A Guide on How to Find Coaching Clients on LinkedIn
Wondering how to get coaching clients on LinkedIn? You’re not alone. As one of the largest social media platforms that has stood the test of time (the company was founded in 2002!), LinkedIn is a flagship destination for business networking today.
Among those with lots to gain from LinkedIn are small business owners and entrepreneurs, like coaches, who are motivated to build their brands and client bases. In this article, we’ll cover pro tips on how to do exactly that. So if you’re a coach pondering how to find coaching clients on LinkedIn, here’s your “what you need to know” guide, complete with actionable tips and examples that can help you make the most of the platform immediately.
What Is LinkedIn Marketing for Coaches?
LinkedIn marketing for coaches is a strategic approach to utilizing professional networking platform, LinkedIn, to establish authority, attract clients, and build a reputable coaching brand. For reasons explained throughout this article, LinkedIn offers coaches some of the best opportunities to find new clients and build meaningful credibility.
Coaches who fully leverage LinkedIn marketing don't merely stop at creating a profile. They dive deep into content creation, frequently engage with their network, and ultimately grow their audiences. With the right strategies in place, any coach can use this social media platform to help sustain their small business.
But first, before we dive into profile optimization and content creation, some context. What makes LinkedIn so great for business development?
3 Major Benefits of LinkedIn Marketing for Coaches
Here are some of the key reasons why LinkedIn is a worthy part of an effective marketing strategy for coaches.
1. Your target audience probably lives on LinkedIn
The first benefit here is simple: You need to find your audience in order to market and sell to them. Fortunately for coaches, plenty of popular niche audiences can be easily reached on LinkedIn.
To name a few examples, consider core focus areas like entrepreneurial coaching, executive and leadership coaching, manager coaching, and career coaching. Each of these coaching niches are related to “business” in some way, which means there are relevant users on the LinkedIn platform who may take an interest in those coaching focuses.
Also worth mentioning—some LinkedIn users may have access to professional benefits (i.e. wellness stipends from their employer) which makes them that much more qualified and likely to convert to paying coaching clients.
2. LinkedIn engagement is better than other platforms
To get a bit more technical, LinkedIn is a great social media platform by the numbers. For example, organic reach for content posted on Linkedin is some of the best in the social media space. That means that when you post an update, your content is likely to reach a healthy amount of people without the need to “boost” the content with paid ads.
Further, lead generation on LinkedIn is 277% more effective than Facebook and X (formerly Twitter), according to HubSpot. That is great news for any coach practitioner hoping to generate real business online. Leads are out there, just waiting to be found!
3. LinkedIn is a smart place to build thought leadership
From a brand-building perspective, LinkedIn makes a lot of sense. The platform tends to reward and promote thought leadership content. Ever notice the viral posts that show up on your feed? They usually convey anecdotes, ideas, or insights that you, as a coach, are just as capable of producing as a “thought leader” in your space.
If you’re just starting out, your very first coaching clients may come directly from your LinkedIn network. The same goes for your future clients. Building trust and credibility is critical for any coach—might as well build it where it matters.
Foundational Work: Optimizing Your Profile
An effective LinkedIn marketing strategy for coaches involves both foundational work and maintenance work. Foundational work relates to your profile and can be optimized at once, only to be revisited periodically. Maintenance work, on the other hand, relates to the content you publish on the platform on more of a week-to-week cadence.
Let’s start with the foundational work. Your LinkedIn profile should be a hub of relevant information for your target audience, much like your coaching website. Let’s review some of the key elements every coach should add to their profile as part of a LinkedIn marketing strategy—and how to do them well.
Profile image & header image
Use a profile image that communicates professionalism. It shouldn’t just be a selfie taken on a whim. Rather, it should be high-resolution, well-lit, and inviting to potential clients. Details like image quality may seem small, but they contribute to a sense of credibility and give your audience context clues that communicate that you take your practice seriously.
