The best marketing strategies for coaches, therapists, consultants (& other service providers)
If I had to pick just a couple of marketing tactics for a coach or consultant (or a therapist, web designer, nutritionist or other service provider), it would be to focus on referrals and relationships, and to pay as much (if not more) attention to creating referral partnerships as to generating client referrals - and then to back that up with some content creation, potentially with a focus on SEO.
I’m basing these preferences on my own experience, my clients’ experience, and the experience of my wider community (colleagues and newsletter subscribers).
This is why many of my Mentorship clients focus on relationship-based marketing - quite simply, in over twenty years in business, this is what I’ve found works best for me, for my clients and for other small business owners in my network.
Both these tactics involve playing the long game and having a clear niche - but if you can take both of these elements in your stride, you will have sustainable marketing practices that will still be paying dividends for you in years to come. I get to work with clients now who find me as a result of relationships I built, or articles I wrote, years ago.
These days, as I recover from a brain injury that has greatly impacted the number of hours I can work each week, I’m deeply grateful for these long-term investments I made of my time and energy, both in relationship marketing and in writing blog posts with an eye on SEO.
How to choose the best marketing strategy for you:
There are so many options for marketing your small business - should you focus on social media, paid advertising, SEO, referral marketing or something else entirely?
The nuances of the answer to this question will depend on your own specific business, your temperament, other responsibilities and overall capacity - but for most small businesses, my recommendation is to focus the majority of your marketing efforts on partnership marketing (often also called relationship-based marketing), and then to pick one or two other tactics to amplify your relationship-building efforts.
What do I mean by partner or relationship marketing?
This kind of marketing focuses on the following sources of lead generation and nurturing:
referral partnerships (such as a copywriter who gets most of their business via 4 or 5 web designers who refer their clients to her for copywriting services)
borrowing other people’s audiences (going on podcast tours/delivering workshops in other people’s communities/doing a newsletter or Substack swap/guest posting/delivering the keynote/being on a panel at a conference)
building close and ongoing relationships with colleagues and former clients, such that you are always top of mind when opportunities come up - so that your name is mentioned even when you’re not in the (often virtual) room
deepening relationships with a small number of people, through doing things like running roundtable events or peer-led masterminds
hosting your own bigger events in collaboration with others (summits, pop-up podcasts, virtual retreats/conferences) in order to pool your audiences
This form of marketing is also sometimes described as joint venture marketing, because you’re usually collaborating with someone else to offer something (a workshop, guest post or event) to one another’s audiences. But relationship-based marketing is wider than that, because, as you have seen in the list above, it also includes simply strengthening your existing relationships with former clients and colleagues, without necessarily offering specific events/opportunities to share with their audience.
The reason I recommend this overall approach to the vast majority of my clients is that it’s both faster, more effective and more sustainable than social media marketing. It’s faster, because you don’t need to wait for SEO to kick in, and because, unless you already have a large engaged social media following, you can reach more people (by borrowing someone else’s audience) faster than you can by first growing your own account and then fighting the algorithm to get people’s attention. It also allows you to make use of the halo effect, giving you referred legitimacy, trust and authority from the person you collaborate with.
Collaboration is the secret sauce of relationship marketing - it allows you simultaneously to create or build on your relationship with the person you collaborate with, while growing your audience and reaching new people you might collaborate or work with in the future.
If partnership marketing is my main recommendation, what else do I suggest to clients?
I do think that it’s worth combining up to three different sets of marketing strategies, so as to avoid putting all your eggs in one basket, and also to give you the opportunity to amplify the effect of one strand of your activity via another. So, for instance, if you promote your joint ventures on social media, it’s both giving you content to share and allowing your event to reach a wider audience than it would do otherwise.
You also need to consider which tactics are better for acquiring new leads and which are better for nurturing your existing audience. What I do myself, and recommend to most of my clients is some version of the following blend:
My primary marketing tactic, and the source of the majority of new leads, is relationship based marketing.
I back this up with content marketing, a combination of social media and blogging, because that way I can extend the reach of my partner marketing, and I also get a smaller number of new leads via SEO or very occasionally via social media. Although I enjoy writing, I don’t make content marketing my primary tactic because I don’t enjoy feeling like I have to churn out content all the time and I dislike fighting an ever-changing algorithm (both on social media and on Google) - and I’m also depressed by the onslaught of AI content.
