Lead Generation for Coaches

How to Attract and Convert Ideal Clients with Online Marketing

Without effective lead generation to bring clients to your website door – all online businesses are doomed to fail. It’s essential if you want to grow your coaching business to have a constant stream of new people coming into your world so they can figure out what you’re all about – and hopefully become loyal customers.

Luckily the opportunities for online marketing and promotion are huge and varied so you can find a digital strategy which works for you – and bring those new leads directly to your coaching business over and over. When you’re selling to an international audience and providing virtual services then it’s essential that you have a magnetic online marketing strategy to get the word out.

In this article we’re going to look closely at Organic Marketing and the depth you need to get to to get traction in a rapidly evolving AI market – and… without spending a ton on ads or going live on Social Media.

Understanding Your Target Audience

Taking the time to identify your ideal client is a step you’ll have gone through during your marketing process – and, I’m sure something you’ve already done. I don’t buy into the process of going too deeply into the demographics – because, people are complex and it’s frankly a time-wasting exercise to be thinking about which magazines they read and the itsy bitsy details like that. It’s better to know and understand yourself – and those that get you, “get you”. 🙂

OK, so you’ve done the job of figuring out your niche – because without a finely defined niche your marketing efforts are just throwing spaghetti at the wall.

You’ve probably also done a basic Competitor Analysis – but… I bet that was really superficial – and, you can go deeper with that:-

Conduct Keyword Research

• Use an SEO tool like SEMrush or Ahrefs to find the relevant keywords for your industry and run them through your filter to see if they make sense or not – given many keyword explorer tools now lean heavily into the AI world – not everything they throw up is helpful – so watch out for garbage!

Conduct Competitor Research

• You’ve probably come across a pretty basic SWOT analysis template before – and that will have helped you figure out who your competitors are. More than likely you’re already following them or signed up to their lists to observe how they operate.
• Again, do a deep dive SEO analysis to figure out which keywords they’re ranking for to because that’ll give you a good idea about what type of content is resonating within your niche and this allows you to closely target that and produce a better version so that your site can outrank theirs.
• Traffic Research: How are your competitor’s visitors finding their site? And… where do they go afterwards? This is a key measurement because it’s going to show you how your potential customer prefers to get their information online – and of course, how they actually behave online.

Building a Strong Online Presence

Create a Professional Website

• Design a user-friendly and visually appealing website. You don’t need to spend too much time worrying about fonts and “pretty shit” – but please, please, please make the font size readable for all of us out here with crappy eyesight and varifocals! 😉 We were 25 once too you know…
• Optimise your website for mobile devices – all modern website builders are already optimised for mobile viewing – but, once you’ve published – make sure it all looks good on your own phone.
• Use a clear and concise navigation structure so that the Search Engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, etc.) can read all your information really easily and get your site, pages and posts nicely indexed.

Leverage Social Media

• Choose platforms that align with your target audience – if you’ve carried out your full Competitor Analysis, then you’ll know which channels your customers prefer to use.
• Register your brand name with the channels at least because it’ll stop someone else grabbing them.

Content Marketing

• Create high-quality blog posts, articles, and videos. SearchGTP is taking away the ability to rank highly for what we’d call factual or ‘thin articles‘. You know how you just tap into Google “what’s x in farenheit?” – that’s an example of thin content and it’s something that the AI GTPs are going to be able to easily answer without going in depth. That’s why your articles and blog posts now need to go deep. Answering basic questions in a really generic manner is going to make it harder and harder for your site and articles to rank. So at this stage I think you should be looking at creating long form articles over 1000 words a piece.
• Optimise your content for search engines (SEO) using those long-tailed keywords you found during your keyword research – but, keep it natural.

Effective Lead Generation Strategies

Email Marketing

• Build an email list in exchange for a valuable incentive (please no more template crap! – Information is needed, signed Humans everywhere!) and send regular newsletters. Please don’t use horrible copy & paste templates – ngl, last month I got 2 emails on the same day which contained exactly the same content which I knew must’ve come from some sort of club selling “send this to your people“. I unsubscribed – guilt-free! If you can’t be bothered to actually write to your people – don’t be surprised if they can’t be bothered to buy your shit!
• Use email automation to help handle your lists, segment any which way you fancy, nurture your leads and convert them into clients. There’s a whole heap of autoresponder software out there suitable for every budget and business type.

Webinars and Workshops

• Informative webinars and workshops are a lot of bloody hard work. But, you can set them to be on-demand and available for when your leads want to view them if you’ve not got the bandwidth or capacity to ‘do it all live’. If you go down that route though, be sure to update on a fairly regularly basis because the digital and online world moves so fast it’s easy for your information to become out of date.

Paid Advertising

• This is really a scaling operation because the ad markets are extremely turbulent right now and it can get very expensive and go very wrong very fast

Networking and Partnerships

Attend industry events and conferences

• Forget the heavy flinging your business card at everyone – keep your eyes and ears open for the latest industry trends so you can stay ahead of the curve. TOP TIP: Feeling the crushing guilt of being an introvert and not knowing how to handle a networking event knowing you should be talking to someone but feeling sick inside? Look out for the most nervous scared looking person in the room and make a beeline for them – they’ll be fucking delighted you’ve done the ‘hard work’.

Join Online Communities and Forums

• Join online communities and forums. That doesn’t mean spamming the shit out of your product or service – but instead keep your eyes open and think about what people are saying. It’s a great opportunity to find out what’s going on at street level. I love Reddit – despite not being in to the Socials – I love a slice of Reddit. 🙂

Tracking and Analysing Your LEAD GENERATION Results

Use Analytics Tools

• Track website traffic and user behaviour from Google with Google Console and GA4. Get much deeper information from an SEO tool such as Semrush. This will all be evolving over the next few months as Bing (ChatGTP) takes a bigger bite out of the Search Engine apple.
• Monitor the performance of your marketing campaigns so you know exactly what your numbers are, what’s working – and what’s not.

Adjust Your Strategy

• Continuously analyse your results and make the necessary adjustments to improve your growth. Bad feedback/results is just information – make it work for you!
• Test different approaches to identify what works best because just because something is working for your competitor – does not necessarily mean it’s going to work for you.

Conclusion

Getting leads is never going to be a ‘one and done’ exercise – especially in the fast-moving world of digital business and online marketing. Trends that work today will not be the same ones which work in 6 months. Consumers are savvy and quickly tire of desperate attempts to open their wallets!

To get a reliable stream of leads to your website with your online marketing efforts you need to take a sustainable approach because burning through cash on ads isn’t a sensible long-term strategy – and, if you never develop the skills to grow your coaching business long-term then you’re going to crash and burn and feel like utter shit when you have a big launch you can’t replicate.

Start with your website. Optimise for technical SEO so that the search engines can actually read your website. Then, utilise your keyword strategy by creating quality content and let the search engines work for you.

You can read more about how SEO can grow your business here.