If you’re a coach who wants to get clients this year, without social media, then you’re in the right place!

In this post I’m going to be sharing everything you need to know about attracting clients without having to rely on social media.

This post is going to focus on how to get clients so we’re going to specifically talk about client attraction rather than general marketing.

However, if you’re looking for ideas of how to market your coaching business without social media then check out that post for a list of social media free marketing ideas.

Let’s jump in.

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What’s the problem with social media?

Many coaches are feeling disillusioned with social media these days. Whether it’s the impact on wellbeing, ethical issues or simply the fact that it doesn’t work as well as it used to as a marketing tool, more and more of us are feeling a pull away from social media platforms for our work.

However, I don’t feel it needs to be an all or nothing thing, you can of course get clients without social media at all, and that’s what we’ll be looking at in this post. But you can also take a more balanced approach where you don’t necessarily delete all your social media accounts but instead have a more limited and specific presence.

I still use Instagram and have a client and customer only Facebook group. When I stopped putting pressure on these platforms to bring me clients and sales, and started using them for creativity, community and fun – and to amplify what I create elsewhere, then how I felt about showing up on social media changed.

The bottom line is social media simply isn’t the best place to focus your client getting activities and general marketing any more. When we can’t own or control our own accounts on social media, we’re leaving our businesses vulnerable to changes that we can’t control or foresee.

This is why I’m such a big fan of making the most of what you do own – your website and email list, and using search based platforms that give your content more longevity – but more on that in a moment!

Marketing for coaches

Before we get into client attraction let’s touch on some marketing for coaches basics.

To get clients we need to be getting in front of the right people – the people who are experiencing the problems that we solve or who have the aspirations we can help them achieve and we need to connect with them and build a relationship with them on a repeatable, scalable basis – because volume of leads does matter if you want to scale your business in the future.

Of course there’s a lot of intricacies around that basic premise such as messaging, positioning, sales, your offers and offer structure etc, but understanding this is helpful because when we understand that turning leads into clients is about creating connection and building a relationship with them we can see that there’s lots of ways we can do that without social media.

Marketing types

Something I find helpful to consider in this is understanding 3 key types of marketing:

Organic

Organic marketing is your content based marketing that happens off of social media. When we’re thinking about online marketing we’re looking at mainly search based platforms like our blogs, YouTube, Pinterest and even Podcasting. I’m a massive fan of this form of marketing and having it as a foundation for your business because of how much longevity this form of marketing creates. It also works really well to grow your email list.

Paid

Paid advertising doesn’t just have to be on Facebook and Instagram, Google Ads, Pinterest Ads and even more traditional ads in magazines and newspapers all count as a valid form of marketing. Personally I feel that any paid ads that build your list with your ideal clients are a great idea.

Collaborations

Collaboration, where you work together with other online business owners (or you could collaborate with people IRL!) to reach each other’s audiences can also be a successful form of marketing. Summits and Bundles have been working really well for email list building lately, but you could also include guest posting, podcast interviews etc under this heading as well.

When it comes to your coaching business and getting clients, the key is using these forms of marketing to get people on to your email list and then building a relationship with them from there.

Understanding your leads

A quick note on the term ‘leads’ – I’m not a massive fan as it sounds a bit dehumanizing! But for want of a better phrase or name, leads are basically the wonderful humans who interact with your business and have the potential to become clients.

One of the most simple ways of looking at your ‘leads’ when it comes to client attraction is the cold, warm, hot leads model:

Cold – your cold leads are people who have literally never heard of you before.

Warm – these people might have interacted with you before, they’re probably on your list or are avid readers of your blog or listen to your podcast.

Hot – these people have engaged with you directly, perhaps they’ve enquired about your services, replied to an email you sent your list, they click on your emails and clearly enjoy your content etc.

The theory is that you need to be moving people from cold to hot on a consistent basis to get clients as your hot leads are the people most likely to become clients. However there are always rule breakers and I’ve had plenty of clients who came across my site and signed up to work with me the next day!

Getting clients

So when we understand the organic, paid and collaborations forms of marketing and hot, warm and cold leads we can see that to get clients without social media we need to be performing marketing from one, two or all three of those headings and then moving people from cold to warm to hot.

So how do we do that?

For me, the best way to move someone from cold to warm is getting them on your email list. If we’re looking at organic, paid and collab, then the best way is presenting people with a really awesome freebie in exchange for joining your list, whether that’s when someone lands on a blog post (like this one!) via organic search, or sees a paid ad for your freebie or learns about your freebie in a summit via a collab.

This is even why social media probably isn’t the best form of marketing because it’s not the easiest way to get them on your list.

Once you have them on your list you need to consider how you can help them become a hot lead.

There’s numerous ways to do this. I love a Priceless Power Hour style strategy, but there are other ways to have people virtually raise their hand and express an interest in finding out more about working with you, maybe this is writing really good email sales copy – but honestly for me this is simply about being a human and connecting with people – maybe that’s using video, maybe it’s sharing your values, telling your story – anything that allows people to connect with you is going to make a huge difference.

I cover elements of this in the FREE Aligned Client Attraction and Marketing Workshop which you can sign up for below (see – awesome freebie at work there!)

I’d love to know if this has given you some ideas about how you can get more clients without social media, let me know in the comments which form of marketing you’re going to focus on next!

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