Are you feeling as though your coaching practice is yet to reach its full potential, to make the impact you’ve envisioned?
Having a strategy to reach potential clients might help you get there!
Coaching is all about helping people and empowering others, but your biggest challenge as a coach might be finding them.
No matter how brilliant of a coach you are, if you can’t attract new clients, you’ll have a hard time making a living doing what you love. This makes lead generation for coaches extremely important.
Based on our expertise in marketing and lead generation at GetResponse, we put together 11 lead-generation strategies you can try as a coach today to make the impact you’ve always envisioned!
11 methods to generate leads for coaches
Here are some effective ways to go about lead generation for coaches.
Pro tip: They work great individually. Better yet if they’re part of a well-oiled sales funnel tailored for coaches.
1. Highlight the USPs
With thousands of coaches to choose from, why should potential clients pick you? If you can’t answer that, you’ll find it difficult to attract any leads. So, let’s define your Unique Selling Proposition (USP).
This step involves some brainstorming and research. Start by listing top coaches in your niche. Find out what they excel at and what their clients love. You’ll find this information by reading reviews, joining their communities, or even their email lists. Then, create a detailed list of their strengths and weaknesses.
Examine your clients, too. What do they truly want? Remember that you don’t want to target just anyone. Identify a core group and create an ideal client persona representing them:
Now, reflect on your strengths and differentiators. What do you bring to the table that your competitors don’t?
Combine these insights to craft a simple, catchy, and specific USP for your coaching services. This USP must be:
- Client-focused
- Easy to understand
Take a look at Patrice Washington’s USP:
Here’s another example from a spiritual coach, Sahara Rose:
Once you’ve nailed this down, feature your USP across every marketing channel—your website, social media, email campaigns, and even business cards
2. Leverage social media marketing
Around 64% of buyers discover products and brands through social media. So, social platforms are a valuable opportunity for you to connect with your prospective clients and generate a consistent flow of leads. This makes social media marketing an effective strategy for lead generation for coaches.
After choosing the right social media platform, the next move is to create a strong brand presence on the platform. Start by creating a detailed bio, highlighting your USP, and adding some professional images. Check out how Jackie Carl does it below.
If you’re using more than one platform, be sure to keep your branding style uniform across these platforms. This helps enhance your recognition.
Now, the next crucial step is to actively engage your audience with high-quality posts. Make sure you’re taking full advantage of the various content formats each platform offers. For instance, mix in helpful and engaging reels, carousels, stories, and standard posts if you’re using Instagram. Tyler Archer, a successful business coach does this so well:
The conversation should not be one-way either. Create time to respond to comments and messages, and actively participate in conversations. This is key to keeping your audience engaged and creating a vibrant community around your brand. You can see how Tyler takes time to respond to comments, too:
Social media platforms further provide opportunities for running paid ads to increase your reach. You can also set criteria such as your preferred demographics and interests in the ads. This ensures that your paid ads reach a highly targeted audience.
3. Social media giveaways
Would you pass up the chance to win a freebie, especially if it’s something you genuinely care about? Probably not. That’s why a giveaway contest is an incredible lead-generation process.
Besides, over half of the world’s population hangs out on social media. So with the right strategy, you can attract the right coaching clients through fun giveaways.
Most giveaways that you come across probably require comments, likes follows, and shares. However, since the primary purpose of the giveaway is to generate leads, make sure to add email submission as one of the requirements for participants.
For example, you can link to a lead gen landing page from your social media bio and posts where you’ll have the forms to collect email addresses.
That said, your social media giveaway must be on the right platform for it to perform well. The right platform here is where most of your target audience hangs out.
Let’s assume you’re a life coach targeting Gen Z. TikTok is a very popular social platform for this demographic. Thus, it may yield better results than taking your giveaway to LinkedIn.
Therefore, take a moment to check the audience analytics of the various platforms you want to use. Do these platforms have your ideal customers? You can also research where most of your competitors are active. Chances are they’re getting good results from those platforms, so you can’t ignore them.
💡 Pro tip: Besides the platform, you must also choose your giveaway prize carefully. Avoid generic items like cash because they’ll attract all kinds of people, including those not interested in what you offer.
Instead, go for prizes closely related to your service to ensure you only attract high-quality leads. For example, Snoupii gave away free coaching sessions, as shown below.
You should also consider other options like self-help journals, productivity tools, or discounts on your coaching packages.
One of the biggest challenges with giveaways is that they tend to lose momentum with time. We recommend announcing one or two winners weekly to avoid this. This should keep the excitement alive and encourage more entries.
