How to promote your wellness coaching business online without breaking the bank
Let’s face it – digital marketing is a competition. As a wellness coach, it may feel like unfamiliar territory to market yourself online, but taking the time to follow some digital marketing best practices can set you apart from your competitors. The result will be a strategic and polished online presence, and this kind of presence doesn’t have to break the bank.
Curious about where to get started? Start with these 5 fundamental pieces of a good digital marketing campaign:
- Website: The elements of a good business website involve a good design, a responsive and fast-loading site, clear messaging, and easy-to-find contact information for interested clients. Perhaps most importantly, your website should always be updated regularly. That will help with SEO (see the next section) There are plenty of options for low-cost website development on open-source platforms like WordPress, or if you’ve got some design chops, you can try your hand at building your own with a free site builder like Wix or Squarespace.
- Search engine optimization (SEO): SEO is the practice of making your website more visible through online search. SEO is not a magic source of website visitors, nor is it a comprehensive marketing plan. It is, however, a way to make your website show up better when people search Google or other search engines for particular terms. SEO is reliant on good website content, as well as some best practices related to how you set up your website pages. Good SEO is an investment in either time or money – you can try to educate yourself on some basic DIY SEO tasks, or you could hire a firm that specializes in small business SEO, likely for somewhere between $500 and $1,500 per month depending on the complexity of the work.
- Social Media: Whether Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn or Twitter, social media is an effective and easy way to conduct outreach. However, social media is about more than always trying to sell yourself as a wellness coach. It’s a social media, after all. Try to be informative and conversational. Provide varied content in the area of health and wellness, or share insights on areas that make you unique as a coach. Whenever you can, direct people back to your website to get more information, which will help drive more visitors to your site and increase your new client leads.
- Email Marketing: Do you send regular email updates to your clients and contacts? If not, consider this as a way to nurture your clients and to convert those who are on the fence. And, believe it or not, email is still the highest-converting form of digital marketing. Whether a monthly newsletter or a regular message to your coaching community, this content is a chance to provide relevant information and calls to action. Emails are another way to drive traffic back to your website, where the majority of your information sits. Remember to be responsible with your email marketing – over-communicating can turn people off, so decide whether monthly, quarterly or something else is best for reaching out to your clients.
- Digital Advertising: Digital advertising can take many forms, including pay-per-click ads on Google, social media ads, display advertising and other variations. Digital ads are an effective way to drive higher volumes of traffic to key pages on your site, or to run specific lead-generation promotions. Facebook and Google are two of the biggest online advertising options, and likely the best place to start for coaches looking to reach their target clientele. The platforms have tutorials and guides to help do-it-yourselfers get started, or you could find a consultant to help you set up the campaigns and optimize them for results.
Whether you have an established wellness coaching business or you’re just getting started, you’ll benefit from taking the time to examine your digital marketing plan. Remember: Be a source of information, an expert, an educator. Find your voice as a someone who shares insights and offers helpful tips, and you can start to build your following and increase your potential client pool.
Looking for additional tools to support your business? Check out our Wellness Coaching Business Toolbox for a variety of practice-building options.
