12 Focused Life Coach Marketing Strategies (To Help Fill Your Programs)

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Does the whole idea of life coach marketing seem to you like a giant mystery? 

You’re not alone!

After all, you’re great at helping coaching clients reach their goals. 

But when it comes to marketing, social media marketing, your social media presence, and creating content consistently, it can feel like you’re wearing too many 10-gallon hats, right? I know exactly what you mean. 

Coming up with content ideas and consistently showing up on social media to share your content and engage with potential life coaching clients can be overwhelming. Especially if you don’t feel like a natural writer or expert marketer. It’s a lot.

But don’t worry, as life coaches, creating compelling content (consistently) doesn’t have to be a struggle.

In fact, life coach marketing can be a golden opportunity to attract your target audience of ideal coaching clients and showcase your unique value in your authentic voice. 

Is it time to use effective strategies that make your content shine, bring in leads, and grow your services business with ease?

Great, then let’s explore 12 life coach marketing strategies that can transform the way you attract and engage your dream clients. 

12 Focused Life Coach Marketing Strategies (You Can Use Now)

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#1] Write your life coaching clients’ backstory

To truly connect with future coaching clients, it’s essential to start your content creation efforts from a solid, informed foundation: a compelling backstory that speaks to their unique situation, needs, and desires. 

This means going beyond typical, generic target market details like age and income which is where many service business owners stop describing their clients.

When you go deeper, you can better understand clients’ urgent challenges and deepest motivations. Including the problems they’ll hire you to help them solve. The dreams they want you to help them achieve.

By tapping into their perspective, such as how they got into their problematic situation, and building empathy, you can tailor your content to meet them where they’re stuck. 

With this deep clarity, you’ll be able to make a real impact and stand out in your industry with your social posts, blogs, emails, and website pages. 

So if you’re serious about growing your health coach business or life coaching business and making a positive impact on even more people, as I know you are, get to know your dream clients like no one else can. Document their backstory.

One note, if you’re in the I-hate-to-write camp, your ideal client backstory is a low-pressure life coach marketing project. 

You don’t share it. No one sees your dream client backstory. It’s your personal resource. So no worries about editing. Simply make sure that you can easily find and review the backstory for details whenever you create content.

 Okay, you may say, now what?

To put together an ideal customer or client backstory, ask yourself questions like:

When crafting and implementing your life coach marketing plan, shouldn’t you create captivating content? The kind that stands out to your potential clients, customers, and students?

Then you must start by understanding your clients on a deeper level. 

Rather than skimming the surface of their pain points, invest time and thought into uncovering their colorful backstory. This can enable you to discover why they find themselves in their current situation.

Investing your brain power to understand your best target clients’ story will transform your content. 

You can then relate directly to their challenges and aspirations, making your content stand out. You can be in a better position to empower your audience, once you’re intimately familiar with their world.

As you infuse your unique understanding of their experiences into your blogs and social media posts, you can also build a stronger connection with your audience. You can demonstrate empathy for their frustrations.

By the way, make this life coach marketing exercise easy. Your clients’ backstory can be pages full of bullet points if you like.

How will you use your client backstory? Here are 3 ways:

⇒ To refresh your memory when writing content for marketing and social media marketing 

⇒ To “educate” ChatGPT when you query the artificial intelligence (AI) writing app for content ideas

⇒ When you hire virtual assistants or contractors, to bring them up to speed on who you serve 

Next up: the high-priority task of choosing topics your clients search for.

#2] Choose client-specific content topics

Is choosing blog, website, and social media post topics that your clients care about a stumbling block for you? 

Tired of staring at a blank screen with that pesky blinking cursor mocking you? 

I hear you. We all get stuck there from time to time.

As a services solopreneur or health coach, finding time to create awesome content on the regular can feel overwhelming with all of your other responsibilities. 

It all starts with juicy topics that your audience of prospective perfect clients can’t resist.

