You managed to set up your coaching practice from scratch and, now, you’re determined to grow your coaching business online. You’ve already experimented with a few ideas, but soon realized that creating a successful business is challenging. As a result, you’re left wondering how this will work — if it does, at all.
Don’t doubt that it will, dear coach! To help you face and overcome this challenge, in this article, we’ll attempt to break down — what we believe to be — the necessary steps for skyrocketing your online coaching business!
What is an online coaching business?
In short, it’s when a coach decides to take their practice online, instead of the in-person approach. But, how can one coach people online? Well, with so many tools available, it’s pretty easy. Indeed, endurance coaches today have everything they need to coach remotely and keep a smooth stream of communication with their athletes, across a series of different media; ranging from various messaging platforms and email, to social media, recorded video sessions, live streaming, etc.
However, without a comprehensive online coaching platform, a coach can only go so far, toward establishing a thriving coaching business online. For instance, our online coaching platform, Endogusto, allows the endurance coach to create training plans, monitor their athletes’ progress, and analyze their data quickly, and easily; all, while streamlining interaction and communication with them. So, it’s pretty evident that an endurance coaching platform, alone, can make a huge difference in the success of an online endurance coaching business.
14 steps to a thriving coaching business, online
As a small business owner, you know that trying to create a thriving coaching business online is a time-consuming task. Yet, scaling your online business — without having to spend hours on end, working on this endeavor — is vital. After all, your job is to coach and, naturally, coaching will take up most of your professional time.
Thankfully, there are several ways to boost your business online, provided that you can spare a few hours a week for it. To that end, we’ve compiled an effective guide, to help you focus on what really matters.
1. Learn all you can about the people you’re helping
For your online coaching business to thrive, you need to know your target audience’s needs, and the challenges they face, and tailor your services accordingly. But to do so, you have to know who the people comprising your target audience are: Their age, their sex, the region they live in, what they do for a living, their lifestyle, etc. How can you learn all these things about them? Well, you obviously have to do some research online.
2. Listen to your audience
Once you get to know your target audience, you have to listen to what they have to say. What does that mean? It means that you need to talk to them on social media platforms, read their posts and conversations, and get to know them. You can also search for their reviews on your competitors’ services; see what they like or dislike about their services. Slowly build a profile for their pains and needs.
Overall, keep searching and researching until you know your target audience better than they know themselves. This way, you can cultivate a relationship with them, and build rapport. That’s one sure way to create a stronger, more sustainable coaching business online.
3. Set your business goals
As you know from coaching, goal setting is crucial for success. You also know that having a specific goal in place, will help you measure your progress and keep your focus on your tasks. What goals can you set for your online coaching business? That’s entirely up to you and what you want to achieve, based on business priority. For example, you could be generating leads, increasing brand awareness, bringing traffic to your website, etc.
4. Use storytelling
Storytelling can be a powerful tool, if you use it properly. What is storytelling? It’s the art of engaging your audience, by sharing your brand’s story, through a targeting communication strategy. In this respect, storytelling allows you to create a personality for your brand. This brand personality can make a world of a difference in promoting your coaching business online.
5. Provide value to your target audience
Providing value to your target audience will not only inspire them to become your clients, down the line, but also brand ambassadors; hence, helping your business grow online. The good news is that providing value is quite easy, given that you did good work in getting to know your target audience and their needs.
6. Become a source of knowledge and guidance
You already are a source of knowledge, guidance and inspiration, but your target audience doesn’t know that, yet. You need to prove it to them. Remember the ‘providing value’ part we just mentioned? That’s how. Utilize the wide reach that posts, articles, podcasts, live streaming sessions, webinars, etc., can have to share your knowledge, and help your target audience address their problems.
7. Think outside the box
‘Thinking outside the box’ may sound like a cliché, nowadays, but it plays a key role in differentiating your coaching business online. To think outside the box requires creativity, and innovation. It allows you to recognise what’s lacking in the coaching market, and offer a practical solution. As a result, you gain a competitive advantage, and even leave your mark in the coaching industry. Now, that’s how you create a successful coaching business online. 💪
8. Differentiate yourself from the competition
The truth is that the endurance coaching market is crowded, thus, a very competitive one. If you want to create a thriving coaching business online, you must stand out as a coach. Put differently, you must distinguish yourself from your competition, increase loyalty, and drive sales and growth.
Focusing on your target audience is a good start to successful brand differentiation, because it will help you design and offer services that make a difference in their training. Make sure your target audience understands what makes you different, by pointing out the following:
- Outline and document how you intend to help them
- Create assistive material
- Reflect and leverage your coaching methods in your workout strategies
9. Create your own coaching product(s)
Have you ever wondered why some coaches managed to create a thriving business online, relatively fast? Probably because they niched down their coaching practice, while specializing in specific services. And, there’s no better way to do that, than creating your own coaching product(s).
How are you going to create your signature coaching product(s)? Your experience as a coach — perhaps, as an athlete, too — can be one source of inspiration. Try to think of a factor that stands out, something that you could turn into a signature service. Other sources of inspiration may also be your education, or even your personality, and your unique style of coaching and solving a specific problem.
10. Start small, then scale operations gradually
If you’re serious about scaling your business, you need to take one step at a time, so that you can sustain steady growth, in the long run. Starting small is the secret to scaling your coaching business online. As you advance, don’t lose your focus, and be patient.
11. Build your reputation
Why do you want to dedicate time to building the reputation of your business? Simply because it can help you cultivate a professional image and market your coaching brand online. Positive reviews and mentions on social media, Google, and other platforms or sites, can indeed help you build a good reputation. And, you can integrate them into your marketing content, too. These strategic actions will help you increase trust with prospective clients, hence, increasing the chances of them choosing your coaching brand over another.
12. Be adaptive
When we say ‘be adaptive’, we mean that you must adapt yourself — and your business goals and actions — to your ideal customers’ needs, every time. Your capacity to adapt and reform your business and marketing mix, will determine whether your business survives and scales. At the end of the day, that’s how you create a flourishing coaching business online.
13. Hire assistant coaches
One day, hopefully, you will not be able to manage your coaching business alone. You will need assistance. Rejoice when this happens, dear coach, because it means that your business is growing! ✌
It also means, though, that you’ll have to hire an assistant coach; perhaps more. Don’t overestimate the situation, or yourself. No matter how skilled you are — as a coach, and an entrepreneur — you won’t be able to lift this load alone.
14. Create opportunities for upselling
Let’s take a minute and see what upselling is, to help you understand why this is important for the growth of your coaching business. Upselling is encouraging the purchase of an upgraded or premium — and, more expensive — version of a service. Note that you can’t start upselling from the get-go; you need to start small, remember? There will come a point, though, when things become more stable with your business efforts, signaling that it’s the right time to start creating opportunities for upselling, if you want to help your business grow. And, you’ll have several upselling opportunities to tap into and scale your coaching business online.
TL;DR — Invest in an online coaching platform
Online coaching is a perfect way to increase revenue from your coaching practice. Yet, trying to create a successful coaching business online, and start coaching an army of incoming athletes, is a huge step forward, presenting you with a heap of challenges.
Apart from everything we discussed in this guide — which we hope you found helpful — you need to make the most out of an online coaching platform, too. Endogusto is a great example, since it offers you a quick and easy way to create training plans, tailored to your athletes’ needs, in only a few easy steps. If anything, Endogusto is your go-to coaching platform for maximum coaching capacity and efficiency.
Create an account with Endogusto, and see how easy it is to turn your small coaching practice into a thriving online coaching business!