Combining Passion and Profit: How to Build a Successful Coaching Business
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In a time when self-improvement and personal growth are greatly valued, the opportunity to launch a coaching business is more enticing than ever. If you’re asking yourself, “how can I get started?” this post is for you. We’ll talk about the fundamental steps to creating a coaching practice that fuels your passion while getting paid because who doesn’t want to make money doing what they love to do?!
The global life coaching industry was valued at $2.85 billion in 2019 and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6.7% from 2020 to 2027. People are investing in personal growth, and you just need to decide what to focus on.
Identify Your Coaching Niche
You can coach anyone but you shouldn’t coach everyone because if you coach everyone, you cater to no one. Identifying a specific customer in mind allows you to provide specific services that solve their needs. You’ll be able to deliver the best results and position yourself as an expert.
To help identify the right target customer, start with your experience, strengths, passions, and the market demand.
Define Your Expertise: What are you good at? What are your skills, knowledge, and experience? What industries have you enjoyed working in? What education, training, or certifications did you complete that you’re proud of?
Know Your Passion: What are you genuinely interested in? What hobbies do you have? What are your natural talents? What do others say you’re passionate about?
Understand Market Demand: Is there a demand for people who need what you offer? As you do research, do you see any emerging trends or recurring themes of problems people are willing to pay to solve?
Analyze your Competitors: Who are the coaches in your chosen field, and what are they doing to attract and serve clients? What are they doing well? What could you do differently to set yourself apart?
Develop a Plan
Just as you would develop a coaching plan for your clients, creating a business plan for your coaching business makes good business sense. Your business plan serves as your roadmap and north star to clarify your goals, objectives, mission, vision, and business and financial operations. It also helps you measure and track your success, guides your decisions, and focuses on short- and long-term goals.
Part of your plan should include your business model (the service you provide and how you’ll get paid). You can focus on one type of model or combine various models that work for you and your clients.
One-on-One: Personalized attention but less scalable.
Subscription: Recurring fees means predictable revenue.
Group: More scalable but requires effective time management.
Workshops: Highly scalable and excellent for building a broader network.
Online courses: Passive income and easily accessible for clients but not tailored and lacks human connection.
There are online resources (US only) that can help guide you in starting your business, including SBA, US Chamber of Commerce, your local Chamber of Commerce, and SBDC.
Set Up Your Online Presence
Your online presence allows customers to engage with you and can establish credibility as you build authority and reputation. Most importantly, having an online presence extends your marketing reach and makes you accessible to more people, especially potential clients.
Brand Identity: Your brand identity is the outward-facing personality, appearance, and behavior of your coaching business. Several elements make up a brand identity, including visual elements (logo, color palette, typography, images, and graphics), verbal elements (your brand’s voice and tone, and the type of language used when communicating to your audience), and other elements (company name and tagline).
Website: A website allows you to reach a wider audience, generate leads, showcase your services, create a direct line of communication with your customers, and build trust and credibility. Your website is your virtual storefront. According to a study by Blue Corona, 48% of people cited a website’s design as the number one factor in deciding the credibility of a business. Many do-it-yourself tools to help you secure a domain, host, and design your website that showcases your services, success stories, and expertise. Some popular tools include GoDaddy, Squarespace, Wix, Bluehost, Hostinger, and more.
Social Media: Platforms like LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook are powerful tools to attract potential clients, engage with your audience, promote your services, grow your following, and build your brand. A report by Sprout Social shows that 57% of consumers follow brands to learn about new products or services. Share your coaching tips, client success stories, and host live Q&A sessions.
Business Tools: Once you’ve set up your online presence, leverage software to automate your workflow to get more done in less time. A few must-have tools that Coaches use today include client management software (like HoneyBook or PaperBell), an email marketing platform (like Brevo or MailChimp), accounting software (like Quickbooks Online or Freshbooks), a social media management app (like HootSuite or MeetEdgar), and a social media design tool (like Canva or Pixlr).
Design Your Coaching Packages and Services
Your coaching packages should cater to your client’s needs and budgets. Here are some things to consider:
Offer Multiple Types of Coaching Services: From offering one-on-one sessions to hosting group workshops, diversifying your services can appeal to different segments of your target audience. For example, individual sessions provide personalized attention, while group coaching promotes peer learning and interaction. As you build your business, you can expand your reach and continue to add value to your coaching portfolio by creating digital products such as eBooks or online courses.