Keep in mind, your overall content strategy success depends on:

Let’s look deeper into topic selection so you can conquer content creation.

Get your creative life coach marketing juices flowing with these simple tips to brainstorm new subjects! 

The best way to brainstorm is to simply start writing, without editing or revising. Let yourself freely generate raw, messy writing from your heart and gut. You can polish it later.

Want extra sources of inspiration to jumpstart your brainstorming? Try these…

Now, take your captivating topics and zhuzh them up with our next life coach marketing strategy.

#3] Unleash your inner storyteller

They say, facts tell and stories sell. This applies in a major way for life coaches. Why? Because our lizard brains love a good story. 

So when you want to ‘zhuzh’ something up, like a designer, you add an element to make it more appealing. Now for designers, this might be a bold area rug or spicy colored throw pillows, as a life coach, you’ll use a story.

All the same, you may say, “But I’m not a writer.” I understand, and you’re not alone.

But here’s the thing:

When crafting life coach marketing content so you can book more discovery calls, you don’t have to be a storyteller like J.K. Rowling. 

You only have to imagine the situation that resonates for your One Person. Your ideal client.

For instance, this is how I began a popular blog post about how to build your credibility with dream clients using your original content …

“Hey,” Kendall said to herself in the mirror. “It’s time to stop being so hard on yourself…”

To ensure privacy for your coaching clients, you can make a life coaching client or customer success story anonymous. 

Here’s a rough idea… 

Now, I completely made this one ^^ up, as a simple story intro example to appeal to moms who desperately need help getting their toddlers on a regular sleep schedule.  

 Jilly, at Baby Sleep Made Simple, does an excellent job of telling the story of her 2-year old’s sleep issues and how she solved them. 

How can you adopt this life coach marketing strategy?

Choose segments of your experience you’re comfortable sharing, when writing content to entice future clients to discover your services.

Then, you want to make sure to add our next crucial life coach marketing step so you can lead a future client closer to hiring you.

In our next strategy, we look at how to remind readers to take the next step to learn about your services.

#4] Promote your life coaching prospect’s next step 

When growing a health or life coaching business, using content and social media marketing to promote your podcast episodes or blogs is invaluable to make potential customers aware of your services. 

Your next vital life coach marketing step? Getting them into a conversation.

To inspire customers to set up a discovery call, make the next step easy by providing a link to your scheduling app (like Calendly). 

Invite them to book a strategy or discovery call by telling them what’s in it for them.

Assure them that your coaching business is different from others, you won’t simply pitch your services on the strategy call. 

To sweeten the pot, what extra value can you offer after the call, whether they decide to enroll in your coaching package or not? 

Can you provide a personalized coaching checklist of next steps? 

How about a customized 3-step life game plan to help them get started?  Here’s what I offer, as an example.

Or something else they’d find incredibly helpful?

Make it simple for you to both create, and update, for each prospective client as you complete their  discovery call. 

In the next life coach marketing strategy, we’ll talk about: educating when you create content.

If you want your no-cost, personalized next steps marketing + content plan, set up a discovery call here.

#5] Teach in your life coaching business content

As a caring health or life coaching solopreneur, you can likely get behind this definition of marketing: 

Marketing is education. Marketing is serving in advance. 

// cynthia trevino

Marketing is giving. It’s teaching and sharing baby steps to help your readers get unstuck in their life.

By sharing bits of your life and expertise, you’re letting potential clients get to know you and your teaching or coaching style.

Sharing your life expertise and coaching baby steps in your life coach marketing content is an awesome digital marketing strategy for life coaches. It’s also a super effective way to make sure your content is in alignment with your values and your goals.

To find life coaching topics to educate your audience about, consider: 

• What are the exact, persistent frustrations she can’t get beyond?
• What’s blocking her from reaching her life or career goals?
• What solutions has she already tried that didn’t work?
• What lessons are others in your industry not sharing?
• What specific problems does she talk about with her best frie

Here’s a thoughtful journaling exercise; how would your dream client fill in these sentences?

