Life coaching businesses have become more and more popular in recent years, with a lot of people all across the US looking for a life coach of their own.

Even if your life coaching business is already established and operating in your local area, there are still a lot of ways to grow it into a much more successful business. The important part is understanding how you can make your online business thrive, especially if you are unsure where to go next.

It can be hard to digest all of the information you need to push your online coaching business to a new tier of success. However, it sometimes just takes one little push to help you discover the next step in your business’s evolution.

Understanding Your Target Audience

The more you know about your target market, the easier it becomes to market your own business to them. There are countless potential clients out there that you might be looking right past or new methods of generating more income that you have completely missed.

If you do not know your audiences, then you can’t market to them. You need to know who wants your life coaching services and how you can use that information to gain more customers for your life coaching business overall.

Demographics

The demographics of your existing coaching clients can be important. The audience that wants career coaching will be very different from the audience that needs a health and wellness coach, even if they overlap in certain areas.

Knowing the demographics behind a coaching program allows you to market your online coaching business correctly. You can market each coaching program to its main audience rather than doing generalized marketing that might harm your coaching business in the long run.

Habits

Knowing the habits of your audiences can be important too. Some groups may only start an online coaching program at specific points in the year or try to dig deeper to find cheaper life coaching options.

If you know what your audiences are looking for – and how they act – then you can market every online coaching program to the right places at the right times. If you want to attract clients, you need to approach them when they are most likely to be receptive to your marketing pitches.

Sources

It is a good idea to look at where your past clients are coming from if you have that information available. Every business starts out client-less, so if you have already earned more clients through other methods, it can be a good idea to see what kind of potential those methods might have.

A marketing strategy does not have to be an entirely new process. You can always refine the way that you are already marketing yourself, doubling down on the parts that work while experimenting with other marketing options for more niche audiences.

Using SEO

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is quite possibly one of the most important tools an online coaching business can rely on.

SEO is all about adapting your own website to rank higher for relevant search results, meaning that you will appear more often to people who are looking at terms related to your business online. In general, this allows you to tailor the audiences that you will appear for and to hand-pick the kinds of topics or keywords that your business is related to.

By doing this, you can put your online coaching business in front of specific audiences when they are looking for specific things, giving you a huge amount of control over your own marketing. The only downside is how many other factors can influence your SEO results – it is not an easy field to manage.

Keyword Research

You can use various SEO platforms to figure out which terms are causing your business to appear most often and what keywords your customer base or target audience is commonly searching for.

If they look up terms like “online coaches” or “personal growth online courses,” then these key phrases will bring up results related to them. However, your business might not be ranking high for them, meaning that you are not appearing on the first page of results.

By using various SEO techniques to change the keywords, you are ranking for, and how high you are ranking, you can put your online coaching business in front of these audiences with minimal effort.

This ensures that you are appearing for the markets you want to target and appearing when they look up terms related to what you offer.

Not only does this mean that you are not appearing for irrelevant searches, but it provides far more online coaching business clients among your site traffic. More of your organic search result visitors are going to be people with an interest in the services you are offering them.

Site Content and Adjustments

The higher your site’s rankings are, the more prominent it becomes in relevant search results. This means that an online coach website will want to make as many SEO improvements as possible, both in terms of direct content changes and on-site tweaks.

Pushing your rankings higher usually means making some changes to your site. For example, you might rework some code to make pages load faster or optimize images to smaller file sizes so that they put less strain on the users. The more you can avoid new users leaving due to poor site performance, the better.

There is also the content of your site itself. Online coaching can come in many forms, but most life coaching businesses will still have a similar set of basic keywords, along with niche keywords for their particular coaching sessions and services. Inserting these keywords into more website content can really help.

Backlinks

Earning backlinks from other sites can contribute quite heavily to your own SEO, making your site rank higher in local search results as long as the links come from trustworthy and high-authority sites. This makes backlinks a major part of improving your own website overall.

Earning backlinks can take many forms. You might pay for content on another site that links back to you or insert a guest post onto a blog. Some backlinks are earned just by being a good enough site that other websites will link to you, either as a resource or to your product and service pages.

