10 Best Marketing Strategies for Wellness Coaches to Attract Clients

Marketing Oct 20, 2020

As a wellness coach, helping people improve their health and lifestyle is your job. But finding those people who require your expertise and retaining clients can be tricky.

To build up your client base and establish a target market for your wellness coaching business, you need to implement some marketing strategies to first attract interest in your services.

The idea of setting up marketing strategies can seem overwhelming, however, but once you have the right knowledge and a little practice, it becomes a much easier process.

We have lined up the 10 best marketing strategies to attract clients and boost business and how to implement them for wellness coaches.

Define Your Niche as a Wellness Coach

If you want to increase your client base, you need to stand out amongst the competition of other wellness coaches.

You can achieve this by identifying your niche, that is, what differentiates you from the other wellness coaches in the business.

You can discover your niche easily:

List down your strengths as a wellness coach
List down your values as a wellness coach
Consider what kind of clients you want to help (pregnant women? Athletes? Weight loss clients?)
From these details you can determine your niche, for example: “Pregnancy Wellness Coach”

For example:

You can identify your target audience as pregnant women who want to maintain optimum nutrition throughout their pregnancy into post-partum. You can demonstrate how your skills can help them and how you are set apart from every other wellness coach in the business.

Determining your niche as a wellness coach should be one of your most vital marketing strategies which will help you be chosen over your competition.

By specialising in a certain wellness coaching area, you will attract the right clients who need your service.

Attract Clients with Referral Programs

Referral marketing and programs are a great promotional tool to gain new clients, as opinions of friends or family tend to be trustworthy.

Referral cost little money, as it relies on the word-of-mouth recommendations, making it one of your most valuable marketing strategies you can implement as a wellness coach.

The Gym Group successfully demonstrates this by allowing members to invite friends to train with them, even if they are not a member themselves.

Here are some ways you can attract clients with a referral program:

Offer a free wellness coaching session for friends or relatives of existing clients
Promote a discounted package, such as “3 sessions for the price of 2”
Build a community around your brand. The more social connections a person has, the more likely they will keep returning to your services.

By offering excellent benefits to compliment your high value wellness coaching services, you will easily attract more customers.

Host Workshops and Webinars to Demonstrate Your Expertise

Hosting a workshop or webinar is a valuable marketing tool. You can increase your visibility and demonstrate your expertise as a wellness coach whilst advertising the great services you offer.

For example, you could run a workshop on how to incorporate mindfulness into your everyday life to promote calm, or how to upgrade your office meals to reduce fat and increase micronutrient uptake.

Workshops and webinars can be interactive, so you can also consider helping your audience practice mindfulness techniques together, or give cooking demonstrations for their lunchboxes.

Here are some ways in which you can include a wellness coaching workshop in your marketing strategies:

Reach out to Human Resources departments at local businesses. Employers often want to introduce a wellness programme for their staff, and you can offer professional wellness coaching to them.
Contact local gym and leisure centres and suggest hosting monthly wellness workshops for their members.
Use platforms such as Eventbrite and Monday.com to organise your wellness coaching sessions.

Not only will you inspire new clients with a workshop or webinar event, but you can also build connections with other businesses as you offer your training services.

Be a Guest Speaker on a Podcast to Maximise Exposure

One of the best marketing strategies is offering your expertise as a guest speaker on a podcast, as this will increase your chance of reaching a different audience.

Not only will you increase your exposure as a wellness coach, but you will also reach an already engaged audience who are fans of the podcast you are speaking on.
To find appropriate podcasts to appear on, make a list of by searching for your niche among health podcasts.
Speaking as a wellness coach on a podcast will humanise your brand, making it more relatable and appealing to listeners.

The combination of listener anticipation before your episode airing and post-listening engagements as listeners search for your brand will increase your visibility as a wellness coach and entice more potential clients.

For example:

Instagram-famous personal trainer Joe Wicks, aka The Body Coach, makes guest appearances on various podcasts to boost his marketing strategy, including guest speaking on Fearne Cotton’s The Happy Place podcast.

By appearing as a guest speaker, Joe Wicks was able to promote his brand in a natural way, reaching a whole new audience via The Happy Place podcast.

