Health Coach Marketing: Tailored Strategies to Get More Clients
For health coaches today, great marketing represents a critical differentiator. In an increasingly saturated health and wellness market, the top health coaches are those who stand out on social media, appear in more web searches, and ultimately get in front of the most potential clients.
Well executed health coach marketing can be the sole reason you find success in this field. So what does it take? In this tailored guide, we’ll show you how to position your coaching practice to get more clients and to stand out in the digital age. We’ll cover the importance of niching down your branding, types of marketing that are worth your time, and immediately actionable steps to get started with your marketing machine. Let’s get right into it.
What Is Health Coach Marketing?
Health coach marketing involves strategies and techniques specifically tailored to coaches within the health and wellness space. Common goals of marketing for health coaches include increasing online visibility, developing credibility, and getting more clients.
The idea is simple: As a coach in a crowded market, what can you do to stand out and rise to the top of the pack? Fortunately for you, the grand majority of coaches don’t yet have it figured out. That means there's a major upside opportunity for health coaches who can be quicker to the punch—those who get ahead and start building their brands to create a moat as more coaches inevitably enter the market.
How Great Marketing Elevates Great Coaches
When executed well, digital marketing does more than just broadcast a message—it builds bridges between coaches and potential clients, fostering trust and credibility even before a client’s first session begins. Further, it creates a system by which a coach can enjoy a consistent flow of new leads for years on end, often at little cost to the coach.
How exactly? Through time-tested marketing strategies, like content marketing, SEO, brand building, and social media posting. We’ll cover more of the specifics shortly, but coaches can think of their marketing investments as akin to planting a garden. While the initial groundwork requires effort, once the seeds are sown and the plants are growing, the garden will consistently bear fruit. In the same way, a strong marketing foundation can help create a solidified personal brand, a community of interested prospects, and steady lead flow.
Great marketing allows coaches to do what they do best: coaching. It takes work, especially at the beginning. But the end result is well worth the time and effort.
The Importance and Value of Niching Down
If you self-identify as a health coach, you’re already familiar with the idea of niching down. You’ve taken the first step to say, “Okay, I am not just a ‘coach’ in a general sense…I specifically focus on clients wanting to work on their health.” If that sounds like you, good! But we need to go a step further.
In order to have any chance of standing out and articulating a clear offering in the health coaching space, you’ll need to get more specific. That’s largely because “health” is such a broad term that encapsulates a wide range—from nutrition, to dieting, to weight loss, to exercise, to mental health, to athletics. With no standardization around what really defines a “health coach,” it’s your responsibility to wear your marketing cap to specify your own flavor or coaching.
Here are a few examples of niche health coaches who would have a much easier time finding and satisfying a target audience through marketing:
Plant-Based Diet Coach: Assists clients in transitioning to or maintaining a vegetarian or vegan diet while ensuring balanced nutrition.
Senior Wellness Coach: Concentrates on health, fitness, and nutrition needs for the elderly, considering mobility, strength, and chronic conditions.
Mindful Eating Coach: Teaches clients to tune into their body signals, break free from diet culture, and adopt a more intuitive approach to eating.
Somatic Coach: Enhances clients’ holistic well-being by focusing on the mind-body connection.
There’s no shortage of ideas here. What exactly are you great at within the health space? Who exactly do you want to serve? You don’t have to go so narrow as to cut out most of the market. But you should be able to select some particular niches that you’re particularly adept at serving.
Types of Marketing Worth Your Time as a Health Coach
With some clarity around your health coaching niches, you’ll be empowered to build a personal brand and marketing materials to cater to those spaces. By leveraging a niche approach, your audience may be smaller than it would be as a more generalized “health coach,” but your marketing materials will have way more impact when they get in front of the right people.
With great niche marketing, like-minded prospects will be thrilled when they discover that you specialize in a shared interest. But how and where should you try to find those prospects? Here are some recommended types of marketing that are probably worth your time.
Content Marketing
Content marketing for health coaches involves writing articles or blogs centered on health tips, nutrition insights, or fitness routines. The idea is to create content that brings highly relevant and qualified web searchers or social media users to your site or profiles. We’ve written before about SEO for coaches and content marketing for coaches—related topics that both deserve a spot in your marketing mix as you aim to get your ideas in front of your target audiences.
Social Media Marketing
In addition to your blog or website, social media is a worthy outlet for publishing thought leadership and brand-building content. Social media can be a goldmine for health coaches. The key is to figure out where your audience hangs out and what kind of content they engage in.
For example, are your ideal coaching clients avid users of Reddit, where perhaps they share recipes and health tips in certain subreddits? Or perhaps you want to leverage Instagram and Tik Tok, where you can post video selfies sharing your wellness tips of the day. (Check out this article for more on relevant social media platforms for coaches).
Finding the right social media mix is equal parts 1. Where your audience hangs out and 2. Your skill set for content creation. Follow what you’re great at, and marketing won’t feel like such a chore—which is important because consistency, volume, and dedication are all part of the game when it comes to winning on social media.
Networking
Whether in person or online, don’t forget about the power of building relationships in real time. Local events, mixers, or classes are a great way to meet like-minded individuals who may organically become clients. Virtual events, like webinars (hosted by you or others), is another way to achieve this from the comfort of your own home.
It’s not just about showing up to these opportunities to sell your coaching. While leads may emerge in time, it's just as important to get immersed in the community you intend to serve. Only good things can come from that—and your marketing will certainly sharpen as you get more acquainted with the challenges, desires, and dreams of those in your target audience.
Meeting the Growing Demand for Health Coaches
CoachRanks projects the coaching space is set to grow to $6.25B in 2024, measured by coach revenue generated. Driving that growth is nearly 150,000 active coach practitioners, a figure that has doubled in just 5 years.
What does it all mean for health coaches? Seeing as “health” is one of the largest sub-sectors within the coaching space, the growing demand is a promising sign. While coaches will face more competition in their marketing and sales efforts, keep in mind that the coaching space is still in its early innings. Even if it feels like you’re late to the game, you’re actually on the earlier side. Imagine how new entrants to the coaching market will feel five years from now.
Health coaches today should do all that they can do to build up the foundational aspects of their marketing machines. It is a slow process that takes dedication, but it pays major dividends if you stick with it. Nobody said it would be easy to create a consistent flow of inbound coaching clients. But it’s certainly possible.
And of course, it’s not just about getting more clients. Every piece of content, every post, and every interaction is a step closer to aiding someone on their health journey. Effectively building your business while helping others can in fact happen at the same time. For more on how to build and market your coaching business, make sure to subscribe to the CoachRanks newsletter below, and bookmark our blog for more content to help you along your journey.
