If you’re a newly qualified coach, social media may seem the obvious choice for marketing your new business.
After all, it’s free, and it looks easy. You probably follow a few coaches yourself on Facebook or Instagram. But for the solopreneur coach, organic social media alone is not enough to grow a business.
Any successful business owner will tell you that posting social media content does not drive growth or sales.
Besides, coaches do not have the time to show up with engaging content day after day consistently. And even after building a large audience – which can take years for a coach working solo – the returns you get in exchange for the effort are extremely low. In the meantime, you need paying clients.
Are there smarter ways to market your coaching services online and for free?
Yes, and here are 3 of them:
1. Appear on podcasts
You can tap into large, ready-made audiences for free by appearing as a guest on other people’s podcasts.
There are already 2.4 million podcasts, and it is predicted that there will be over 400 million podcast listeners by the end of the year.
With millions of podcasts looking for guests, the marketing opportunity for coaches is ample. So, you are probably asking yourself, ”how do I start getting onto podcasts?”
The obvious place to start is people you know. Maybe another coach you met through networking has their own podcast. Familiarity with the podcaster will put you at ease and allow you to practice your material in a more natural way.
Then you can move on to pitching for other podcast guest slots. Make a list of podcasts on which you’d like to appear, and find the contact details in the show notes. Before you send an email, make sure you listen to 2 or 3 episodes first to get a feel of their content and the tone.
Then write them a great email telling what you would bring to their podcast, i.e., your specialist subject, the story you have to tell and why their audience would love it. You can also point them to your previous ’practice’ podcasts as a demonstration of your material and personality.
When you land your first podcast, be prepared.
Firstly, think about what you want to be remembered for. Secondly, you must have a web page to capture the email addresses of everyone interested in your podcast interview. The web address will be posted in the show notes as your first point of contact for potential clients.
2. Publish blogs where you’ll get the traffic
Did you know that over 90% of online experiences start with a search engine, and 8.5 billion searches are done daily on Google alone?
This is why companies invest so much in search engine optimization (SEO).
The problem for coaches is that building enough traffic to their own website (without investing a substantial amount of money) would take many years of effort.
The good news is that coaches can reach people through search engines without paying. Instead of only publishing content on your own website, you can find a larger audience for it by guest posting on other platforms that already get traffic.
Two good examples are The Coach Space and Medium.
If you have a good backstory to tell, you could go viral on Medium, whereas that would be impossible with a blog post on your own website. Another benefit of Medium is the niche-specific spaces called ‘Publications’.
Some of these publications have hundreds of thousands of followers. You have to be accepted into a publication, but the effort can be worth it. There is also the option to add an email subscription form to your Medium posts.
The Coach Space was explicitly designed for coaches to get more traffic. They will publish your blogs on their platform and even write them for you, saving you loads of time. The first blog post is free, but for a small yearly fee, you can also have all the other benefits, like a profile page, email subscriber pop-up and directory listing. You can even republish your blogs elsewhere, such as on your website.
3. Good old email
Email is often overlooked as part of a marketing strategy, which would be a mistake, especially for a coach.
With social media, there is no guarantee that everyone – or anyone – in your audience will see your posts. Your success depends too much on the algorithm of the social channel.
Whereas everyone will see an email newsletter you sent to them. They might not read it, but they cannot avoid seeing your name in their inbox. This alone makes it a powerful marketing tool.
Also, it takes less time than you think to build an audience and with much less effort than social media.
The chances are you already have a list of people you can add to your email list right now (with their permission, of course). Previous clients, for example.
Then, you must add an email subscriber form to your website to capture interest from your website. Every visitor is a potential subscriber, and they all add up. Also, every lead that contacts you can be asked if they’d like to go on your mailing list (tell them they can unsubscribe any time).
This is the quickest way to build an audience interested in buying. And last but not least, it doesn’t take a tremendous effort to send something of value to your audience regularly, e.g. a compilation of interesting reads (including some of your own content, of course). You can send them a special offer or free trial when the time is right. And you can do that for free (up to a certain amount of subscribers) using Mailchimp.