For header images, don’t overcomplicate things! Less is often more in the pursuit of a professional-looking profile. Find a high-quality skyline image of your home city on unsplash.com (for free). If you’ve achieved certain accolades, consider adding a simple, cleanly designed overlay (you can easily hire someone on Fiverr if you need the help). For example:
💡 LinkedIn recommends header image dimensions of 1584 x 396 pixels.
Headline
Under your profile image is your headline, which can be customized to whatever you like. Your headline is important—LinkedIn features it frequently in tandem with your name, and it’s your first opportunity to tell people what you do.
There’s no perfect formula for your headline. Some people effectively use the headline field to make a simple statement about what they do. For example, “I coach startup founders to become effective CEOs.” Just as commonly, some people use this space for their official job title: i.e. “Marketing Director at Tesla.”
Whichever route you decide, coaches should aim to get to the point quickly. A clean LinkedIn profile avoids verbosity. If you’re a specialist in a certain coaching niche, make it known. For example: “Nutrition coach helping retirees eat clean and feel great.”
About
Your About section on LinkedIn is your coaching bio. As with any effective web content, your bio should aim to hit the right balance of being easy and quick to read, yet long enough to give readers enough context. For most coaches, this probably means 2-4 short paragraphs, at the most.
Some of the most effective About sections on LinkedIn take a less traditional content approach. Is there a way you can tell a story as you simultaneously explain what you do? For example, marketing himself with the headline “Startup storyteller + Pitch deck guy,” Joey Katzen starts his About section with the following couple lines, which effectively prompts users to want to read more:
Recommendations/Testimonials
If you’ve spent any time collecting life coaching testimonials, you’ve probably put those endorsements to use on social media or your website. On LinkedIn, however, testimonials appear in the “Recommendations” section of your bio. Recommendations must be written by other LinkedIn users, and you can request recommendations from specific members of your network.
If you’ve secured testimonials from people outside of LinkedIn, consider asking them to copy the same endorsement into a LinkedIn recommendation. This is one of the most effective places to establish quick credibility in your profile, as real people are putting their own reputations on the line by making a public endorsement of you.
Experience
Your experience section lists all of the professional experience you wish to showcase to your audience. For coaches, make sure to highlight any and all career experience related to your coaching niche(s), as this will help contextualize for potential clients what makes you qualified to coach in that space.
Also consider creating a “Company profile” for your coaching business, so you can create a new Experience entry and link to your company profile. Coach Sarah Brooks has done this effectively, creating a Company page for her practice (Sarah Brooks Coaching), complete with a company logo that appears as part of the Experience entry on her profile.
Education, Skills, Certifications, and more
Additional sections worth including in your LinkedIn profile will vary from coach to coach. Explore the different possibilities—Education, Skills, and Certifications are all worth checking out if you have compelling content to add to them. Do your best to keep things simple and focused, remembering that very few of your profile visitors will want to read lengthy sentences and paragraphs of text.
Call to action
Last but not least—does your LinkedIn profile clearly map out how interested prospects can take the next step? Whether you communicate that info in your About section or by prompting visitors to check out your website, consider the experience for users who find your profile.
Of course, a LinkedIn user can always request to connect and/or send you a personal message. That works too. But if you’re going to put the effort into optimizing your profile, you might as well take a few swings trying to funnel your profile visitors to that next step in your sales and marketing funnel.
Maintenance Work: Content, Engagement & Audience Growth
Once you’ve optimized your profile, you’re ready to start leveraging the LinkedIn platform in a more consistent, day-to-day way. Whereas your profile is considered “foundational work,” think of this second part of the equation as maintenance work—it’s just as critical when it comes to how to get coaching clients on LinkedIn.
Creating Content for LinkedIn
This topic alone deserves its own in-depth article. Creating and publishing content for LinkedIn can be studied for hours on end. For our purposes here, we’ll hit on some key concepts and best practices, FAQ style.
What if I have nothing to post about?