4. Organize a virtual summit
Virtual summits are online sessions where experts, influencers, and thought leaders deliver valuable insights. The event usually spans several days, covering various industry topics. You can make it free or charge a fee—most people don’t mind, as long as it’s offering something truly valuable.
A summit is a fantastic lead-generation strategy to gain warm and qualified leads for your coaching business. Think about it. The attendees are interested in the topic, right? Since this topic aligns with what you offer, there’s a better chance to convert them into paying clients later.
Moreover, attendees will typically share their emails to register for the event. You can use this to launch an email marketing campaign and continue the relationship after the event. See Jason Moss’s business growth summit, for example.
Remember those crucial connections we mentioned before? Virtual summits offer another chance to expand your network. Based on our experience, the experts you invite and those attending could become valuable sources of partnership opportunities down the line.
The only catch is virtual summits demand lots of organization and planning.
Start by choosing a suitable topic. Be sure it’s something that brings several pain points of your audiences under an umbrella. Let’s take the summit mentioned earlier, for example. The audience is having issues with getting more clients or increasing sales. So, it makes sense that the topic is about business growth.
Next, find speakers and influencers with complementary expertise to speak. Look for those sharing expert insights on social media platforms like LinkedIn. Other options are:
- Asking your current audience for speaker suggestions
- Using summit speaker directories like VirtualSummitSearch or HeySummit
You also need to decide on the platform to host the event. Eventbrite, Zoom, or Hopin are excellent choices.
And finally, don’t forget to promote your webinars through social media, emails, or a dedicated virtual summit landing page. You can even sweeten the deal by offering incentives, like access to a private community for summit participants, to encourage registrations.
5. Conduct webinars
Unlike virtual summits, webinars are laser-focused on a single topic and only last a few minutes to a couple of hours. You also won’t have to invite lots of speakers – one or two should suffice. So, if you find virtual summits a bit too demanding, we can assure you that webinars are an effective way for lead generation.
Before granting users access to your webinar, ask for basic contact information. Here is the thing, though. People will only share this data if they believe your webinar is worth it. So, create a simple webinar landing page, like the one below, to highlight its value.
Also, unlike a virtual summit which can cover a broader theme like “empowering entrepreneurs in 2023,” a webinar should have a more targeted focus, like “Building a Resilient Online Brand.” Essentially, come up with a focused topic that you can cover within the short timeframe of your webinar.
Given the smaller audience size during webinars, it’s easier to make these sessions highly interactive. So, incorporate polls and live chats to create a more engaging experience.
6. Guest blog posting
Many websites are actively looking for experienced contributors to write high-quality content for their audience. Why don’t you take advantage of this opportunity to share your insights? By doing what you love – making a positive impact through your expertise – you can also attract people to your service.
These posts typically feature the author’s bio at the end, often with a link to your website. This is great for boosting brand awareness. Here is an example.
Speaking of links, guest posting is also a very effective SEO strategy. The backlink to your website sends signals to Google that your website content is valuable and trustworthy. This can boost your website ranking, hence increasing your web traffic.
How can you implement this strategy?
The first step is finding websites that accept guest posts. Let’s say you’re an executive leadership development coach. Websites covering content around leadership, business strategy, or professional development will most likely have the audience you’re looking for.
💡 Pro tip: Search one of those keywords on Google using this format: keyword + “write for us” or “guest post guidelines.” The search will return thousands of relevant websites open to guest posts
Naturally, you’d want your insights featured on reputable websites. So, your prime focus should be websites with domain authority of 60+ and steady monthly traffic of over 5k. You can use SEO tools like Moz and Ahrefs to confirm these metrics.
Next, check out their guest post guideline to see how you can pitch to them.
When writing, remember that the quality of the content that gets published under your name reflects the quality of your service. So, take the time to write expert, authoritative, and trustworthy content addressing the audience’s pain points.
7. Guest emailing
Guest emailing involves partnering with influencers or industry professionals to use their email lists. Similar to guest blogging, the idea here is to create compelling email content for their audience while building your brand awareness in the process. Interested audiences might then opt to join your email list, expanding your potential client base.
Here are two ways you can find partners for guest emailing campaigns:
- Your existing connections: think about websites you’ve guest-posted on or podcasts you’ve co-hosted; they likely have a mailing list,
- External sources: build connections at industry events or join relevant communities on social media.
The most important thing here is to make sure the partners are credible. You want to avoid teaming up with partners whose emails are marked as spam or frequently blocked due to a lack of value.
💡 Pro tip: Consider joining your partners’ emails for a while to assess them. This also gives you a good idea of the kind of content their audience loves.
Once you identify these opportunities, pitch to them as you would for guest blogs.