If I don’t find a way to fix _______, I don’t know how I can cope.

I’m sick and tired of ________.

I’m so frustrated by ________, because it’s keeping me from ________.

I wish I could finally stop ________, so I can _________.

It’s time I found a way to ________, once and for all. Then I can ________.

Once you’ve identified your potential coaching clients’ worst problems, you’ll have a trove of website content topics. You can also reuse these topics on social media for your life coach marketing plan (more about that shortly). 

Happily, you’ll also have an excellent starting point to focus a new group program on if you choose.

Let’s delve into how to bask in your happy clients’ testimonials next, shall we?

#6] Show how you help clients in your life coaching business

Enthusiastic customer testimonials are valuable life coaching business assets that you can share across multiple platforms. It’s a trust-building way to build credibility for your brand! 

Be sure to showcase these glowing reviews on your website and occasionally post them on social media. Also, include them in emails to your subscribers.

But here’s something really interesting: You can expand on your coaching business success stories by creating dedicated blog posts that offer insight into how you helped your clients in specific cases. 

While you don’t need to share your expert secrets, providing helpful information can be beneficial to readers facing similar issues. 

These micro case studies can help your readers see what it’s like to work with you.

⇒ Use your happy customers’ experiences to position your expertise and highlight the unique value of working with you. 

⇒ Show how your life coaching clients went from discouraged to determined while working with you.

 How? 

• Outline client’s initial problems 
• Summarize steps you advised them to take
• Explain broadly how you tackled the challenge
• Describe the positive impact your coaching had on their life

Whenever possible, be sure to include your coaching clients’ own words in all of your coaching business and marketing content.

Sharing testimonials on social media can be effective. Here’s an example of how Sue B. Zimmerman, @TheInstagramExpert, shares a testimonial on her Instagram profile. You can create and share something similar about your life coaching clients’ experiences.

You’ve sweated blood to start and expand your business, haven’t you? So now let’s look at how you can build the all-important trust factor with your audience.

#7] Select key parts of your story to share

We all know that people prefer to buy from businesses they know, like, and trust. 

But how do you, as a service provider establishing your brand online, build those valuable qualities? 

Sure, there are various strategies, such as maintaining a consistent online presence and engaging on social media. 

However, one of the most powerful ways to establish trust with your your target market audience of dream clients is through sharing parts of your story. The parts you’re comfy sharing. Of course, you have boundaries, so decide what yours are and keep them. 

As author and consultant Annette Simmons puts it,

When you talk in stories, your words turn into color, your requests turn into a mission, and people find you more compelling.

Annette Simmons, Author, Consultant

So, don’t resist the power of telling your story because it can make you more memorable and connect with readers on a deeper level.

Please learn from my mistakes. Initially, for years, I resisted telling my story in marketing coaching business content. 

That is, until writing my Amazon #1 bestselling book She Markets: A Guide for Women Entrepreneurs. (With a lot of help from Jim Butz, my husband, I self-published it too.)

Thankfully, my wonderful Content Development editor wisely advised me to include parts of my story to make a stronger connection with my readers.

That said, take your time and consider how telling parts of your story can enhance the lessons you teach and build more trust with future clients. 

It’s your call but, if you’re in a crowded industry, like life coaching, sharing your story has the power to make you stand out online. It can make you and your life coach marketing unforgettable.

Along with telling bits of your own story, adopting copywriting rules can be super helpful too, let’s discuss those now.

#8] Follow essential copywriting rules for your life coaching business

As a life coach who focuses deeply on your clients, this is an easy rule to follow: in every piece of content, talk, write to “The One”. 

When you’re looking to fill your coaching programs with clients who love your work, speak directly to your one dream, ideal client.  In each and every piece of your life coach marketing.

Imagine this: you’re sitting at a cafe with them, and they’ve just poured out their heart. What do you say to give them hope? Write that in your content. 

⇒ Write in chunks: Tackling the easiest part of writing a piece first can make the whole project flow better, faster. 