If you only take away one thing from this section, it’s this: Content ideas, particularly for coaches, exist everywhere. It’s simply a matter of putting your “content cap” on and starting to recognize that a LinkedIn post can truly be created from nothing. For example, let’s say your coaching client just earned a promotion, largely thanks to your coaching guidance. How can we create content out of that development?
Your impulse may be to start a post with:
“My client just got a promotion! I am proud to have played a role in her success.”
A much better framework here would be to dig deeper. You have an opportunity to add much more value for your readers. Something like:
“One of my clients just got a big promotion. Here are 3 things we worked on in our recent coaching sessions that helped make it happen…”
Here, we’ve created a piece of content out of a very simple update around a client’s promotion. We found a way to flip the promotion into an educational post on coaching topics that helped make it happen.
What type of content performs well on LinkedIn?
Your content should be unique and not so obvious. LinkedIn rewards insightful content that earns lots of engagement. That means you should be creating content that your readers are eager to support—perhaps so they can reference back to it later for their own benefit.
When posts appear in the home feed of LinkedIn, they are truncated. Viewers must hit “see more…” in order to consume the whole post. This means you have 2-3 lines of copy until the rest will be hidden. What can you write in those first couple of lines that will be so engaging that your readers have to hit the “see more” button?
How often should I post?
Lots of people assume that they will fatigue their audience by posting too much. The truth is, only some of your posts will be seen by some of your network, and the idea of posting “too much” is rarely a factor. You should aim to post as much as you can, taking note of what’s working along the way. If you’re a content powerhouse with tons of ideas, try posting once a day.
What if I’m not a writer?
If you’re not a writer and have no intention to try yourself, hire a content writer who has experience writing thought leadership content for LinkedIn. If you’re seriously trying to figure out how to find coaching clients on LinkedIn, it’s an investment you can easily justify.
Audience Engagement & Growth
As you become a meaningful contributor to the LinkedIn discourse around your areas of expertise, maintaining your audience (and not just your content) is also part of a winning strategy.
As for engagement, you should set a goal to reply to anyone who is engaging with your content. Not only will this increase the overall engagement on your content, it makes you accessible and that much more valuable to your audience. If someone took the time to support your content, why not take the time to support them back?
Engagement comes in many forms on LinkedIn— i.e. likes, comments, and shares. And it’s not just about liking or commenting back to users on your own content. You should spend time engaging with other peoples’ content too, searching for posts that would benefit from your support or commentary. It may not feel like the best use of your time, but supporting other users’ content is a critical part of becoming a recognized name and face in your niche.
A result of consistent posting and engagement is that your audience will start to grow. This should happen naturally to a large extent, as new people see the value in the content you’re posting and want to follow along. You can also accelerate the process by connecting with any users who show support for your content—even a “like” from a non-connection is enough context to send a connection request!
In theory, the larger the audience, the more potential reach your content will have. Take the time to periodically find and connect with previous colleagues, clients, or friends who will accept your invitation to connect. Coaches should aim for at least 500 connections, at which point LinkedIn stops displaying your specific number of connections in favor of “500+”. It’s a small detail, but the 500+ badge suggests you have a strong network which may help earn you some credibility and authority.
Going Beyond How to Get Coaching Clients on LinkedIn
As much of this article suggests, LinkedIn is a fantastic place for coaches to find new, qualified clients. For most types of coaches, this platform deserves a spot in your marketing ecosystem. But it shouldn’t be the one and only part of your strategy.
As you’re building your strategy for LinkedIn, consider what else you could be doing to create a holistic “marketing machine” around your coaching practice. Maybe you determine you also need a beautiful website that LinkedIn users can visit if they want to learn more. Or perhaps you want to post longer-form content on your blog for those who are considering your coaching services. Even better, maybe you want to write longer form content first, and recycle the best tidbits for your LinkedIn posts—a two birds-with-one-stone approach.
LinkedIn is just one piece of the puzzle. For more on how to get coaching clients on LinkedIn, along with dozens of other marketing strategies for coaches, make sure to become a CoachRanks Insider below and bookmark our blog to stay in the loop!
