Market Your Way to Success: Personal Development Coach Marketing

Rahul Mehta

on Apr 18, 2024

• 9 min read

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With about 145,500 coaches as of 2024, working as a personal development coach is a more fulfilling future than ever. However, the market is increasingly crowded and competitive. For example, in 2023, only 126,050 coaches were active, so about 20,000 people joined the field in a year.

As a personal development coach, you’re here to help people become the best versions of themselves. However, you can’t assist them with reaching their goals at the scale you desire until you expedite your marketing efforts.

This guide will explore why that's necessary and how to do it.

Why Personal Development Coach Need Digital Marketing

You’ve poured a lot of figurative blood, sweat, and tears into creating your personal development coaching business. Set it up for success by using digital marketing for coaches.

Here are the advantages your business can reap.

Improve Brand Awareness and Strength

Your personal development coaching business is unique because of your traits and attributes. They’re one part that comprises your brand, or the personal stamp you put on your business.

Right now, your brand is known to your client base, but if that base is small, you need better brand awareness. Going full throttle on your marketing will put you in a better position to spread your brand.

Once your target market becomes aware of your brand, you can also rely on marketing efforts to strengthen that recognition.

Develop a Bigger Network

Coaching is all about networking. You never know who can refer you to a potential client. However, when you’re trying to run a business, who has time to go to all those industry events, handing out business cards and rubbing elbows? Certainly not you!

Marketing for coaching businesses will help you build your network without leaving your house (or wherever you get your best work done). You should still attend those in-person networking events when you can, but you can rest assured that in the meantime, your community continues to thrive.

Establish Yourself as an Authoritative Source and Industry Leader

Why should clients choose your coaching services over the tens of thousands of others out there? This is where having expertise really helps you shine.

Content marketing especially will help you establish yourself as a leader in the personal development coaching industry. As you publish blog content, whitepapers, videos, and webinars, people will look to you as a thought leader and authority.

When clients seek the best personal development coach, you’ll come to mind right away.

Better Connect with Your Target Market

Identifying your target market is one thing; connecting with them is another. Marketing a coaching business helps you find your target market and reach out to them, whether via a social media ad, an email ad, or even a PPC ad.

Reap More Conversions and Sales

The last advantage of digital marketing for coaches is arguably the best: more success for your business! As a personal development coach, you’ll happily watch as more clients come through the figurative door, converting more readily and increasing your bottom line.

7 Coaching Marketing Strategies for Personal Development Coaches

You’re ready to begin, but you’re unsure how to market your coaching business. This guide will gear you up for success, as it’s chock full of tips and advice.

If your website doesn’t already have a blog, your next order of business is to create one.

A blog is an excellent opportunity to showcase your expertise, get eyes on your website (and social media if you cross-post your content), build traffic (and repeat visitors), and showcase value.

What better way to prove to prospective clients that you can get the job done as a personal development coach than with a blog filled to the brim with helpful advice?

Before you begin writing, you need to do keyword research to identify which search terms your target audience looks up. Keywords have varying levels of difficulty, which denotes how popular they are.

Higher-difficulty keywords are used more regularly. The market for those terms might be oversaturated, making it harder for your blog to break through. You can feel like a drop in an ocean of noise.

However, low-difficulty keywords have so little traffic they’re rarely worth pursuing. Seek keywords with a difficulty somewhere in the middle.

Next, you must determine your posting frequency. At the very least, you should plan to publish blog content at least weekly. As your brand expands, you might find it appropriate to post several times a week.

When writing content, whether you do it yourself or outsource it to freelancers, ensure the copy achieves your brand tone.

Build a Social Media Following and Engage

With over five billion global social media users, platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and TikTok remain popular ways for businesses of all sizes to improve their marketing quotient. That includes your competition.

Your coaching marketing will benefit from building a presence on social media. Here are examples of how to do that and engage with your audience once you have it. These ideas are catered to each platform.

Facebook: Create a Facebook Business Page and double-check its accuracy. Encourage clients and former clients to leave reviews (Facebook displays reviews on a five-star scale on Business Pages). Repost your blog content, upload images and videos of a day in your life, and go live on occasion, answering questions.
LinkedIn: Share your highest-ranking blog content on your LinkedIn. Consider writing new content solely for the platform. Join personal development coach groups or start your own.
Twitter: Link to your blog content and other website news. Upload images, such as inspirational quotes. Comment, like, and share client content, especially user-generated content.
YouTube: You Can create a YouTube channel with your brand name and then post long-form videos and shorts. Use your blog posts to inspire video content, then go back and update the post by inserting the video after it goes live. Go live and answer questions as part of a Q&A.
TikTok: Share engaging and interesting moments of life in your work as a personal development coach. Weigh in on ongoing trends related to your niche.
Instagram: Upload short-form videos (it’s okay if they’re from other social platforms) and images, including inspirational quotes.

Coaching marketing should also include paid advertising, especially on social media. You’ve done the hard work to build a following, so reap the rewards by advertising to them and related audiences to convert more clients.

Each social media platform has paid advertising, so which should you gravitate toward? In the early days of your digital marketing, you might only be able to afford one or two, which is fine.

Begin with the platforms that have the largest share of your target market. Contest testing can help you discern which platform to focus on. You should also let your budget be your guide.

Social media advertising is advantageous in that you can select from many ad styles, many of which are native. That means they blend right into the content you see on your feed.

Here’s an overview of the ads you can choose for each social media platform.