I start writing by drafting my favorite section of a blog post or an email first. If you do the same, you’ll have the wind at your back to finish it.

⇒ Make writing a part of your business day: as a solo services entrepreneur, you’ll do a ton of writing: emails, blogs, podcast outlines, web pages, social media profiles, social posts, your life coach marketing plan, and more. 

So to make writing easier, if it’s not your fave activity, try writing at least a page every day. That way you’ll get better and writing will become easier.

⇒ Energize your writing with a conversational voice: avoid using technical terms or jargon unless you’re certain your audience understands them.

Follow this rule on your website pages, in emails to your list, in social media posts–everywhere you’re writing to connect with future clients.   

Again, practice writing: They say, practice makes perfect. Practice makes you a more confident writer. This rule applies no matter what skill you’re looking to polish. 

I promise you, writing everyday, and shifting your mindset from not-a-writer, to writing to connect with dream clients will be a powerful boost.

In the next strategy, we’ll see how to get the most mileage from your writing.

#9] Recycle, republish everything you write

Yes, you can, you should, you MUST leverage your own content in your life coach business. 

• Recycle blog posts into social media snippets. 
• Remix articles you’ve previously written into blog posts. 
• Combine your best strategies, lessons into an Instagram carousel. 
• Mash up webpage content into podcast episode outlines.
• Rework old articles into blog posts or emails.
• Test, trial, experiment to see what format of re-mixed content your audience responds to.

With help from Laren Graterol, a super-talented graphic designer, here’s a LinkedIn carousel repurposed from one of my blog posts.

It’s your intellectual property. Reuse your content however you find it helps you to connect with dream clients.

See, even if you hate to write, once you’ve created a content piece–you can reuse it! 

Now, stay with me as we look at your creation flow in the next section.

#10] Find + schedule your own creation flow

There’s a time worn saying, “What doesn’t get scheduled, doesn’t get done.”

That’s so true for me because I’ve tried content creation and content sharing both ways: with a schedule and without one. 

Don’t know about you, but if I don’t have reminders on my calendar about keeping up with all the key actions and projects to run my business, too many won’t get done.

Because, I’ll look up and think, wow, has it really been 3 weeks (or longer) since I posted on Instagram? 

Test your best times to create content, when you’re most creative and have the least distractions.

What do I mean by creation flow? For a blog post these are my steps, spread out over several days. These may not be consecutive days.

Day 1

Day 2

Day 3

Day 4

Day 5

Publish final post into my WordPress site, SheMarketsMentor

Day 5 – Day 365

Each of us has our own rhythm for creation and sharing, you’ll find yours.

The next strategy is not to be missed: calls-to-action.

#11] Use Calls-to-Action in all your life coach marketing  

 

When it comes to life coach marketing, a strong call-to-action (CTA) is vital for guiding your audience towards the next step in their customer journey with your business. 

Depending on the purpose of your content piece, choose the appropriate CTA that aligns with your goals. 

You want to suggest the next, best, step for how your reader (or listener) can progress from stranger to paying client. 

Whether it’s inviting them to read another blog post, listen to your podcast, schedule a discovery call, download a free resource, or enroll in your coaching program, your CTA should be compelling and clearly communicate the value they will receive by taking action.

Examples of CTAs:

• Click on website links (inserted in the weekly email to your list)
• Schedule a discovery / strategy call with you
• Check out your program / course
• Buy your book on Amazon
• Respond to your survey
• Read another blog post
• Connect on social media
• Share your blog on social media
• Answer a question in your Instagram post
• Download your meaty freebie and opt-in to your email list

#12] Take one of these three actions

Entrepreneur and founder of global small fundraising platform Kiva.org, Jessica Jackley wisely said,

Deciding what NOT to do is as important as deciding what to do.

