5 Life Coach Marketing Strategies That Make Money

If you’re a life coach (or really any entrepreneur, just substitute your niche for life coach), you probably are working hard to try to market your business so you can grow and make more money. I want to help, so I’ve created a list of 5 life coach marketing strategies that will help you make more money in your coaching practice. If you’re another entrepreneur, keep reading because you can apply these strategies to your business too.

You may have been told that you should be everywhere, all the time, so your dream clients can find you wherever they search. While it makes sense and seems like a good idea, that’s not actually a marketing strategy, nor is it going to generate good results. What it will do is burn you out quickly, which will keep you from growing in the long run. You don’t have to post to Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, have a podcast, blog, email, and run ads to have a successful business. You need to be more strategic in your approach, and you’ll likely get better results with less work.

I see many life coaches start a business but struggle to find clients, and it makes me want to help. You’ve invested so much time, energy, and money into your certification to become a life coach, but in most cases, those programs didn’t teach you how to be a marketer to market your business. You may not have realized it when you signed up for life coaching school, but you also have to learn how to market yourself to grow a business.

Life coach marketing strategy tip  #1 – Focus on your dream clients

I know, this probably sounds super simple and maybe even a little bit basic. But I talk to a lot of students and clients who think they know who their ideal customer or dream client is, and when I ask them about them, they can’t describe them with any clarity. They’re confused, sometimes fumbling over their words, and definitely not connecting with the right people.

If you don’t know who your ideal customer is and how you help them, you won’t be able to talk to them in a way that makes them realize you can help them. You need to understand your dream clients, know their hopes and dreams, as well as what they fear. You need to understand their emotions and desires. You need to know what they’re most afraid of so you can help them.

Life coach marketing strategy tip #2 – Focus on the right marketing channels

This may seem simple and straightforward, but it can be tough. Finding the right marketing channels isn’t as simple as deciding I like LinkedIn, so I’ll post over there. It’s more about understanding your dream client or ideal customer and knowing which social channels they like and want to spend time on. I know it may sound funny, but you can find that one channel works great for you and another, seemingly similar channel is terrible.

I personally find Pinterest to be a terrible marketing channel for me. I’ve tested it several times over the years and have followed all of the best practices and optimized my profile, boards, pins, etc., and I do get traffic from Pinterest – I’ve figured that part out, but what I don’t get from Pinterest is customers. I get a lot of people who come to my site, read a few blog posts, and leave.

While Pinterest doesn’t work for me, podcasting works exceptionally well. I can release a new podcast episode each week and get thousands of downloads per month. I also look at my reports in Apple Podcast Connect and know that I’m creating the type of content that you want based on the consumption information available there.

When you’re picking social channels to use for your marketing, I always recommend starting with one channel. Choose a channel based on which one has the best chance of connecting with the right people and test it out for a while. Give it at least 3-6 months of effort to see if it works for your business. If you get traffic but it doesn’t generate leads or make sales, then it’s probably time for a different channel. Don’t try to be everywhere at once, even if you’re thinking, oh, I’m just repurposing my content, it’s easy… It’s not. When you’re trying to post everywhere, it can be time-consuming because the amount of work that’s necessary adds up as you add more channels to your marketing mix. Start with one, and when it’s working well, you can add another if you want.

Life coach marketing strategy tip #3- Create content that converts

Since you’ve really focused on who your ideal customer is, you should know them quite well and be able to create content that will help them. What I want you to think about here, as you’re creating content, is what does my dream client need to know before they want to work with me? You don’t want to simply create content. You want to focus on creating content that answers their questions, provides value, positions you as an expert, and helps move them from visitor to lead to client. Think about your sales funnel; you want to have content that addresses each stage of the sales funnel. You don’t want to just create content for the sake of writing a blog post, recording a podcast, or posting on social. When you have a strategy behind you, you get better results.

Life coach marketing strategy tip #4 – build a sales funnel

I know the word funnel or sales funnel can feel overwhelming. It did to me at first, too. But a funnel, even a very simple one, is necessary to make money as a life coach or online entrepreneur. You have to have something to sell or you’ll go broke. You generally need a way to capture and nurture leads before you can sell to people. You don’t have to have a big, fancy funnel with automated timers and multiple layers of confusion to succeed in business. You can have something as simple as a 3-step funnel.

You only need three things to build a funnel:

• An opt-in (a freebie that provides value and helps your ideal customer see that they want badly enough that they’re willing to give you their email address in exchange for a copy of the document).

• A way to deliver the email with the opt-in they’ve requested to make sure they get it in a timely manner. You can use an email service provider to host it and automate it for you. I use Active Campaign personally, but there are so many options.

• Something to sell, in your case, as a life coach, that’s your coaching services.

• That’s it. That’s all your sales funnel needs. Now, you’ll also need a traffic source or two to get people into your funnel, but the funnel itself only needs those three things to start making money. You can always test, tweak, and make things more complicated in time, but when you’re first starting out, keep it simple and make it easy for you to manage.

Life coach marketing strategy tip #5 – track your metrics every month

I know the thought of tracking metrics may sound a little scary or intimidating, especially if you don’t know what to track or where to find the right information, but it’s honestly pretty straightforward.

You’ll want to track each step of your sales funnel to see how things are working and identify any areas that need to be improved.

First, look at your traffic source that brings people to your funnel. How’s it working? Is it growing? Are you bringing the right people to the funnel? Ideally, you want a mix of traffic from different channels. You don’t want to be completely reliant on one traffic channel because if the algorithm changes and your visibility drops, your entire business is at risk overnight. Always diversify your marketing channels. I personally recommend you use a mix of channels to protect yourself long-term. I use organic via website, blog, and podcast to drive traffic into my funnel. Then I use email, podcast, and webinars to nurture the people who are in my funnels. And finally, I use webinars and sales sequence emails to help them move to the point of conversion.

You want to track performance at each stage of the funnel so you know what’s working and what needs to be improved. You don’t want to fix something that’s working great and accidentally break it. Your funnel metrics will depend on the structure of your funnel.

Let’s walk through our sample 3-step funnel and see which metrics we’d want to track.

Opt-in landing page. You’ll want to find your conversion rate for this page by taking the number of signups and dividing it by the number of unique visitors to the page. For example, if you have 10 signups and 100 unique page views, you have a 10% conversion (10/100), which tells me you have an issue with your opt-in or landing page, and now you can start to adjust your page to see what’s wrong. You want to see it at 30% or above.

Then in step 2 of your funnel, your nurture sequence emails, you’d want to track your click-through rates. Open rates don’t really tell us much anymore because so many email service providers pre-open emails today to check for spammy links or issues. You want to see your click-through rate at 1% or above.

Finally, you’ll want to watch to see how many people on your email list buy your products over time. If you have a consult call option, you can track how many people see the page and then how many sign up. You can determine your sales conversion rate by taking the number of sales / the total number of opt-in sign-ups.

Understanding your metrics will make you a better marketer, and being a better marketer will make you a better life coach because it will give you more clients to coach.

Final thoughts on life coach marketing strategies that make you money

You need to learn how to market yourself so that people want to work with you. I know it can feel very awkward and even hard, at times, to put yourself out there, but it’s so important to do it anyway. Do it scared. Focus on the tips that I’ve shared in this post, and it will make it easier and help you be more streamlined.

I help life coaches and other online entrepreneurs with marketing every single day, and I’d love to help you too. We can work 1:1, or you can join me in a small group program and work together on this. I’ll guide you through the process of setting up your marketing funnel and analyzing the data so you can adjust what needs adjusting and get more clients, so you can make more money.