Facebook: Collection ads, Instant Experience full-screen experiences, Carousel ads with 10 videos or images, video ads, and image ads.
Instagram: Reel ads, shopping ads, Explore ads (on the Explore Page), collection ads, carousel ads, video ads, Story ads, and image ads.
LinkedIn: Dynamic and text ads, lead gen forms, sponsored messaging, sponsored content, carousel ads, video ads, single image ads, event ads, thought leader ads, and document ads.
Twitter: Promoted trends, brand reminders, branded emojis, promoted polls, promoted accounts, promoted images, promoted text, promoted live videos, in-stream video sponsorship, in-stream video ads, and promoted video ads.
YouTube: Masthead ads, out-stream ads, bumper ads (six-second clips that play during or after a video), in-feed video ads, non-skippable in-stream ads, and skippable in-stream ads.
TikTok: Spark ads, branded hashtag challenges, branded effects, brand takeover ads, TopView ads (which appear first thing when you open your feed), and in-feed ads.

4. Start an Email Marketing Campaign

With an estimated 361 billion emails slated to go out in 2024, there is never a better time than now for a personal development coach to use email marketing. You can rely on email to engage with and nurture your leads through the sales funnel until an eventual conversion.

How to market your coaching business through email? Well, first you need an email list. You may already have one, in which case, you can always afford to expand. If you don’t yet have email subscribers, it’s time to revise your approach.

Launch opt-in forms with lead magnets utilizing the blog content you created. Host a contest or giveaway to drive traffic to your site, then watch as your subscriber count begins gradually ticking up.

Once you have subscribers, you can begin sending email marketing materials. Consider a monthly or quarterly newsletter to inform your clients and potential clients of your services and availability.

Showcase reviews (with the client’s permission) and include personal stories and anecdotes from time to time. Take your audience behind the scenes on why you’re an excellent coach.

The question of how frequently to send emails is always paramount. You should plan for at least two weekly emails, maybe up to three.

Anything less than two makes you easily forgettable considering how many emails the average person gets per day (it’s 121, in case you were curious), but more than three can be considered too much for most audiences.

5. Work with Influencers

Partnering with influential parties is always a good way to market yourself as a personal development coach. Best of all, this method is usually free or low-cost.

The first matter is finding an influencer to team up with. Look for those who embody the values of your coaching brand.

Alternatively, you can choose one of your favorite clients to be your brand ambassador.

The goal of working with an influencer or brand ambassador is to improve your rate of user-generated content or UGC.

Consumers always trust other consumers more than businesses, and UGC is one of the ultimate forms of social proof. It’s also a free promotion.

Another benefit of partnering with an influencer is being introduced to a brand-new audience. Likewise, they get that perk from your clients.

6. Start a Podcast

Another great way to share your pearls of coaching wisdom is by creating a podcast. More than 504 million people listen to podcasts, which goes to show how monumentally popular they are. That’s part of why the industry is valued at $23.56 billion.

Creating a personal development coach podcast is your opportunity to showcase your unique brand voice, establish yourself as an industry authority, and attract new listeners.

You can interview major names in your niche, which is sure to boost listenership. Post your podcast episodes on your website and social media to draw more traffic. You can even use

7. Use Testimonials

Digital marketing for coaches would be incomplete without discussing the value of testimonials.

A testimonial is a glowing advocation for your personal development coaching services in either text or video form. Although you can ask your clients to review you, they’re free to express their own thoughts and opinions.

If you receive enough glowing reviews, people will pay attention. After all, nearly 100 percent of consumers will read reviews, and nearly 50 percent of people trust reviews on the same level as a recommendation from a family member or friend.

Reviews and testimonials have major power, so earning a few will springboard your marketing efforts.

Measuring the Success of Digital Marketing for Coaches

How is your personal development coach marketing campaign progressing? These key performance indicators will let you know.

Average engagement rate (which determines how many people saved, shared, commented, and liked your content relative to your followers)
Follower count on each social media platform
Email open rates
Email click-through rates
New subscribers
Unsubscribers
CPM, which is short for cost per mille and determines what you spend on advertising for 1,000 impressions
Cost per acquisition, which determines what you spend to convert a lead
Return on advertising spend
Backlinks, which indicate whether your influencer partnerships have flourished
Organic website sessions
Paid website sessions
Keyword rankings
Return on marketing investment, calculated by subtracting your gross profit from your marketing costs, dividing that by your marketing costs, and multiplying by 100
Customer lifetime value
Conversion rate
Cost per lead

How FreshLearn Helps You Achieve Your Personal Development Coaching Goals

FreshLearn is designed to assist personal development coaches to facilitate their digital marketing goals. You can sell digital downloads, newsletters, your knowledge and expertise, live workshops, and online courses to your audience using this all-in-one platform.

Coaches like life strategist Vanessa Henderson, health coach Nipa Asharam, confidence and mindset coach Rachel Lounds, master certified coach Dr. Cherie Carter-Scott, MCC, and more have used FreshLearn to elevate their respective careers.

FreshLearn makes it easy to customize digital products, build an accompanying sales page, create a community, and use campaigns and newsletters for marketing your coaching business.

Wrapping Up

Personal development coaches need digital marketing techniques for differentiation against the competition, branding, exposure to new audiences, and to elevate conversions and sales.

With so many marketing tactics at your fingertips and excellent tools like FreshLearn to help you achieve them, you’re ready to take your coaching business to the next level.

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