MadeByHelena

Getting Clients as a Health Coach

Picking fresh olives off an olive tree

This is the part that you really want to know about, the part that everything leads to. Your brand and website are only as useful as the contribution they make towards getting you clients.

There are a million marketing and business books out there, thousands of business and marketing coaches, even more courses on marketing and growing your business, and certainly no lack of strategies to promoting your business and getting clients.

I have learned, taught and tried a lot of these approaches. I can't tell you what's best for YOU and what will work best for YOU. But I do know that starting from a place of awareness will get you far.

I mentioned how building a strong brand strategy helps in making decisions in every aspect of your business, and that includes your marketing approach to getting clients. You want to clarify who you are, what you stand for, your values and strengths, and who your ideal clients are FIRST before ever thinking about your marketing.

Here are two examples to bring across the point:

  1. The first health coach is really keen to build their business and help people. She's excited and heard from a friend about this business coach who helps health coaches fill their client roster. She joins that person's programme, spends a few thousand dollars, and learns the basics of marketing. She also sees a lot of other health coaches use Instagram, LinkedIn and TikTok to build an audience, and decided that's what she should go and do as well.

    After some time she realises how stressed and burned out she feels from the pressure of "having to" post every day/week and that her client roster isn't full at all.

    So she goes looking for more tips, resources, coaches, and solutions. She finds another business coach, another online course, another book, another recommendation from someone else who tells her what she should do and what worked for them.

    It's a never-ending cycle of "never enough" and chasing silver bullets. It's a marketing approach based on scarcity and "the grass is greener on the other side".

  2. The second health coach goes out and practises her coaching. She gets practise clients (referrals from friends, family, acquaintances) and builds her skills. After a while she takes a step back to consider who she enjoyed working with the most and for what reasons. After the agreed number of practise sessions, she might even make an offer to a few of those clients to continue coaching with her for a reduced fee. She builds relationships and skills, and most importantly gets to know herself AND her clients really well.

    When she starts to think about expanding and growing her business to get clients outside of her initial practise client base, she knows who she wants to work with and what type of clients she wants more of. She also understands what their struggles are, what words they use to describe them, and what they wish for in their life.

    All of that knowledge and relationship-building leads to 1) new client referrals, 2) a great understanding that she can now use to build her brand and attract more of those ideal clients, because she knows what will resonat

    In terms of marketing and getting new clients, this health coach also knows where her dream clients hang out, how they spend their time, what they're looking for in a coach and so much more. This means she knows whether they spend time on Instagram and whether that would be a good place for her her marketing. And, what's also important (!), even if her ideal clients might be on Instagram, but the coach herself doesn't enjoy consistently posting on social media, she can consider other avenues and approaches that overlap with where her dream clients can be found.

This is where branding shines - it combines your unique skills, values, strengths, and preferences with your ideal clients' values, viewpoints, lives, habits, etc., and allows you to make educated, strategic decisions that will lead to results (i.e. new clients).

When you think about how to get clients as a health coach, ask yourself some questions:

What do you enjoy when it comes to marketing?
What do you already know as it relates to marketing?
How did you get your last few clients who you really enjoyed working with?
Where do your dream clients hang out?
How much time do you want to spend on your marketing?

Here are a few (common) ideas and approaches to getting clients as a health coach:

  1. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), done through blogging/strategic content, keyword optimisation on your website, etc.

  2. Social media (if you pick this, focus on only ONE channel to begin with!)

  3. Building partnerships (e.g. with functional medicine practitioners or yoga studios)

  4. In-person events (teaching/workshops)

  5. Direct outreach (e.g. sending someone a personal, genuine, meaningful message on any platform)

  6. Community building (e.g. growing a Facebook group)

  7. Building an email list and continuously "nurturing" your audience there

If you take this considered, thoughtful approach to evaluating what makes sense for YOU when it comes to your marketing and business growth, I have all the confidence in the world that you will (even if it takes time) find the approach that works, and that will get you health coaching clients.