Propose valuable content or offers that align with your expertise and cater to your audience’s interests. The offers could be an exclusive webinar, downloadable resources, or special promotions.
8. Invest in content partnerships
We’ve already covered how you can partner with other thought leads via email and guest posting. You can take these collaborations a step further with other content formats.
For example, consider co-hosting a social media live session, joint Q&A, or even webinars. These partnerships are mutually beneficial since they allow you to cross-promote your brands.
You can extend this approach to podcasts, too. For example, Elizabeth Yang partnered with Coach Crystal in an episode of Mindset Mastery.
As your relationship deepens, you’ll naturally feel more at ease directly promoting each other’s brands and even organizing giveaways together.
9. Share social proofs
Nothing speaks quite as loud as the success you’ve helped your clients achieve. That’s why social proof like testimonials is incredibly important for generating leads. They help you build trust and nurture your audience’s belief that they too can achieve similar success.
If you have a satisfied client that you’ve built rapport with, ask them to share their experience by writing a review. Feature these written testimonials on your website and social channels. If possible, include their image and a short background to make the testimonials feel personal and authentic.
See Pacific’s life coaching business, for instance:
You should also consider incorporating video testimonials for added authenticity. Let your client know they don’t need a fancy setup for this. With tools like TrustMary or Testimonial Hero, they can record a short video with their phones.
Sharing these videos across your marketing platforms boosts your credibility significantly. Here’s a beautiful example from Coach to Transformation:
Case studies can also be a powerful form of social proof. Case studies are more detailed than your regular customer testimonials. As such, they give you a chance to share the specific pain points your customers experienced and the results you helped them achieve. This could be professional growth or career advancement for your clients.
You can place these case studies on your contact page, service offering landing pages, or even your homepage.
10. Build referral programs
Has anyone ever benefited from your coaching service before? Such clients should be more than willing to recommend you to others, especially if you give them a little push. Saying, “y’all should try him out, he’s a good coach and he’s helped me a lot” definitely has more weight than “Please try me out, I’m a good coach.”
Of course, your service has to be top-notch for referrals to happen in the first place.
But even then, you must still send a simple email to your existing clients, gently reminding them to recommend you. If you’re not sure about what to write, you can use our AI email generator. Just give it some context and it will deliver a very high-quality email in seconds.
You’ll probably need to come up with incentives to supercharge your referral program. So, offer valuable prizes to motivate your clients to take action. You should also explore two-way prizes that reward both the referrer and their referrals–these tend to perform better and create a viral referral program.
As a final tip, you have to make it easy for your client to refer someone. Provide clear instructions and a referral link that they can share easily. Referral tools like Referral Candy or Referral Rock can streamline the entire process for you.
Once your referral program is in place, be sure to make it known across your website and social channels.
Related: Best email coaching templates
11. Implement guest training
The final strategy to gain a high influx of leads is through guest training. Guest training involves training the audiences of other businesses, influencers, or communities whose niches overlap with yours.
How can you achieve this?
To begin, compile a list of potential partners with a similar audience and who are well-known in your niche. Then, start building a relationship with them. Social media is an excellent starting point. For instance, connect with them on LinkedIn or join their private Facebook communities if they have them.
Next, engage with them actively. Comment on their posts with valuable insights, contribute to their communities, and be genuinely involved to grab their attention. This makes it easier for them to see your value when you finally propose a potential collaboration.
Finally, propose a free training session for their audience, perhaps through a brief webinar. If it’s high-quality, their audience will likely become intrigued by what else you have to offer, and might eventually become your clients.
How to generate leads for coaches -FAQs
1. How do I get more clients as a coach?
The best way to get more clients as a coach is by leveraging several lead-generation techniques, like guest blogging, organizing virtual summits, and tapping into partnerships with other coaches. This article covers 11 techniques to help you get more coaching clients.
2. How do I market my coaching business?
Analyzing your audience and identifying your unique selling point are the first steps to marketing your coaching business. Once you have the two covered, leverage the correct marketing channels to promote your business through referral programs, free webinars, and by sharing social proof.
In closing: Lead generation for coaches
If you’ve made it this far, congratulations! You’ve successfully hacked lead generation for coaches.
Just a quick recap of the lead generation methods. Some of the strategies to consider are guest posting, social media giveaways, guest emailing, webinars, and virtual summits.
Also, don’t neglect the importance of emphasizing your unique selling proposition (USP), sharing testimonials, and asking for referrals. Lastly, take advantage of social media marketing, content partnerships, and guest training.
Remember, you’ll need to combine a couple of these lead-generation efforts to ensure a steady stream of leads for your online coaching business.
Good luck!