However you get them, they can be a great way to bolster your own life coaching business marketing. Many people turn to backlink companies as a way of getting them easily, giving their business a constant stream of new links by outsourcing their backlink marketing efforts to a third party.

The most important thing to remember is that not all links are good, and too many spam links can actually get your business penalized on most search engines. You need to think carefully about which links might offer the most authority (also known as “link juice”) which you can check using a range of link management tools.

Using New Platforms

If you want to market your life coaching business well, then your marketing strategy should contain more than one advertising platform. Life coaching services can be relatively niche, so the father you can spread your influence, the more clients you will earn.

The exact platforms depend on your overall goals, but it is important to remember that you can market a business online in a huge range of ways. Building a good marketing strategy means taking these different methods into account, especially if you want to build brand awareness across multiple sites at once.

Social Media

Social media platforms can offer a huge amount of value. Not only does social media often allow for paid advertising to spread your business to more potential customers, but you can use the general nature of social media to your advantage.

If you start posting about your life coaching business regularly using relevant keywords or hashtags, then you can begin to draw in more online business just by existing on that platform.

On most social sites, this allows you to perform organic marketing at basically no cost as long as you have the right tools for the job.

This can be an incredibly important step if you are just starting an online coaching business. If you have not even gotten your first client yet, setting up a social media account allows for each communication and awareness-building during the early stages of your growth.

Beyond that, an online coaching business can really benefit from having a social media presence as a whole.

Being able to interact with clients online gives you a lot more ways to market yourself, handle customer complaints, or even adapt your business model to suit your target audience.

Directories

Getting your online coaching business on directories can be valuable for both SEO reasons and as a way of being noticed more often. A life coach directory might not be the first place that every customer turns to, but they are used more often than you might think, and getting your online business onto one can be a huge boon.

This is a huge benefit, even if these directories say nothing other than your brand name, website link, and coaching service. Being able to get your business name out there in a more direct way can help you earn additional clients over time, even if you are not marketing online yet.

Some of these directories will be entirely automatic or free to list yourself on, while others will be paid. Paying a small fee to put your wellness coaching business online like that can sometimes be worth it, especially if the directory itself is a well-trusted one.

Blogs

Creating your own blog is a great option for drawing in more coaching business, especially if you have a lot to talk about. When you start an online coaching business, you usually want to attract people who are interested in that niche, and life coaching can cover a lot of concepts.

This means that you have almost endless material to work with when writing blog posts. Whether you post about your coaching experience or just general articles that relate to a coaching service you offer, it can draw in more attention a lot faster than you might think.

Having this kind of blog platform allows you to start marketing in a more subtle way, building a thriving business by drawing attention to your blog first and foremost. From there, you can offer your online coaching services to readers whenever relevant.

Even better, having a good blog can sometimes result in other companies approaching you – either to link to you as a resource or to pay you to promote their products. This can give a small business extra brand awareness options, or an additional source of short-term revenue, making a good blog a very versatile tool.

Lead Generation

A lead is any user who has a high chance of becoming a new client, generally because they have shown some interest in what you offer. These can be the ideal client sources for any business that is struggling to get more customers, and lead generation is focused on maximizing the number of customers you are able to earn.

This means that it is one of the most effective ways to grow your online coaching business since you are putting the number of clients as your top priority. This means that you can focus on getting more sales and long-term customers over everything else.

However, lead generation is also just one tool in your arsenal. Overusing it or focusing entirely on generating leads can make any life coach business struggle since you will be missing some excellent marketing opportunities. You need to employ it alongside other marketing options and find a good balance that can work for your business.

Other Elements of Growing an Online Coaching Business

Not all of the factors behind growing your business are that large-scale, and some are actually quite small in the grand scheme of your marketing.

However, it is never a bad idea to consider them, especially if you have just chosen to start an online coaching business and have no existing marketing strategies you need to worry about.

Niche Programs

When you start an online coaching company, you are leaning into certain niches. However, some are going to be far more niche than others, even if they are only a small part of what you coach. You need to advertise everything you coach if you want the highest level of success possible.