Write Engaging Blogs to Increase Online Visibility and Provide Value

Writing for a blog - whether this is your own or as a guest for an established blog - is one of the best marketing strategies as you can implement.

You can showcase your expertise on a particular subject by writing informative blog posts.
Blogs offer free valuable advice and content which can help turn website visitors into paying clients.
Creating regular blogs with great content will help boost your SEO and ultimately your online visibility.
Writing blog posts on your chosen niche helps establish you as an authoritative and trusted wellness coach.

A successful example of this is Dr Hazel Wallace’s work as The Food Medic. Wallace uses her expertise as a medically trained doctor and registered nutritionist to deliver education and inspirational content through her website, podcasts, and social media platforms.

Dr Hazel Wallace has positioned herself as a wellness coach with knowledge “grounded in science” for followers to make easy and healthy lifestyle changes.

Creating quality content should be one of your marketing strategies. As a wellness coach, you want to build a strong authority on your subject of expertise to gain trust and pique client interest in your services.

Offer Free Consultation Services

Another effective marketing strategy is a free consultation service, which will demonstrate what benefits new clients will gain from you as a wellness coach by trying it for free.

Ensure you are consistent with your services by treating free consultation clients the same as your paying clients.

Organise Challenges and Contests to Entice Clients

Challenges and contests inspire clients to work towards their goals, with the help of your wellness coaching, and is an interesting addition to your marketing strategies.

By introducing fun and realistic challenges, the difficulty of reaching a goal is transformed into a rewarding journey for your clients.
By introducing a challenge, clients are motivated and held accountable for their goals.
Clients may find goals hard to reach, but with a challenge and your support, they will discover the positive associations of incentives to realise their potential.

You can set your own challenges as a wellness coach, such as increasing your client base by a certain amount by a deadline date.

Write Email Newsletters

In this day and age of social media and digital marketing, some may overlook email marketing strategies as an archaic and therefore futile process.

This couldn't be further from the truth, here's why:

Email marketing remains to be the highest converting tool for marketing, with 80% of business professionals claiming it to increase customer retention.
Of those who receive marketing emails, 59% say these emails influence their purchase decisions.
The average ROI for email marketing is 122%, proving it to be one of the most powerful marketing tools out there.

One simple yet effective way to achieve this is to include email newsletters as one of your marketing strategies. Email newsletters are a brilliant way of engaging new clients and gaining sales for your wellness coach business.

Get List Building to Increase Your Client Base

List building is a marketing strategy which refers to the process of developing a database of clients who would be interested in your services as a wellness coach.

By increasing your database of clients and people interested in your brand or wellness coaching services, you can reach out to them regularly with offers, information and other valuable messages to keep customers coming back to you.

Ways in which you can start list building:

Create a ‘call to action’ button on each of your website’s landing pages to encourage visitors to subscribe to your email newsletters
Promote your email newsletters on your social media. If you already have a good following or fan base here, you are likely to encourage new sign-ups.
Use Facebook ads to drive traffic to your website and encourage mailing subscribers. Facebook ads can help target an audience which is similar to your existing contacts.

Don’t forget the goal is to provide valuable information to your recipients so that you can attract new clients and keep existing subscribers satisfied.

Using social media has proven to be an essential part of business marketing strategies.

With 200 million Instagram users accessing at least one business profile daily, and two out of three Facebook users visiting a local business's page daily, you need to include social media into your wellness coaching marketing strategies.

Decide which social media platforms are right for your wellness coaching brand by considering where your target audience is active online.
Share compelling visual posts to grab the attention of your audience.
Interact with your audience - reply to comments and show that you are listening to what they have to say.
Create giveaway competitions such as a free wellness coaching session for followers who like, share or retweet your social media posts.

Including social media into your marketing strategies is an inexpensive yet effective way of boosting your client base and awareness around your business.

The Takeaway

Creating marketing strategies takes a bit of planning but is worthwhile the effort. By including the strategies laid out in this article you can expect to attract new clients and retain existing ones as a wellness coach.

Credits - Charlotte Osborn