Creating a Lead Generation Machine for Your Coaching Business

If you’re a coach, consultant, or anything along those lines, you may have faced similar hurdles as others like you probably when it comes to lead acquisition for your coaching, there’s a lot that you can do to accomplish your goals of acquiring and coaching more clients.

But a lot of times what I’ve come across is coaches don’t know the best way to go about creating a sustainable machine that can be turned on when they want more clients and turned off when they have enough.

I see coaches all the time post quotes, videos, blog posts, and other things on social channels like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram that helps generate awareness for a small amount of time but they don’t have a system for targeted lead generation and then furthering the prospects from awareness down to closing the client on programs or packages.

So what I’m going to do is help you dial in on what I would consider the fundamentals. This all starts out by reverse engineering what success would look like to you.

That begins with understanding who it is that you serve the best, where you can provide the most value, what you can do for them, and what your contribution to their lives will be as a coach.

Identify Your Target Audience

Some of the things that we’ll be going over may not make sense at the very beginning but they will as we get further into the post. There are some pretty cool things that we can do with online advertising that we weren’t able to do even 3 or 4 years ago.

The accuracy of the information that platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Google, Twitter, Pinterest, youtube, TikTok and other platforms we entertain and inform ourselves with today are a huge tool that you can use as a coach to target specific kinds of people that meet certain criteria to push your marketing collateral to their social feeds.

This enables you to create highly accurate and cost-effective marketing so you don’t have to spend a ton of time organically generating awareness but you also don’t have to spend tens of thousands on tv or radio marketing with no guarantee of success.

The only thing is you have to make sure you’re doing it right and you have everything else like messaging and lead magnets dialed in before you start pushing paid traffic to your landing/sales pages. To get started, let’s go over the main identifiers.

1. Demographics Demographics are the easily quantifiable ways to identify someone such as location, age, gender, race, employment/job, education, income, marital status, etc.

2. Interests Interests are things that can be targeted on Facebook and other platforms which we’ll get to later that can help identify and hone in on who it is that would most likely take us up on our offers, value propositions, or other things that  

Interests can be anything in the audience persona that helps you shave off general people and zero in on people that are likely to convert into a client. There’s no point in even gaining awareness from people that most likely won’t even consider your services. Instead, we want to do everything we can to identify potential buyers by finding common interests, hobbies, market influencers, and other things that would help identify potential prospects.

3. Pains/Problems These are the things that you can help with as a coach and include resources and information about that will help attract the kinds of people that will eventually end up wanting to be coached by you. The thing this helps with most is identifying the types of content and lead magnets to create so that you attract and funnel ideal clients towards the eventual purchase of your coaching packages or sessions or however you bundle/sell your services.

Understand Your Target Audience’s Desired Transformation/State

The point to understanding what your ideal client’s transformation is is so you can best serve your target audience.

Understanding how you, as a coach, can help your ideal prospective clients achieve that transformation and what role you play in helping them get there is critical to communicating your value to them throughout the customer journey.

When we identify who we help and what we help them with, we’re able to then understand exactly what value we bring to the table when coaching them.

I’m sure if you have a specific kind of person you help already, you’ve identified some overlap within the coaching clients you have as far as pains and hurdles go along with solutions to helping them overcome those hurdles.

And once you have a firm grasp on those things that you often help people overcome, you can start pushing out content that then leads people to a lead magnet that then leads people to your email list that then nurtures them until they become a paying clients of yours.

Now, I know that may seem a bit complex. And you don’t have to start by creating and setting all that up at once. In fact, I suggest starting a lot more simple with a sales page, a lead magnet, and a few pieces of content to push out to generate awareness about what you do and who you serve. And just to lay that out in a more structured way for you here’s a better breakdown of how each of these coincides with each other and why they’re all vital to scaling your coaching business.

Creating Content and Funnel From Awareness to Conversion

This is a high-level view of what creating a funnel for your coaching business would look like and how you would accomplish it.

You’ll still probably have lots of questions after consuming this information so I’ll be creating some content soon that dives really deep into how all these things work in conjunction with one another.

But for now, I’m going to have to be fairly general with the information.

Let’s go over the stages and what happens in each of those stages. The goal of content marketing in the way I’ll be laying it out for you below is to develop relationships with your prospective clients so that you can focus your efforts on the ones that are ready to take action and buy your coaching services now.

Again you can check out my blog post on the customer journey to better understand the digital conversion process. awareness stage – this is where you want to build rapport and attract attention for the most part.

You want to be pushing general content solving problems that the ideal client has and would like pointers on or other content that inspires, informs or entertains while also building a relationship with you.

Ideally, you should push out videos so the audience can better connect with you (youtube videos with tips, answering common questions, helping solve common issues, telling your story and why you serve in the way you do, and what you’re looking to accomplish, inspirational videos, videos that show you’re an authority in your space, etc.). 

engagement stage – this is the stage you want people to give you feedback on (likes, comments, shares, etc.) you want to share more specific and targeted content that really is starting to narrow in on those problems or pains that ideal prospects have that you have specific knowledge about that you really feel can help them.

You want to give immense value upfront to not only build a relationship with prospects but also to show that you understand them and that you can really help overcome obstacles that they may be facing in their life, career, or business.

lead stage – This is where you want to deliver your lead magnet. You want something attractive and ideally downloadable and personalized that can help you scale your ability to deliver very specific value to your prospects.

The thing you have to make sure happens though is that you provide ACTIONABLE information that will help them get a taste of a transformation. Something that will help weed out the action takers from the people who just talk about wanting to coach.

It’ll help you identify the ones who are serious and will actually likely pay money to have you help them in some way accomplish.

nurture stage – email sequences & content retargeting ads should be used and put into place once you have your other lead generation components refined and predictable with paid traffic.

Those that download your lead magnet in exchange for their email should get emails that either helps your email list see more content that furthers the relationship you already have developed with them online and drives them more towards your coaching services or towards your calendar for your free consultation call where you’ll ideally help both you and the prospective client see if it’d be a good fit for your coaching services.

Something you may want to consider as well just to prevent you from having to actually do any selling on the phone if you don’t like that is to put your pricing on a page that people will see before scheduling a call with you.

If you prefer to present price on the phone and you have flexible/creative pricing depending on the situation of the client feel free to leave that out until you get on the phone with them and do it that way. 

Conversion stage – At this point, people should only be getting onto your calendar and speaking with you directly on a one-to-one basis if they’re really ready for you to help them define and achieve objectives that you can help them with.

You should ideally be doing the rest of your wedding out digitally rather than manually and wasting your time having 1-2 free consultations/conversations with people that are still “thinking about it”.

At this point, I know you may still have lots of questions as I mentioned before. So feel free to schedule a call with me and ask me questions about how we could do something like this for your coaching business.