General life coaching is very accessible, and a business coach or career coach can be important for anybody with a career. However, more specific coaching sessions can have fewer and fewer ideal clients in the online world, meaning that you have to work harder to draw in new customers.

Many businesses offer to coach customers in niche things, and they market themselves as being able to coach that. However, it is not all of their marketing – they still coach other courses too, so they market each course they coach differently to ensure that every relevant audience is captured.

Your Signature Program

If your coaching programs all revolve around one signature service, make that a core part of your business plan.

Life coaching sessions can cover all kinds of topics, but if your business mostly focuses on trying to coach clients about something like mental health, you can use that to target your marketing much more effectively.

The same goes for things like career goals coaching or spiritual coaching. They have a reduced audience overall, but this also makes the people within that audience much more starved for options, meaning that your business may gain traction faster among smaller audiences.

Session Specifics

Do you do one-on-one coaching programs or group coaching programs? If it is one-on-one, how private is it? Clients want to know these details ahead of time.

For example, if you want to draw in the ideal clients for group coaching, mention that it is group coaching. That way, you only get traffic with an interest in that kind of life coaching, while people who prefer solo coaching will move on.

You can also do this for individual ad campaigns. If one campaign promotes group sessions and another does not, then do not cross them over – that way, you are targeting both audiences equally well but drawing in both to their own respective landing pages.

Landing Pages

Speaking of landing pages, make sure that you are always delivering your clients to spaces that suit whatever brought them there.

A paid ad about a specific kind of coaching should bring them to a page about that coaching, or at least a page with a section about that kind of coaching. This boosts your SEO and helps you retain visitors that are only interested in that kind of coaching.

Imperfection and Accidental Clients

It is tempting to only market towards your ideal clients: the clients that suit your target audience perfectly. However, sometimes the non-ideal clients are just as important.

Clients’ lives are not purely focused on what you are marketing to them. They may see that you coach another course and take an interest in that, or even be willing to pay more money for niche life coaches. You simply do not know until you hear it from them.

Sometimes, marketing slightly outside of your original target audience can draw in extra clients from a market that you did not know existed. If somebody will pay money for you to coach them, then there is no reason to turn them down.

Blog Presence

It is entirely possible to become a thought leader within an area or topic that you coach, especially if you have a blog. Whether you are actually trying to create change in the industry or just offering more tips to hook in potential clients, a blog can be a great way to give your business some more power.

If your life coaches are able to start an online coaching blog and get a lot of traction, then you can use this to market yourself far more effectively.

The same can go for places like Facebook groups – a Facebook group can lead to a business coach getting their own small community built around them.

This means that you are able to offer life coach advice, coaching tips, or a whole host of other information as a method of gaining extra clients. On top of that, it will help build brand awareness since your blog will be tied to your business, and people will often end up spreading your posts around.

Reviews

Reviews matter. A good client experience means a good review, something that can really help if your SEO is poor and you are struggling to gain more customers through search results alone.

With a negative review, you often need to contact the past client and try to find a deal where you can compensate them for the problem. In exchange, you can try to get them to remove or amend the review, removing a potential hazard to your marketing.

Unconventional Options

Growing your life coach business online is not easy. Even if you are helping current clients achieve their goals, that might not mean that your life coach company is getting any more traction or earning any new clients.

Turning to unconventional options can work. Bulk email marketing is an example of something conventional but not-always-used, whereas a fully unconventional option could be something like choosing to start an online forum for coaching discussions.

Thinking outside the box always comes with some risks, but it can make a huge difference if you get lucky. Not only can you earn a lot of clients with far less effort, but you might end up with a new strategy that none of your competitors have tried before.

The only issue is that you can’t know whether it will succeed until you see the results. Backing up your experiments with solid marketing strategies can be incredibly important.

What Next?

Whatever you plan to do with your marketing next, remember that your coaching company can grow in a wide range of different ways. Not all growth has to be financial, and sometimes earning more customer leads can be enough to secure future success.

Take your time and approach each new marketing tactic with as much care as possible. If you plan ahead, it becomes a lot easier to keep yourself and your business on track.

Useful Guides

Please see some useful guides related to generating more business leads.