Marketing Your Coaching Business: 4 Tips for Success

Running a successful business is hard. That’s why more and more people are hiring business coaches—people with a proven track record of building successful businesses—to help them get their idea off the ground.

A business coach or consultant uses their knowledge and experience to advise new business owners in exchange for a fee and can provide valuable insight that you might not learn in school.

Similarly, a lot of people feel like they’re digging themselves a hole in life. Maybe they’re divorced with a failed career and don’t know how to start again, or maybe they’re overwhelmed and confused about how to iron out life’s chaos. Other people want to learn the habits of successful, confident individuals. For these and other reasons, life coaching is also rising in popularity. Life coaches teach their clients how to get on track and advise them on how they can meet their goals.

If you’re someone who’s qualified to do either of these jobs, you might be trying to get a coaching business off the ground! You may have printed off business cards, gotten a smart haircut, and fine-tuned your Zoom background, and you might even have set up a website and a marketing campaign.

Sadly, at this stage, a lot of aspiring coaches hit an unexpected wall: Customers just aren’t clicking on their ads or hiring them. What’s going on here? It’s possible that your marketing just isn’t hitting the mark.

But don’t worry, in this article we’re going to show you how to turn it around. Read on to find out why so many coaches struggle to market their businesses, and how you can increase the odds you’ll come out on top.

Why is It So Hard To Market A Coaching Business?

Here at NeuroGym, we know that it’s hard to get a coaching business off the ground—that’s why we offer coaching programs geared to keen entrepreneurs like you! But if it’s your first time trying to market a coaching business, there are a few easy mistakes beginners make that you might not be aware of.

The first is that marketing a coaching business is hard because customers are not as easy to advertise to as they used to be. People looking for a life or business coach are spammed with advertisements promising ridiculously over-inflated results in exchange for large sums. This has become so common that customers can easily see through all the old manipulative advertising tricks, which means these methods aren’t likely to succeed anymore.

The second common problem is that you might not have a clear idea of what customers you’re looking for, or if you do, it might not be clear in your advertisement. Customers are looking for someone to give them personalized advice, not a one-size-fits-all approach, so your ads need to be tailored to convey that!

Thirdly, customers may be feeling condescended to if advertisements are taking the wrong tone—and this is not the way to encourage them to pay for your services! Everyone wants to sound confident in their abilities, but this can sometimes go too far.

If your ads are insulting potential clients, implying that you think they’re clueless, that they can’t do anything without you, or that they’d be stupid not to hire you, they won’t stick around to be talked to like that—they’ll find someone they feel respects them!

Lastly, the problem might not be the way you’re presenting your business, but where. To market successfully, you need to pick a strategy that will reach your specific target audience and stick to it. For example, if you’re advertising to older adults but placing ads on the hottest social media sites for youth like TikTok and Snapchat, you’re going to miss the mark!

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4 Steps to Successfully Marketing Your Coaching Business

Think you have what it takes to be a great life or business coach? Have some valuable experience to share? Trying to advertise your coaching business online or elsewhere, but not getting much return on your investment?

You don’t have to throw in the towel just yet! In fact, a relatable story about your struggles with getting your business off the ground—until you finally found the right way to succeed—can be a great thing to have and share with your clients. You could even act as your own testimonial!

In this section, we’re going to look through the best ways to successfully market your business or life coaching business, and the neuroscience that backs up why they work. With these 4 simple tips on your side, you’ll take your chances of success—and with any luck, your income—from zero to a hundred in no time!

Be As Authentic As Possible

The first problem we mentioned above was that it’s now harder than ever to convince customer’s you’re legitimate and not simply a fraud or a money-grabber! The key is to make sure you don’t fall into the same generic trap.

Being authentic in your marketing means—as cliché as it sounds—being yourself. You want to show your customers you’re a real person with real experience, not a company with a board of executives conspiring to create the most cunning ads possible.

Why does this work? If people think you’re honest, they’re more likely to trust what you have to say. It seems obvious, but neuroscience backs it up!

Here are some tips for being authentic:

• Along with your name, have a friendly and natural (but still professional) picture of yourself on your advertisement.
• Be honest. Don’t overstate your abilities or qualifications, be upfront about the price, and don’t suddenly reveal extra charges that aren’t clear from the outset at checkout.
• Show that you actually know what your target audience is struggling with. If you have a funny anecdote about working in their field that highlights what you can help with, that’s marketing gold!

Know Your Target Audience

It’s important to know who you’re advertising to, and to make sure they know you’re talking to them specifically! As we stated in the last section, make sure your advertisements are specific to your customer base, and show that you know just what they’re going through. You want to show your customers that your approach suits their unique needs.

Why? People are more likely to be convinced when they feel a connection or similarity to the person speaking to them, and relating to your customers is the best way to do this!

Here are some tips for tailoring your marketing to your target audience:

• Use colors and imagery associated with their field.
• Highlight your experience—use anecdotes, and if their field, subculture, or social group has its own lingo, make a point to use it (and use it correctly).
• Speak directly to the people you’re talking to; state who the target audience is.
• Include a testimonial from someone working successfully in their field, or who knows what it’s like to be in their situation.

Be Respectful

Neuroscience confirms something we all know: People who feel disrespected or condescended to are less likely to be convinced by an argument, and that goes for advertisements as well.

If you want your ad campaign to bring in customers, you need to let them know you respect them and that you don’t think of yourself as some super-powered guru or messiah—you’re a person just like them!

Some best practices include:

• Emphasize your “normalcy” in the ad.
  • For example: “Hi, I’m Bob, an entrepreneur from Minnesota. I’ve run three successful businesses, and for my fourth, I want to share my knowledge with people just like me–and just like you!”
• Don’t overstate your accomplishments—especially not if it’s something easily verified like a degree or award.
• Use normal, down-to-earth language, but avoid dumbing things down.

Know How to Target Your Audience

Even if you create the best ad campaign in the world, customers won’t bite if they never see it! You need to do your best to put ads in places customers frequent. Our tips below are mostly about digital marketing, but they can be applied to print, radio, and television ads too!

• On a computer you don’t usually use, an incognito window, or after clearing your caches so that your search history doesn’t influence your results, search for keywords someone in your target audience’s field looking for a coach would search. What kinds of sites come up? Use this information to inform your advertising.
• Think about the age group of your audience and do some research on which social media sites they’re likely to frequent. Target these in your marketing campaign.
• Sponsor YouTubers and other content creators who make videos your audience might watch.

If you thought that was all there was to know about succeeding in marketing your business, think again! NeuroGym’s LIVE 5 Day Breakthrough Challenge gets you a front-row seat to lessons from top experts about how you too can grow your business using neuroscience. Book your spot NOW!

Final Words 

Now that you’ve gotten to the end of our 4 tips for successfully marketing a life or business coaching business using neuroscience, you have one more tool in your toolbox for successfully making money: sharing your knowledge. Running a business isn’t just about having the skills and professional background to do the job you’re advertising, it’s also about convincing the public that you’re the best person to do it!

While most people don’t think about it, our brains guide us down different paths every day without us even noticing. Being aware of how human brains function can help you make this little quirk of our biology work for you—and gives you a valuable advantage against the competition!

Still have questions about how clever applications of neuroscientific knowledge can help you attract customers and boost your income? Why not join us at the LIVE 5 Day Breakthrough Challenge with NeuroGym to learn from the experts? Don’t wait—book your spot NOW!