How to Market Yourself as a Life Coach: Top 5 Mistakes (and Fixes)

Ever wondered if you’re handling your marketing the right way? 

Check out our guide on how to market yourself as a life coach below.

Working as a life coach is one of the most meaningful careers you can pursue as a professional. You get to touch lives and make a real difference. However, it’s no secret that sometimes, maximizing your reach to help more people comes with a bit of a challenge. As a result, many people are wondering how to market yourself as a life coach. 

Am I doing things right? Have I been using the best strategies to expand my reach? How about the marketing platforms I currently use? Am I maximizing their full potential or finding it hard to navigate them? 

These might be some of the questions you have as you try to figure out a way to market yourself. Let’s find out the answers as we tackle the top 5 marketing mistakes of life coaches and the best ways to address such problems. 

#1. Having no clear message and defined target market

We get it; you want to try to serve as many people as possible. This is quite a common trend among a lot of new practitioners. However, while it may seem like the most logical approach, it could hurt your practice. When you aim to serve a broad market, you end up sending unclear messages. Consequently, your process fails to establish strong and meaningful connections – a crucial part of building a successful life coaching practice. 

The solution: When you’re thinking about how to market yourself as a life coach, it should start with your target audience. Your brand message needs to resonate with your target market. It will strengthen your coaching practice and differentiate you from the many other life coaches out there. 

Then, with a clear and focused branding message, you get to narrow down on your target market. It will help you build a more streamlined approach to doing your business. 

#2. Not looking ahead when you plan your marketing

If you’re wondering why you do not see results even after exhausting your efforts and resources on every single platform available, then you may be doing something wrong. It could be  the following:

• You have weak calls to action in your platforms.
• You’re not establishing engagement when it matters the most.
• You don’t follow up on your leads (interested clients, phone inquiries, people who engage with your content, etc.)
• You don’t analyze essential data for your business (social media engagement, phone inquiries, email inquiries, website visits, etc.)

Note that marketing a life coaching practice has significantly changed over the years. Nowadays, it will require intensive planning and understanding of your customer’s journey. 

The solution: Build a robust marketing funnel that helps you turn your leads into clients. This will allow you to establish the key touchpoints to engage with your potential list of clients and a system that works for meeting your long-term goals. 

#3. Not using your social media pages the right way

Another mistake we need to discuss in this guide about how to market yourself as a life coach is the poor use of social media pages, which includes the following practices: 

• Deep diving into social media marketing without an actual content marketing plan
• Using irrelevant content and hashtags
• Looking at the wrong Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as vanity metrics
• Using too much automation when posting content or engaging with users
• Focusing too much on your practice instead of your target audience

The solution: People use social media because they want to engage with real human users. If they can quickly tell that you are inauthentic or the posts you share seemed automated and impersonal, your engagement quickly dips. It would help if you also worked on your social media marketing plan. This way, you have a more targeted path to engaging and connecting with people that matter most to your practice. 

#4. Creating inconsistent content

We can’t stress enough the importance and value of having good quality content. It makes you stand out and allows you to provide better value for people who badly need your help. If you insist on publishing irrelevant, redundant, and too sales-focused content, you may lose viewership, and in the long run, potential leads for your marketing funnel.

The solution: Work on your content marketing plan that builds credibility and trust. It should incorporate your branding message, key touchpoints for target clients, and the best content marketing practices today.  

#5. Relying too much on digital sharecropping

Nicholas Carr coined the term “digital sharecropping” to describe how content produced on social media platforms like Facebook no longer belongs to the businesses that created them.

Simply put, this means that if Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or whatever platform you use to market your business decides to get rid of your pages, you may lose your digital presence, not to mention a key source of revenue.

Moreover, if they decide to implement changes such as charging fees for using the platform, you have to incur additional expenses. 

The solution: Don’t just stick to building your life coaching empire on social media! Instead, you should also create a website. It’s the one platform that you can fully control and change anytime. With SEO, content marketing, and paid ads, you can quickly turn your website into your primary marketing channel. 

How to Market Yourself as a Life Coach: Doing it right with Hope and Healing Solutions

Are you quite guilty of the top 5 mistakes we discussed above? This is your chance to correct them! With our help at Hope and Healing Solutions, you can make the necessary adjustments to address your current marketing issues. 

We offer an extensive selection of marketing services, including website design, SEO, reputation management, content marketing, video marketing, online ads, social media, and marketing funnels creation. Feel free to reach us today to start planning your new life coaching marketing strategies!