There are countless ways to market your coaching business. When picking marketing techniques to grow your coaching business, there are a lot of factors to consider. Budget is often the biggest factor to consider, but coaches should also consider the results they are trying to achieve, their ideal client, and ROI. Let’s look at some of the marketing options available to coaches. We’ll compare both free and paid marketing techniques.
Free Marketing for Coaches
Free marketing options are a great way to grow your business while keeping your costs low. Any money you make from these free marketing techniques is profit because they don’t cost anything to setup or run. This is great when you first start out and want to keep costs low while you create the products you will sell or while you are conducting market research to make your paid marketing more effective.
These free marketing options are also often called organic traffic because the clients found you naturally. All businesses will use free marketing methods, regardless of their marketing strategy. Most of the organic marketing strategies are a great way to expand your reach so more people know who you are and what you do. They also help you to keep in touch with your coaching clients and market your coaching products and services to people who are already interested in what you do.
Because these organic marketing techniques are used by all businesses, they often require a lot of maintenance. For example, social media or coaching blogs need to be updated regularly to continue to drive traffic.
Examples of free marketing options for coaches include:
- Guest posting or guest appearances
- Social media
- Organic search (SEO)
- Referrals
- Forums
- Lead magnets
- Email marketing (until you move into paid subscriptions)
Paid Marketing for Coaches
Paid marketing options are often used as a supplement to free marketing options in order to accelerate the growth of your coaching business. When used correctly, it helps you to achieve your goals much faster in exchange for money. For example, SEO can take a lot of time and content to achieve results, but a Google Ad will be able to boost you to the top of search engine results almost instantly.
Paid marketing techniques allow you to pay to get in the newsfeeds of your ideal coaching clients. You can either run an ad to your coaching products or you can pay to use your content as an ad. The former option will be more likely to result in sales. The later option will be more likely to result in more followers/readers. Your approach will depend on your goals for the paid advertising.
Examples of paid marketing options for coaches include:
- Affiliate marketing
- Google Ads
- Facebook ads
- Social media ads
- Physical ads (magazine, newspaper, billboards, etc.)
- YouTube ads
- Podcast ads
When to Use Free Marketing for Your Coaching Business
Always use free marketing for your coaching business. Coaching clients expect you to have some form of web presence, so you need a social media page and ideally a website.
If you’re just starting your coaching business, you can start small. Pick one social media platform and create a one-page website. We have seen coaches build successful businesses using social media with only a homepage, Linktree, and email list to support their sales. Keeping your business model lean can help you to keep costs low until you find what works.
Once you are ready to start using paid advertising to grow your coaching business, continue to use the free marketing sources. They are a great way to establish yourself as an industry thoughtleader and warm your leads through free content.
When to Upgrade to Paid Marketing for Your Coaching Business
The first factor to consider when deciding when to upgrade to paid marketing for your coaching business is your budget. Paid marketing options cost money, so it’s important to consider your budget, your marketing goals, and the ROI of your paid advertising.
For example, if your goal for paid marketing is to get more followers and fill the top end of your sales funnel, then your ROI will be really low. Depending on how your sales funnel is set up, it may even take you months to make money from the new followers you gain through this paid marketing campaign. In other words, this requires a large budget which you won’t recoup immediately. On the other hand, if you are using paid advertising to market your coaching program, then you still need an upfront budget, but you’ll be making money from people buying your coaching program.
Another factor to consider is if the paid advertising method will get your ad in front of your ideal coaching clients. You want to pick a place to advertise where there is a high density of your coaching clients. You also want to pick parameters that will ensure that you are advertising to mainly your ideal coaching clients. Otherwise, you risk paying to have your ad seen by people who don’t fit your ideal coaching clients.
Things to Consider When Paying for Marketing
Before you pay for advertising, there are a few things you can do to increase your ROI.
- Select where to advertise – Advertise your coaching business or program where it has a high chance to being seen by your ideal coaching clients. For example, if you are picking affiliates or a podcast for your advert, then you need to pick someone who serves your ideal coaching clients.
- Use audience targeting – Use market research insights to show your social media and Google ads to people who fit your ideal coaching client profile. This will help you to maximise the ROI of your ad spend.
- Create your advert – Create an advert that will appeal to your ideal coaching clients. This is particularly important for PPC advertising (pay-per-click advertising) because you only want people to click on the ad if they will take the desired action.
- Boost your landing page – Make the landing page the ad leads to as compelling as possible to maximise the conversion rate. Ensure there is enough information for your ideal coaching clients to make a buying decision based on the landing page.
- Use AB testing – Test the effectiveness of different types of ads and landing pages using AB testing. That allows you to go all in on the most effective advertising combination.