Jessica jackley,founder, kiva.org

It’s important to recognize that you don’t have to do all your business or marketing jobs yourself. Whatever tasks you don’t enjoy doing or feel confident about, consider making one of three decisions:

1. Automate it.
2. Delegate it.
3. Dump it.

I’ve always known the importance of outsourcing major tasks like taxes and website development, but I underestimated how much time and stress a virtual assistant could save me in other areas of my business. 

I promise you, there are tons of life coach marketing projects where  a virtual assistant can be a valuable asset. These range from graphic design and choosing brand colors and fonts to creating PDF lead magnets, designing landing pages, revising webpages, and conducting research. 

This is true, even if you’re just starting out or your services business is a part time business.

As solopreneurs, we wear a boatload of hats and often find ourselves overwhelmed with the endless to-do list. If you’re like me in the beginning, the thought of all of the creating content, managing social media, and keeping up with all the life coach marketing tasks can be daunting. 

But here’s a lesson I’ve (gratefully) learned along the way: you don’t have to do it all by yourself.

I understand that as a team of one, hiring virtual assistants might not always be feasible within a limited budget. 

However, finding alternative solutions to lighten your workload is crucial. Think of it as finding creative ways to delegate or eliminate tasks that aren’t your strengths or that drain your energy.

Instead of feeling swamped, consider these strategies to optimize your content creation process:

1. Prioritize: Focus on the core aspects of content creation that align with your business goals and resonate with your dream clients.

2. Repurpose: Make the most of your existing content by remixing it into different formats, such as turning blog posts into video scripts or social media snippets.

3. Plan Ahead: Create a content calendar to map out your topics, key messages, and deadlines. This helps you stay organized and ensures a steady flow of content.

4. Batch Tasks: Dedicate specific blocks of time to write drafts, finalize drafts, find graphic images, or schedule social media posts. Implementing these steps, you can work more efficiently and maintain the consistency that’s crucial to build trust online.

 6. Find Your Tools: Explore affordable or free content creation tools and resources that can streamline your process, such as graphic design platforms, social media schedulers, and keyword research tools.

7. Experiment with AI Apps: If you’ve dipped your toe into the exploding world of Artificial Intelligence writing apps, (ex. ChatGPT) you know they have the potential to save a boatload of time. To make AI work for you, treat the app like it’s your newbie, junior, needs-handholding assistant that it is. Always revise AI produced content; verify that it’s accurate and in your voice.

7. Seek Support: Find your peeps in online communities, Facebook groups, and networks of like-minded solopreneurs. Share ideas, collaborate, and learn from each other’s experiences.

Remember, the key is to find a balance that works for you. While hiring virtual assistants might not be an immediate option, implementing these strategies will help you navigate the content creation journey more efficiently and effectively. 

Keep in mind, when it comes to your marketing efforts, you don’t have to do it all alone.

By outsourcing life coach marketing tasks and more, you can focus on what you do best – serving your clients, writing content, and filling your programs. 

I promise, it’s okay to ask for help and delegate tasks that aren’t your strengths. Investing in a virtual assistant can be a game-changer for your solopreneur journey.

• Set up your social media posts using schedulers like Hootsuite or Edgar
• Design the layout for your lead magnets in PDF format
• Publish blog posts on your website, add links, insert images
• Make changes to web pages 
• Edit your blog post article by being “a second set of eyes”

Conclusion

Today, you might feel too unqualified to write content that engages your future clients, but you’re not.

Today, you might feel that it’s too overwhelming to even attempt to create marketing content to share on social media, but it’s not.

Today, you might feel that marketing content is a time-suck, a chore, and not for you, but again, it’s not.

You’re an amazing solopreneur and you’re here reading to improve your knowledge. 

That’s all it takes to begin your powerful journey to crafting content that inspires future clients to say, “I want to work with you!”

You can embrace a content creation approach that aligns with your strengths and values, allowing you to attract your dream clients effortlessly.

Promise you’ll keep going, would you?

Because, today, more than ever, the humans around you have ginormous problems to solve. There are customers, clients, and students out there who need your work.

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