouTubers are used to the spiel. If you don’t request your viewers subscribe and share, they probably won’t.

4. Do Guest Blogging

Any sort of guest partnership is a wise move for your coaching business, be it a guest blog or even a guest podcast appearance (provided you have a podcast).

Mutual participation of this nature is beneficial for both parties, as you get chances to be introduced to new audiences. Granted, you won’t convert 100 percent of the other audience, but if you get even 25 percent, it was worthwhile.

Besides, guest blogging costs you $0, just time and energy. When selecting a potential partner, consider their audience and how well they match your target audience. If there’s alignment, the other party might be more willing to work together.

5. Build an Online Course

You have a wealth of knowledge, so share it! Coaching marketing benefits heavily from online courses, especially after you’ve taken the time to establish yourself as an expert in your field.

Your course topic can be about anything under the sun related to your niche. Before selecting a topic, research courses in your industry and see what your competitors have talked about. Veer toward untouched topics or bring a unique approach to a concept that’s well understood within your market.

Promote your course on social media, in your email newsletter, and on your website. If your course is profitable and well-liked, you can consider making more courses to market your coaching business.

Create online Course

6. Host a Webinar

In a similar vein to an online course, it is creating a webinar with your name on it.

Promoting your webinar will drive up attendance, but keep in mind that just because people mark down that they’ll be there doesn’t mean they will be. The average attendance rate is between 20 and 30 percent, especially if you’re new to webinars.

However, webinars can pay off big. You can charge for initial entry, then for any repeated airings and transcripts produced for the webinar. You can also use webinar chapters or segments as lead magnets and opt-in forms.

Platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook truly put the “social” in social media. You can find free groups across both social platforms. While a moderator might have to approve you, that’s the only barrier between you and a group of other like-minded people who you can add to your network.

The goal isn’t to get in on a group and be sales, pitching your coaching service to anyone and everyone. Instead, you want to build a sense of community, being helpful along the way. Answer questions, provide advice, and share anecdotes.

Along the way, you should find people in need of your coaching services, either directly through the group or through referrals from other members.

8. Attend Events

On that note, as popular and easy as online networking has become, it doesn’t negate the need to get out there, shake hands, and exchange business cards.

Look for events about your coaching specialty and make your presence known. Attend keynote speeches and try to talk to the speaker afterward if possible. Pick people’s brains. Share your own advice.

Again, the goal isn’t to be sales but to elevate your coaching marketing goals.

9. Use Paid Advertising

If these low-cost strategies haven’t helped when marketing your coaching business, it’s time to pull out the big guns and turn to paid advertising.

Here is a rundown of the types of paid ads you can explore:

Social media ads: A social media ad appears as native content on feeds from Facebook to YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, you name it. You can target your ad viewers by demographics, psychographics, and geographics. However, each platform charges to run ads, so select the one with your largest target market.
Retargeting ads: People change their minds all the time. Perhaps they were going to buy your online course but didn’t. A retargeting or remarketing ad is your second chance to convert this lead.
Local service ads: Local service ads are designed for a smaller but more concentrated market in your area that can take advantage of your coaching services.
Display ads: We’re all familiar with display ads, banners that appear on the sidebar of websites (but also the tops or bottoms) to advertise a service or product. You can target those who see your display ads based on their location, age range, or interests.
Native ads: As the name implies, native ads blend right into the platform they appear on, be it an email, webpage, or social media site. They may include sponsored content, recommended content, or promoted content.
Video ads: Video advertisements appear primarily on YouTube but can also be displayed or native ads. They’re short commercials promoting your services that can appear before, in the middle of, or after a video. However, people with ad blockers can skip these videos when on their computers or mobile devices.
Billboard ads: Depending on your coaching service, you might consider renting a billboard in your city or town to promote yourself. Just be aware that billboards can be expensive, and you can’t track who saw it, making its success hard to quantify.
Media ads: These advertisements run the gamut from local television commercials to radio spots, newspaper ads, and whole-page ads in a glossy magazine. Again, these forms of advertising can be expensive, and some are harder to track.
Search ads: Lastly, consider search ads. When you search for anything online and see sponsored results at the top, those are search ads in action. They’re an excellent way to drive more clicks to your website.

