Lead Generation For Coaches: 5 Steps To Driving Quality Leads

The one thing every coaching business needs is leads. For this reason, lead generation for coaches is an extremely important element to scale and grow your business.

It’s simple.  Provided you have an irresistible Offer and a highly converting funnel,  more leads will always equal more sales.

What is lead Generation for Coaches?

This is the strategy of creating systems that drive consistent potential clients for your business.

These systems will ensure that your business and funnel are constantly fueled with quality leads that drive sales and revenue in the long run.

This is because when you have a consistent stream of leads,  all that’s left is an automated system that works behind the scenes to nurture each of these leads into becoming paying clients for your business.

In this post,  you will learn how to build a lead generation system that fuels your business and makes you sales on the backend.

The goal of this post is not to show you a thousand and one ways to generate endless leads for your business.

Instead, I’ll be sharing a simple step-by-step guide to lead generation for coaches which will in turn help you navigate the dozens of lead generation strategies that exist.

5 Steps To Lead Generation For Coaches

1. Know your target audience

Depending on the demographics of your target audience, some lead Generation methods will work while others won’t.

It is therefore important to nail your ideal client avatar first before you embark on any lead generation campaign.

Getting it wrong in this phase of your business will mean that your entire marketing effort will be based on reaching the wrong leads and that’s a bad thing.

Since you will either be investing time or effort into generating these leads, you want to make sure to target people who are most likely to buy your offers.

This is where step 1 comes in.

Nailing your target audience doesn’t have to be hard.

It is as simple as thinking deeply for a common description of what types of clients you prefer to work with within your programs.

You will need to give a brief description of who your dream client is while listing out some common details about them.

E.g: Age, goals, gender, needs, and more.

Make sure to be clear and concise in highlighting the common characteristics you’ve seen in your past clients or want to see in future clients.

As a health coach, you might prefer to work only with diabetic patients as opposed to a generic audience.

Another way to define your target audience is to carry out an analysis of your competitors.

Find other coaches in your niche selling similar services and programs like you would want to.

Look for a common trend in their followers and audience by analyzing their demographic, interests, and needs.

If you are offering similar services as your competitors, chances are you’ll have a similar target audience.

2. Optimize the basics

It is so easy to want to hop right into running your lead generation campaigns once you have figured out who your target audience is.

On the contrary,  you want to make sure that the systems you’ll be sending traffic are all set and good to go.

The worst mistake you can make with lead generation is sending a bunch of people to a funnel that isn’t converting enough or to an offer or product they don’t need.

Since you will be Investing time and effort into generating these leads,  you also want to ensure that your nurturing systems are optimized enough to convert the maximum amount of those leads to sales.

The concept of lead generation is simple.

• Find a group of people that have a real problem and need a certain solution.
• Drive them into your funnel.
• Optimize your funnel enough to ensure that those leads grow to know, like, and trust you enough to want to buy from you.

Once this happens, there will be an automated sequence scheduled to pitch your offers and services.

And if you’ve done your homework, you should get 10% of your leads throwing money at you for these services.

So in a nutshell, it doesn’t matter how many leads you generate,  if your systems are crappy,  the return on your investment will be disappointing.

Once again,  this step is easy.

To optimize your lead generation systems, you only need to focus on two things

Your offers:

An offer is more than just a list of your products and services in discounted sales.

Creating an irresistible offer is a psychological art of increasing the perceived value of your products and services with the goal of increasing the chances of YES’s and higher conversion.

A crappy offer doesn’t necessarily mean a crappy product, you can have an awesome product yet suffer poor sales because of the unattractive nature of the offer.

Whereas you can get a crappy product to sell like hotcakes by making an irresistible offer to market it.

There are so many elements that contribute to the compelling nature of an offer, some of which include:

• A Big Bold promise
• An insane offer stack
• A flexible payment plan
• A risk-aversion guarantee
• A good program that gets real results
• Social Proof and testimonials e.t.c

By highlighting these elements in your marketing, you will 10x the perceived value of your product and increase your conversions almost overnight.

Your Funnel:

If you are like most coaches, you most likely sell 1:1 programs that cost a fortune.

While there’s nothing wrong with selling a $1,000 program, your sales won’t be as magical as getting a new stripe notification for every 10 new followers you get in your community.

No one in their right senses would throw such an amount on someone they hardly know or trust.

Now, this is where your funnel comes in.

The idea of a funnel is to create an automated system that nurtures every new lead you get into becoming a die-hard fan of your brand.

With that kind of relationship comes trust and people buy from people they trust.

