Social media marketing should be a key part of every coach’s business strategy. Whether your focus is on your clients’ professional or personal lives, social media allows you to share your ideas with existing and potential clients . However, coaches often struggle with how to best utilize social media to grow their business.
Before launching your social media strategy, you should give thought to where you’re posting, what you’re posting, and how often you’re going to post.
Guidelines of How to Use Social Media to Expand Your Coaching Business
- How to Start: What makes a successful social media marketing strategy is having a firm understanding of who your target audience is. The more you know about your client base, the better you can target them. Key demographic information includes gender, income level, and age range. Also think about what their interests are, both personal and professional. Understanding your potential and existing clients will help you determine what content is likely of interest to them.
- Where to Post: There are a bewildering array of social media platforms, each with their own distinct communication flavor. The content that makes for a great LinkedIn post is unlikely to be easily translated into an effective Tik Tok post. For that reason, focus on the platforms on which your clients are active.Facebook is the most popular social network among middle-aged adults. This platform is popular with those at every income level and those of every educational background. Facebook users are more engaged than users of other social networks with 70% of users logging on daily and 43% logging on more than once daily.LinkedIn is the biggest social platform that caters directly to business professionals. The platform’s users tend to be older, with users over the age of 35 are more likely to use LinkedIn than younger users. However, Millenials are rapidly growing their presence on LinkedIn.Instagram is a fast growing social media network among young adults. More than half of Instagram’s 200 million active users are between the ages of 18 and 29, with most of these users visiting the site daily. This platform is mostly accessed via mobile and is more heavily-used by affluent youth.
- What to Post: But how do you know what you should post? Ideas include answering frequently asked questions and specific concerns your audience has. Mix up your content to include blog posts, articles, quotes, polls, videos, etc. It’s important to keep your content engaging and relevant to your target audience.Coaches may be concerned that by offering social media content online is that they are giving away their knowledge for free. But you can still utilize social media effectively without divulging all your wisdom. Free content should help build the like, know and trust factor with your audience. Free posts should help the client identify that they have a need for the counseling you can provide. Only when someone becomes a paying client, do they gain access to customized expertise explaining how they can achieve their goals. Sharing social media posts, podcasts and videos are a great way to get users interested while paid sessions and content are used to help clients achieve transformation.
- How Often to Post: When it comes to how often to post, consistency is key! To grow your coaching business you want to be as visible as possible, so aim for at least 3 times a week. You can use a scheduling tool such as Buffer to make it easier and more manageable to automate your posts to save time. Don’t forget to regularly engage with your audience and reply to all questions and comments.
Winning Strategy for Business and Life Coaches
The most important strategy is to establish your authority as the expert and ensure that you are focusing on lead-generating activities that will fill up your sales funnel. The key to growing your coaching business is to understand your niche, remain visible on the most relevant social media platform for your audience, share valuable content and be consistent in your actions.
Many coaches find it difficult to take time from their busy practice to create properly targeted social media content on a consistent basis. To better leverage their limited time, they rely on a virtual marketing assistant to manage their social media. Working together, the social media account is refreshed with new content, resulting in timely and topical posts that show case the coach’s newest insights.