The best way to win clients is to market where your audience spends a lot of their time, and that is online.
Online marketing is essential for any health coach looking to start their own business.
Online marketing is a broad term that can include:
- Posting and advertising on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat and Pinterest
- Developing a business website
- Optimizing your website to show up in search engine results (Search Engine Optimization)
- Building an email list
Here we outline 5 tips so you can develop a winning online marketing strategy.
1. Set Smart Online Marketing Goals
One of the most important aspects of developing your social media marketing strategy is to set SMART goals. These goals are specific, measureable, achievable, realistic and within a set time frame.
For example, your social media goal could be to reach 400 likes/followers on Facebook within 6 weeks, or to maintain an average of over 5% post engagement on Instagram for 4 weeks.
Having defined goals will help you stay focused with your marketing strategy and will allow you to see the progress you have made.
2. Post on Social Media
When using social media as a marketing tool, you want your posts to have the greatest impact. In order to do this you need to post at specific times of the day, so that your posts have the maximum reach, or in other words, when your followers are most active.
Scheduling daily posts at specific times of the day over several social media platforms, can be a real brain drain and can become extremely time-consuming. Luckily, there are some very handy social media tools that you can use to help manage and schedule your social media posts including:
We’ll now delve into a little more detail looking at how to use Facebook and Instagram as part of your online marketing campaign.
Facebook is the biggest social media network, with 1.94 billion users worldwide, so no matter who your ideal client is, they’re likely to be logging onto Facebook.
Facebook is more than a network for connecting with friends and family. More and more Facebook users are turning to Facebook as a platform to discover new and exciting goods and services.
Facebook offers three tools to help you make the most out of your Facebook marketing campaign:
- Pages
- Ads
- Groups
Each of these options services it’s unique purpose, and combined they will provide the greatest reach for your marketing campaign.
Facebook Pages are similar to profiles, but are generally used for businesses, organizations and public figures. If a user “Likes” your page, then they’ll automatically receive updates from you in their news feed.
Users can also choose to “Like” a page but not to follow it. Facebook Pages do not require a mutual relationship, and they don’t have any restrictions on the number of friends/fans, unlike profiles which are limited to 5,000 friends. Posts to Pages can be scheduled either within Facebook or through an external scheduling app such as Hootsuite, Edgar or Buffer.
Facebook Pages also provides some very useful data relating to post engagement. It’s important to keep track of which posts are most popular, and those that aren’t, so you can give your fans content that they want.
Facebook Ads is a targeted advertising platform that you can use if you’re wanting to make a financial investment into your Facebook marketing campaign. Facebook Ads enables you to create advertisements targeting specific geographic areas, ages, interests and education level.
Facebook Groups are a fantastic way to engage with your audience. Facebook Groups is less about developing the furthest reach and more about building your relationship with your Facebook community, by offering free content and answering general health and lifestyle questions.
Many businesses, including health and wellness professionals have enjoyed immense marketing success using Instagram.
One of the most exciting aspects of using Instagram as part of your online marketing campaign is the ability to create and share your artistic vision of your health coaching business in an almost purely visual way.
Instagram now offers business accounts completely free of charge, which come with a whole lot of features including being able to:
- Promote your posts with a little cash
- Learn insights about your followers and how your posts are performing
- Link directly to your Facebook business account
There are also specific Instagram tools to help you optimize your Instagram reach and engagement with your followers.
Iconosquare is a must have app for any health coach looking to ramp up their Instagram presence. It allows you to fully geek out and analyze the data relating to post engagement, including the best times of the day to post, as well as who is looking at which posts and when.
Later is a freely available app that makes scheduling a post to Instagram an absolute breeze. It allows you to visualize the layout of your feed and alerts you when it’s time to post.
Having only one clickable link within your entire Instagram account (in your bio) can be frustrating, especially if you’re looking to promote a specific blog post, or promotion. To get around this, you may have noticed other Instagram users including the phrase “link to bio” in their captions.
There is a way around this, and the answer is Link In Profile. Link In Profile provides a single link that you can add in your Instagram bio. This link then leads to a special Link in Profile landing page where you’re interested followers can find links to your specific promotions and blog posts.
Your Instagram followers can even click directly on your Instagram posts (as long as you include the relevant link within the caption), and this will take them to your Link In Profile page.
Your Link In Profile landing page will show you how many times each image link has been clicked so you can monitor how well each individual post is being engaged with and how often people are clicking through to read your posts and promotions.
3. Run a Contest on Social Media
A great way to drum up interest in your health coaching business is to run a contest on social media. You can encourage your social media followers to share your contest information by offering giveaway incentives, like a set number of free health coaching spots in your program.
Running a contest is a clever way to grow your mailing list, as interested individuals will provide their contact details to enter the draw.
Some useful tools to help you set up and promote your social media contest include:
- Rafflecopter which is super easy to use
- Woobox which is a great higher-level option
4. Develop a Website
Having a business website is an absolute must for your health coaching business.
A business website:
- Provides accessibility to existing and new clients
- Builds your credibility in the health and wellness industry
- Helps develop your health coaching brand
Your health coaching business website will act as your virtual hub; it will be a place where your clients, both current and future, can find all the information about your health coaching style, services and free content.
You can link your social media accounts to your website and you can also capture the email addresses of interested individuals who have visited your website.
Building your own website is not as daunting as you may think.
WordPress is the most widely used website builder, and some other popular choices include Weebly, Squarespace and Wix.
SEO is the process of optimizing a website so it performs well in an organic search. Optimizing your website’s SEO is another clever online marketing strategy that many online businesses are using.
5. Content Is King
Content marketing is about creating and sharing content that will appeal and attract a defined audience; your ideal client.
Your content can be whatever you’re passionate about and what you believe your target client will be interested in.
Maybe it’s a blog? Possibly videos? Whatever you choose to create needs to be of a very high standard, and images, filters and color schemes play a huge role in your marketing campaign.
Here’s a list of handy graphic design and photo editing tools to help you add that professional touch to your online marketing content.
- Canva is an easy-to-use freely available graphic design app, that enables a graphic design novice to create attractive, profession content
- Phonto allows you to add text to photos
- Picmonkey is great for photo editing and graphic designing your social media content
- Camera+ helps you shoot like a pro using your iPhone
Bonus Tip! Start a Mailing List
Building your mailing list is an essential online marketing strategy. Email is actually better at driving traffic and generating real leads than any of the social media networks.
A great way to grow your mailing list is to include opt-in email sign-up forms to your health coaching website.
Sumo.com provides free tools to help capture the email addresses from your website traffic.
Another handy tip is to use an email marketing provider, as this will will save time, is more professional, and you can study the analytics about your subscribers.
Here are 5 email providers you may like to try:
Boomerang is a handy plugin that help you organize your inbox and can be used with Gmail, Outlook and Android accounts.
Drumming up leads is possibly the most important part of running your own health coaching business. Here we’ve outlined a few proven tips so you can win over clients and start growing your client base.