10. Work with an Influencer

If the idea of partnering with an industry expert sat well with you, you should explore working with an influencer. You can reap many of the same benefits, including exposure to new audiences without having to pay (usually).

Here are some caveats to keep in mind if you pursue an influencer relationship. First, you should select an influencer based on their alignment with your brand and values. For example, if you offer fitness coaching, a nutritionist or dietary expert would be great to partner with.

Second, you have to be ready to give the influencer something of value. This doesn’t always mean a one-to-one swap like with a guest blogging or podcasting arrangement. It could be that they want free coaching services or other perks.

If they live up to their end of the deal, you should do the same with yours.

11. Use Email Marketing

One of the best and most reliable ways to use digital marketing for coaches is through email marketing. More than 360 billion emails go out daily, and 60 percent of consumers find email is an agreeable medium for being contacted by a company.

The challenge lies in building an email list, especially if starting from scratch. Here are some strategies to utilize:

Begin with the networking contacts you already have, asking if you can add them to your list.
Host a giveaway or contest that requires a collection of email addresses to enter.
Use opt-in forms and landing pages on your website, sharing valuable content.
Ask your audience to subscribe to your email list if they haven’t already.
Incorporate a button on your social media accounts that lets people sign up to your email list without leaving the platform.

Once you have email subscribers, send out a newsletter, be it monthly or quarterly, about insights, trends, and news in your industry. Offer exclusive discount codes and VIP deals through email to incentivize more people to join your list.

12. Offer Free Coaching Calls

If you’re good at something, you’re never supposed to do it for free, so why this tip for furthering your coaching marketing campaign?

Sometimes, giving people a taste of what they could have if they paid full price is all it takes to command their attention. That’s the crux of lead magnets, a brief preview or sampler of what’s to come.

One free coaching call per potential client is all you should offer. During that call, provide the usual insights and advice you would when working with any paid client.

Once people see what you’re made of, so to speak, and how you can change their lives with your services, they should be eager for a continued working relationship, in which you’d charge them for future services.

13. Update Old Blog Posts

If you’ve had a blog for a while, it’s worth going back and looking at it, reassessing whether the content could use an overhaul.

There’s a general rule of thumb that you should update one old post for every four fresh ones, which ensures most of the content on your website is new (or newer, at least).

So, which posts do you start with? Review which blogs bring in the most traffic, and plan to refine those.

If you notice information is out of date, replace it. If the post is a little short, lengthen it (but don’t write fluff; add valuable information). If you have new insights since the original publication date, share them.

14. Keep Publishing New Content

You can’t stop publishing new content while you pay attention to your old blog library. Post at least weekly to build momentum, with some brands posting twice a week and others up to four.

The bigger you are, the more you’re expected to post, as you’ll have more resources to make it happen.

That said, this is certainly a battle of quality over quantity. If you rush out three low-value posts a week, your audience won’t care how often you post. They’ll just care that the information isn’t very good.

15. Optimize Your Website

I saved one of the biggest tips for last. Marketing for coaches must include search engine optimization on your website.

SEO determines how your site will rank, so it’s a critical element to ace. The better your rank when people search for keywords related to your coaching business, the greater the chances of organic traffic, which means more leads.

So, how do you optimize your website for SEO? Here is a list to help you begin:

Build quality backlinks, which are external links to other websites.
Improve your website loading speed to two to eight seconds.
Optimize your web design for mobile users.
Do keyword research, then incorporate the relevant terms into your blog copy and on-page SEO.
Request an SEO audit and make the required changes.

Wrapping Up

Marketing for coaches carves out your path to success. It’s how you find your way forward, attracting new leads and customers along the way. Through a combination of content marketing, SEO, social media marketing, influencer marketing, and email marketing, you can grow your coaching business on your terms.

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