The goal of your funnel is to get new leads into an automated relationship-building system to build credibility with them and increase your chances of getting a YES when you make the pitch.

Creating a funnel is easy.

In fact, we have an entire guide on how you can build a simple email marketing funnel that runs your business for you.

So read this post on Email marketing for coaches, to learn how to build your first email marketing funnel.

And if you are new to this whole thing and would a hand to hold your hands through creating a highly converting coaching funnel and offer, I would love to grant you a FREE Audit session.

As a conversion rate strategist, I’d love to help you by tweaking your offers and funnels to perfection.

3. Outline your lead sources

The internet has made it too easy for anyone to reach their target audience and market to them.

Since you know who you’re trying to market to, this step will be very simple to complete.

You will simply need to brainstorm all of the different places your dream clients hang out online.

With this list, you will be able to plan out lead-generation strategies to reach them.

Now, you can either choose to generate leads organically or pay to play.

So which is a better way to go about lead generation for coaches?

Well in my opinion, as long as you’re marketing on a platform that has your ideal clients,  both methods will work perfectly.

With that said, there are so many ways to generate leads for your coaching business, and below are some of the best methods you can try

Organic lead Generation methods will include:

1. Facebook groups
2. Blogging/SEO
3. Short-form content on TikTok, YouTube shorts, and Reels
4. YouTube SEO
5. Social Media e.g Pinterest and Twitter

Paid lead generation methods will include:

1. Facebook Ads
2. Instagram Ads
3. LinkedIn Ads
4. YouTube Ads
5. Google and Bing Ads

Remember, your lead generation strategy will highly depend on who your target audience is.

What works for a leadership coach might not work so well for a fitness coach.

Here’s a quick tip to supercharge this step: If you are finding it hard to storm different lead Generation methods for your business,  once again check your competitors.

Find out the different methods they use in generating leads and make a list.

This should give you an idea of what should also work well for your business.

4. Learn the game

Once you have a list of marketing platforms that you will be using to generate leads,  pick one or two and master their algorithms.

It is so easy to think that the more platforms you market on, the more leads you will be able to generate.

On the contrary,  trying to be on every marketing platform will only dilute your marketing efforts.

So you want to pick one or two platforms and master how they work.

So if you’ve chosen to market on LinkedIn, make sure to learn everything about how the LinkedIn algorithm works before you get started.

If you have chosen to stick with paid ads,  you will also need to learn the basics of how that works as well.

The learning phase might take days and even weeks but trust me, it’s well worth it.

YouTube is your best friend when it comes to learning different lead Generation methods but you could also try out Udemy and Fiverr learning.

Depending on the platform of your choice, I’ve hand-picked some of the best courses to help you learn the fastest.

1. Paid Advertising Mastery {With best selling Individual courses for top Ads platforms including Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, and Google Ads)
2. Blogging/SEO Bundle: Learn how to generate leads organically using Google (The largest search engine in the world)
3. Social Media Marketing Fundamentals: This course will cover the basics of storytelling, content creation, and branding to help you build a following on any social media platform you choose going forward.

Remember, learning how marketing on the platform of your choice will save you time and money that could have been wasted on trial and error.

5. Launch,  test, and tweak

Once you’ve learned how the platform of your choice works,  it is time to take action.

You’re going to need to launch your campaigns whether organic or paid and get started right away.

Using the strategies you’ve learned,  start marketing daily to your target market on the platform you’ve chosen.

One thing to keep in mind though is that organic marketing strategies take at least 3 to 6 months to yield results.

It takes that long to build a solid audience online.

Trust me, nothing good comes easy and your audience in the long run will be the greater asset you’ll ever have.

Unlike Paid ads, you will be able to market and remarket to your audience without spending extra on Ads.

On the other hand,  if you’re paying to play the game,  you need to make sure you test and tweak every element of your ad campaigns to ensure maximum conversions and return on your ad spend.

Paid ads Vs Organic Lead Generation for Coaches

I know!! The question that could be running through your mind now is this,  which strategy is better,  paid ads or organic generation?

Well here is a comparison between both strategies to give an idea of how it works.

If you’ve decided what marketing platform is best for your business, make sure to check the above-listed hand-picked resources to get started right away.

Paid Lead Generation	Organic Lead Generation
You can start to see results fast	It takes 3-6 months to build an audience on average
There’s little room for mistakes	You can test and tweak different strategies without losing any money
There’s a huge learning curve	It’s easy to get started and master
The barrier to entry is high so there’s much less competition	It has a Low barrier to entry, making the competition fiercer

FAQs on Lead Generation For Coaches