Price Your Coaching Services by the Value You Deliver: According to the International Coach Federation, experienced coaches can charge anywhere from $200 to $500 per hour. Benchmarking your rates against these industry standards while also considering your unique value proposition is crucial. Charge not just for your time but for the life-changing value you bring to your clients. Considering a tiered pricing model can also be effective. For instance, offer basic, intermediate, and premium packages that include different levels of service and support. This ensures you can cater to various budgets while maintaining high client satisfaction.
Marketing and Promotion
Effective marketing is critical to attracting coaching clients and building a successful coaching business. A well-rounded approach combines multiple tactics, each designed to enhance visibility and establish rapport with potential clients.
First, develop a marketing plan to ensure you have a clear framework for communicating information about your value and services to your target audience. Your marketing plan ensures your marketing efforts are consistent, and consistency helps build trust and recognition. Here are some types of marketing strategies to consider.
Social Marketing: Deciding how you communicate information and value to your customers starts with answering, “Where are they hanging out online?” Is it LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok? These platforms would be a great place to market and promote your services if your potential customers usually hang out there. You can also create your own online community to directly interact and build strong relationships with your audience.
Webinars and Workshops: Hosting webinars and workshops is a great way to connect with your audience, build authority and credibility, and generate leads. Webinars are cost-effective as they lower the cost-per-lead and result in a positive ROI. Tailor your topics to address common challenges in your coaching niche, providing actionable insights and real-world solutions. It's like offering a sneak peek into the transformation you can deliver.
Email Marketing: Email marketing is another marketing tool that can get your brand, service, and value to people already interested in your coaching business. According to Oberlo, email marketing has a solid ROI and generates $42 for every $1 spent. You can build a list of your clients or potential customers and offer valuable content through email, like addressing their common problems, showcasing your expertise to help solve them, and ultimately encouraging them to book a coaching session with you.
Paid Marketing: Paid marketing, also known as paid advertising, is an online strategy where you pay to promote your services through advertising efforts. You can reach new customers and boost your brand awareness more quickly than organic efforts. This method targets your specific audience rather than waiting for customers to come to you.
Content Marketing: Content marketing focuses on creating valuable, relevant content like blog posts, articles, eBooks, videos, case studies, and podcasts to build your brand and drive engagement without directly selling to your target market. This will allow you to make a deeper connection with your audience, fostering trust and loyalty. As a Life coach, you can create educational content that helps your audience improve their life, or share a client testimonial about their experience working with you.
Influencer Marketing: You can collaborate with individuals with a large social following and leverage their influence to promote you and your services. Influencer marketing can increase sales, brand awareness, and engagement. For example, if you’re a health and wellness coach, influencers like personal trainers, fitness models, or healthy lifestyle enthusiasts can help you boost your business.
There are plenty of other ways to attract your ideal customers, like asking for referrals, identifying partners that you can cross-promote and market, guest-blogging, or podcasting.
Blend the right strategies to promote your coaching business and watch your clientele grow. By doing so, you'll not only attract coaching clients but also build long-lasting relationships that pave the way for a scalable and profitable coaching venture.
Measure Success, Iterate, and Improve
Measuring your efforts and your business’s performance can help you make informed decisions about where to invest your time and energy as you grow your coaching service. You can identify ways to improve and focus on what resources you should leverage. As you identify what’s successful and what isn’t, you can determine what you should do more of and what you should stop doing.
Activities that are important to track include marketing, sales, expenses, lead generation, client satisfaction, goal attainment, referral rate, and session attendance. You can measure these activities over a period of time such as daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annual to trend out the data and iterate your efforts to continue to improve.
It’s good practice to proactively ask for feedback from clients, business partners, mentors, and other peer coaches to know what’s working and what needs improvement.
By combining passion with a comprehensive business strategy, you’ll create a solid business foundation and continue to fuel your drive, motivation, and creativity to help you persevere through challenges, develop a strong brand identity, and ultimately increase the likelihood of success!
