Learning how to attract not just any clients, but the right clients for your coaching program is table stakes if you want to have a successful online coaching business. In this post we cover 7 ways you can attract more of the right clients for you.

Online coaching is a vast industry, with countless coaches working across countless online business niches. Though there are many different factors that can determine the success of an individual coach, one thing that all successful coaches have in common is a consistent stream of high-quality clients.

Whether you’re just starting out as a coach or you’ve been in the business a while, getting clients is going to be at the front of your mind. Generating the kind of steady, dependable stream of work that will ensure your security and define your business as a success will require a careful approach to client nurturing and retention, but before that, you need to know how to get clients in the first place.

In this post, we’ll look at 7 ways to attract more clients to your online coaching business, and the best way to approach each method. Let’s begin!

Carve Out a Specific Niche

Like many coaches, you’re likely to have a long and varied résumé that’s given you a solid level of expertise in a range of professions and departments within one or more industries. With all that expertise, your first impulse may be to create a service offering that covers as many bases as possible.

This is a common mistake that many new coaches make, and often only makes it harder to showcase your real value to people who have the potential to make up the core of your client base.

Specialists are much harder to come by than coaches who take a more catch-all approach, and if you go in attempting to frame yourself as a jack of all trades, you can easily come off as a master of none!

If you need more convincing, read internet maven and writing expert David Perrell’s eloquent espousing of the virtues of niching down online in his writing about building your own “Personal Monopoly”.

Before you do anything in the way of active outreach, make sure that you’ve taken the time to carve out a specific niche for your business, catering to a specific demand in the market. This will not only make you far more credible to prospects who read your marketing material, but will also be highly conducive to referrals in the future, as the people you network with will start to see you as a specific person for a specific job.

Incentivize Referrals

Social proof has always been an effective driving force in marketing, and referrals could be one of the most valuable sources of new clients for your online coaching business. 

When you’ve put in the time to become an established specialist, referrals will start to come in naturally, as people from your client base see successful people from the same circles trusting you with their coaching needs. Until this starts to happen, you can stimulate referrals by incentivising satisfied clients to sing your praises and refer their contacts.

Referral programs can take on many different forms, but when it comes to online coaching, there are a few tactics that tend to be more effective than others. Offering a small commission for referrals, rewarding those who make referrals with free or discounted services, and forming partnerships with other coaches whose client base are likely to need your expertise, are all common tactics for incentivized referrals in the world of online coaching.

Aside from generating new leads, running incentivized referrals can also help foster loyalty in the people making the referrals. This is especially true in partnerships with other coaches where a two-way flow of referrals produces a strong motivation for actively promoting the other party’s services to relevant contacts.

Optimize your Social Media Presence

Independent businesspeople can benefit from having a strong presence on every major social media platform, but for coaches like you, LinkedIn is going to be the most fertile place to create and nurture business relationships.

The first and most important step in making social media work for you is to optimize your LinkedIn profile for social proof, putting the spotlight on your achievements and the satisfied clients you’ve helped in the past. 

According to leading sales engagement platform Sopro “Two out of three people are more likely to buy something after watching a testimonial video that demonstrates how a business, product or service has helped others.” Failing to highlight your value to clients within your target market can cost you a fortune in the long run, so don’t leave it to chance!

With each client you work for, reach out to them at the conclusion of your coaching and ask them for both endorsements for a specific skill on LinkedIn, and a testimonial quote you can highlight on your LinkedIn profile.

If you’re just getting started, and don’t have much in the way of accolades that relate specifically to online coaching, there are still ways to optimize your LinkedIn profile to showcase the value you can offer your target market. 

One simple way of polishing your LinkedIn presence is to open your ‘about’ section with a bold, attention-grabbing fact about your previous achievements that demonstrate the value you can offer to potential clients, for example, “In my X years at [Company] I spearheaded a project that increased revenue by 26% in just 3 months.”

If you’re looking for inspiration, Jared Greer, Executive Coach and creator of the Greer Method is a great example to model Linkedin efforts after.

Write and Publish Thought Leadership Pieces

Once you’ve carved out the speciality of your online coaching service, you’ll need to prove to new prospects that you’re the kind of expert you purport to be. Building and maintaining a solid portfolio will give you a foundation for this, but ensuring people will see it in the first place requires a larger and more visible online presence.

One effective and accessible way to showcase your expertise is to publish thought leadership pieces on spaces where your target market spends their time.

Forbes, Entrepreneur, FastCompany, and HubSpot are just a few of the popular online business journals that will accept guest posts from authors who can demonstrate a strong background in their field, and you may be able to find platforms that are even more closely aligned with your speciality.

Some of the effective types of thought leadership pieces include:

• Guides that answer frequently asked questions or provide solutions to common problems faced by your target market.

• Stories from your experience in the industry where you learned valuable lessons or new approaches to common problems.

• Opinion pieces that outline your views on industry trends.

• In-depth reviews on new tools and systems that are making waves in your niche.

Though breaking into this method of outreach can be challenging at first, once you’ve written a few good posts, making successful pitches will become so much easier, and soon you’ll be able to build a loyal stable of followers who will put the spotlight on your expertise through social shares.

Email Marketing

As you probably already know, email marketing is one of the most effective channels you can use to generate new business. Aside from promising an impressive ROI and giving you the opportunity to pinpoint the ideal times and dates to launch your campaigns, email marketing will give you an effective channel of communication to promote thought leadership content and generally keep your audience invested in your brand.

Email marketing is a complex science in and of itself, and it will take a bit of trial and error to learn the nuances of your audience and online coaching niche. When you’re just getting started though, one of the biggest pieces of advice we can give is to personalize your email content.

Leading email marketing tool MooSend published a case study showing that the airline EasyJet saw a 100% higher open and 25% higher click-through rate by putting a greater emphasis on personalization in their email marketing. 

Simple changes to a basic email campaign such as using customer names in your salutations, tailoring content to locations and client habits, and tailoring send times to specific audience segments, can all have huge differences to your success, promising huge rewards for a relatively small investment of time!

Paid Advertising

Though email marketing, online and in-person networking, and thought leadership can all be powerful sources of new business, they do take time to develop. 

Targeted PPC advertising, though it requires a larger up-front cost, can help you generate business with greater urgency, getting your brand in front of the kinds of people who stand the most to gain from your service, and moving them further down your funnel. Aside from being an effective way to convert leads into paying clients, it can also be a great way to distribute content that requires a sign-up to your mailing list, thereby bolstering your future email marketing efforts.

Though most businesses will go through a period of stagnation before their PPC budget really starts working for them, there’s plenty of things you can do to ensure you get the best start possible. 

One of the most important steps you can take early on is to zero-in on the right audience, based on factors like personal demographics, location and browsing habits. PPC platforms like Google Ads offer a wealth of demographic targeting and reporting tools to help you narrow down the scope of your campaigns, and avoid wasting money on clicks that go nowhere. Whatever platform or platforms you use, be sure to study and leverage all the targeting options at your disposal, and set yourself up for a first campaign that’s both efficient and cost-effective.

Final Thoughts

Whether you’re just starting out or looking to breathe new life into your brand, we hope these ways to attract new clients for your online coaching business serve you well. Though each of these methods will take time to perfect, by taking a hands-on approach, monitoring your results closely, and continually tailoring your outreach to the trends you see, you’ll quickly begin to see a steady, consistent flow of quality clients into your business, and onto your Nudge app.