Any new coach will realize that there is a lot of competition in the life coaching industry and if you want to be a successful coach, you have to learn how to market your life coaching business. 

In the quest to reap results from marketing, companies tend to focus on tactics. They spend their time and resources creating a better brochure, upgrading the website, or running a new ad campaign. However, often the greatest leaps in marketing effectiveness come from focusing on how it all ties together. Here are three steps for you to improve your marketing effectiveness.

How to Market Your Life Coaching Business 

Know what you need. Marketing’s main job is to feed the sales team with nice, warm leads. The first step towards marketing your life coaching business is to understand how much and what kind of food your sales people need.

Start with your sales goals and work backward. You’ll need to answer the following questions:

1. What is your annual new business revenue goal?

2. How many new clients does this represent?

3. What percentage of qualified opportunities do your sales people actually close?

4. What percentage of leads actually become qualified opportunities?

5. How many leads do your marketing efforts need to generate for the sales team?

Using this information, marketing planning becomes much more focused and you can determine how many new inquiries your marketing must generate in order for the sales team to meet their goals. 

Every activity in the plan should in some way contribute to generating inquiries and sales leads. If you can’t trace an activity to this result, don’t spend the money.

Match your marketing process to the buying process. Unless you are selling an impulse item, the decision to purchase your coaching product or service is based on a series of small decisions. Marketing helps to facilitate, and hopefully accelerate, the decision-making process by presenting the right information to the prospect at the right time and from the right source.

It is critical to understand the entire process your clients go through while deciding to buy your product or service. A typical buying process could be something like the following. The prospect:

1. Becomes aware that he or she has a need

2. Identifies options – often a list of coaches who offer a solution

3. Researches the various solutions

4. Creates a “shortlist”

5. Checks references

6. Negotiates

7. Purchases

Information needs are different at each point in the buying process. A successful marketing plan matches these needs. It allows you to create awareness among your target market by engaging them in a flow of communication that helps navigate their way through the buying process. A marketing plan that fails to meet the prospect’s needs at each step of the process won’t deliver as many qualified leads.

Make sure your sales and marketing people are on the same page. It is truly astonishing how many companies suffer from a disconnection between sales and marketing. A sure sign that your company has that problem is when you cannot get an answer after asking this question “which marketing programs result in revenue?” You’ll likely hear marketing people complain that the sales team doesn’t follow up on leads and you’ll hear sales people say that the leads are worthless. You cannot get an answer because no one knows.

Disconnected sales and marketing strategies result in burned leads, wasted efforts, lengthy sales cycles, and low revenue. It is well worth the effort to improve team communication.

One of the easiest and most effective places to start with is to gather your sales and marketing teams together and develop a common definition of the word “lead”. Ask everyone for their definition and you’ll likely find the sales team has a very different view than your marketing team. Now work together to establish a common definition and use this definition to guide marketing in developing leads before handing them off to sales.

These steps are good starting points for you to learn how to market your life coaching business and make your marketing initiatives more effective. Of course, there is much more you can do to enhance the process so that your efforts produce greater results; but by taking these three steps you’ll be well on your way.

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