by Walter Toh
Digital Marketin
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Digital Marketing has become increasing important for businesses in today’s ever-changing world. In order to grow one’s life coaching businesses, one has to venture online to differentiate himself from his competitors.
Life Coaching Industry
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Life coaching is a billion-dollar industry. A lot of demand for life coaching can be found within countries such as the USA, UK, Australia, South Africa and in Scandinavian countries such as Norway and Sweden. Life coaches help clients overcome personal barriers and help them set goals to succeed and maximise their potential.
A life coach is typically involved in helping clients to:
- Improve daily communication skills
- Make career changes
- Help clients with relationships such as marriage and dating issues
Goals
Having clear goals can help increase your chances of being a successful life coach. Goals have to be SMART to be effective.
Short- Term Goals:
Within three months, I want to have 10 new clients per month.
Within four months, I want to have at least 350 followers on Facebook.
Long-Term Goals
Within 7 months, I want to have 70 clients.
Within 8 months, I want to have at least 1000 followers on Instagram and 1000 followers on Facebook.
Within 12 months, I want to convert 20% of these followers to new clients while retaining my existing customers.
Marketing Funnel
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A marketing funnel is essentially the various stages of a prospective client’s journey, from their first interaction with the website/social media channels to the time they convert into a paying client. At the top of the funnel, one has to generate basic interest in the coaching brand and services. One will offer valuable information that contains a soft call-to-action (CTA), such as signing up for an email sequence or newsletter.
When they are in the middle of the funnel, they are likely not yet ready to buy one’s coaching services. This is a good time to share case studies or material one have created (ebookswebinars, YouTube videos) to further engage that visitor. One can also offer free trials and discounts at this stage.
Once the customer reaches the bottom of the funnel, the decision-making stage comes in. One wants to offer product-specific content and engage the prospective clients’ emotions. Using discount offers strategically in the bottom of the funnel can lead to conversions without negatively affecting revenue.
Target audience
The life coach now needs to start introducing prospective clients to his coaching services. Although it is simple to create general advertising for thousands of clients, he needs to devote time and useful resources to identify target markets that will help him to maximize your digital marketing ROI fully. To achieve this, he should sharpen his focus by narrowing on the target audience.
Digital Marketing Strategies
Every successful life coach has a great offline and online presence. Having a digital marketing plan helps the life coach to be able to reach out to clients virtually. These digital marketing strategies range from networking to writing an e-book to pay-per-click adverts.
Networking
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Networking is key to building one’s reputation. Turning up at online events can raise one’s profile and very clearly attract the ideal type of client. By joining groups on social media that contain your target audience, one will be able to find his niche and describe the outcome that he provides. In these Facebook groups, there is time to understand your target audience. Once one is in the correct groups, he has to have a personal statement in his personal profile to let others know about him as a life coach. By posting regularly on social media, the personal posts will further tell prospective clients about the business. In addition, there should be clear ways to take action such as link to a freebie and let customers know about slots freeing up or any promotion that one is running to encourage sign-ups.
Google My Business
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Google My Business is one of the best and easiest ways to provide visibility to one’s life coaching business. With a few clicks, one can set it up totally free, list his business location on Google Maps and local search results and gain reviews from customers that already got his service.
Professional Website
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Although Facebook leads are good, having a professional website of one as a professional life coach will ensure a stable online presence. Afterall, leads may dry out in the long run. Direct messaging is not scalable as people may not be comfortable with chatting with a stranger online. If one wants to charge good hourly rates, building a website and a reputation is essential to one’s business. A website with a user-friendly option of booking a discovery call with the life coach and a page with for each package that the life coach offers will help first impressions.
Blog
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A blog will help the life coach to showcase his expertise. By having regular content on the blog, people who are interested in life coaching will want to return to read the content. This will allow the known life coach to charge high rates. The blog should contain written content in the form of articles. One may also include podcasts, audios or videos to cater to a variety of audiences. One can start with a format that he is comfortable with before trying out new formats. One’s website should be a content repository where articles, podcasts, audios or videos written in blogs are stored. This will give you the opportunity to grow your website traffic as a reliable source of discovery calls. Ensuring that your posting is consistent will also help you rank your content in search engines and build creibility with your audience. Both will become priceless assets for your business in the long run.
(Blog)
Search Engine Optimisation
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Search engine optimization is having as many keywords on blogs, posts, podcasts and videos for search engines to detect so as to have more users frequent the website. In order to do this, the life coach has to do his keyword research and find the best keywords to drive traffic to his website. Optimising one’s content and publishing it regularly will drive ever-increasing traffic to the website where slots can be booked 24/7. It also reduces reliance on ever-changing platforms that hinders lead generation since the algorithms can be changed overnight. Getting on the first page on Google depends on the competition, the orgranisation of the website and regular posting of content on the website.
Social Media Marketing
On top of search engine optimization, social media marketing helps to increase number of people who find the life coach. Having one theme per week which can be turned into 3 or 5 posts for social media. With that, consistency is achieved. Automation is crucial for a life coach because the life coach will want to focus his energy in generating quality content so that viewers can eventually be turned to paying clients.
E-book
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A blog can be a research platform to know the topics and content that people want to read. Subsequently, writing an e-book from a series of blog articles can help life coaches reach and help more people. The life coach can also write an e-book by transcribing and repurposing his videos. However, the writing can be outsourced if one is not keen. Do note that one has to bear in mind such writing can have a profound impact on one’s reputation and its reach.
(E-book)
Pay-Per-Click Adverts
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For a life coach, pay-per-click adverts come in many shapes or forms and which to use will depend on his experience using them. Facebook and Google ads tend to generate substantial interest in the amount of leads in a short time. If one has a small budget of under $5K per month, one will need to learn to do this yourself. FB Ad & Google Ad agencies that achieve real results will not work with him for less.
Analytics
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Lastly, a successful digital marketing plan has to measure the effectiveness of the strategies and activities implemented. Google Analytics can be used to keep track of all these data. Specifically, it looks at bounce rate, website flow and traffic sources. Google Analytics can identify corrective actions so that the life coach can align to the goals set. One has to also A/B test and experiment to gather more data as changes are made. Discover what works and constantly try new things and update one’s website to keep readers interested.
Conclusion
In conclusion, in order to differentiate oneself from his competitors, the life coach has to adopt an online presence which will expand his reach not only locally but internationally too. He will be supported with data analytics to extract data and eventually be able to make informed decisions on how to improve his digital marketing strategies to meet his short and long-term goals eventually.
References
www.stephaniefiteni.com/digital-strategy/digital-marketing-for-coaches/life-coach-marketing/
www.lifecoachingprofessionally.com/marketing-ideas.html
www.wearemarketing.com/blog/a-step-by-step-guide-to-structuring-a-digital-marketing-plan.html
www.yourtangoexperts.com/top-digital-marketing-trends-2019-counselors-healers-life-coaches/