I nurture my audience via regular newsletters and community events for subscribers.
What are the pros and cons of social media marketing?
Most of my clients harbour a dream of one day leaving social media entirely. I have myself quit social media for over a year at a time - and I loved the headspace and freedom from comparisonitis that resulted. However, in the end I came back to using social media in a more limited way - partly, as mentioned above, in order to be able to amplify my other marketing efforts, and to support collaboration partners in the same way I was asking them to support me.
But I also had a couple of other reasons. I find a sense of community online, which I missed when I archived my accounts. It’s easy to stay in ‘light touch’ contact with more people if you can send a three word reply to an Instagram Story, or add a brief comment to a LinkedIn post. It’s easier to support friends and colleagues in their launches or other events by sharing their work on social media.
I also find writing brief social media posts a good warm up to then writing longer newsletters or blog posts, so that often a longer piece of content will build up incrementally from a number of shorter posts. I’m not alone in this technique - for instance, copywriter Kelly Diels talks about using social media being “generative… a laboratory for self-expression,” a place to test ideas and develop new intellectual property and to help shape the wider business culture, so that she can be a culture-maker even for people who never go on to buy from her.
On the other hand, she’s aware that it's inherently addictive so she has strong boundaries to avoid being sucked into scrolling (she schedules posts and responds to comments via her scheduler rather than via the feed).
Another good point is made by business coach George Kao, who writes about how quitting social media involves “deplatforming yourself”. He makes the point that when people deactivate their social media accounts,
“It simply makes it harder to stay in touch with them. They also lose the long-term marketing benefits of using social media effectively… instead of quitting, why not learn to use social media with better boundaries, thereby tapping into the longer term benefits? My own marketing has been made so much easier over the years through social media, which has facilitated growing a true fan audience. No other tool makes it this easy to spread good content and find kindred spirits.”
He notes that many people who’ve come off social media still choose to collaborate with people such as himself, partly in order to benefit from his social media audience, so they can put their work in front of new audiences.
But he also makes a different point, that our social media platforms are worse off without the contributions of thoughtful writers - everyone else’s feed is poorer as a result. And his final point is that the way to cultivate stand-out thought leadership, so good that people will make the effort to share it with their own audiences, is to practice and hone your writing skills on social media, to see what resonates with your kindred spirits, and then to build on that in subsequent videos, blog posts and e-books, where you can go deeper into those topics
Author and small business consultant Regina Anaejionu has a similar perspective, advocating sharing your ideas as widely as possible on social media, then gradually honing the ones with the greatest resonance into subtler, longer and more nuanced thought leadership, culminating in a book or signature workshop/course.
Examples of the real life marketing experiences of coaches, consultants and designers
For Renee Rubin Ross, who is a strategic planning and board development consultant, roughly half of her firm’s bigger projects come from relationship marketing (with the other half coming via SEO).
“In terms of relationship building, I have different things that I aim to do all the time, like having coffee with people, being active on LinkedIn, or just doing Zoom coffees. More specifically, twice a year I teach a couple of classes in board development and strategic planning. I usually have about 20 students in each of my classes, and I make an offer for my Zoom link for a 20 minute meeting to talk to my students about their careers or their organizations or hiring me for work. So, in the case of one of these large projects that we were hired for recently, it was actually someone who I’d stayed in touch with for four years since our original contact. He was on my newsletter, and then he reached out, and I was considered for this project and selected.
Similarly, because of all the networking I do, I knew someone who was on the selection committee for a different project, so it helps to have the relationship. But I should emphasize, these were competitive selection processes - and having the relationship did not guarantee being selected. That being said, it did help in the sense that the client reached out directly to solicit our proposal - and it is helpful to be known versus unknown.
It's about always throwing seeds out there and really not knowing where they're going to lead. There's no guarantee. It definitely feels like I need to have the faith it's going to work in the spirit of abundance and generosity and just helping other people and then trusting it'll come back.”
Marketing coach Nedra Rezinas is another fan of relationship-building, saying that,
“I think the best marketing return comes from building on my relationships (through LinkedIn, newsletters, and letter writing) and offering a way for people to experience me - I've started doing this Marketing Focus Day once a month and it's been amazing: people want to get a taste of you before working with you and offering free workshops is a really great way to do that!”
Not everyone is a fan of a networking approach to marketing though. Web designer Pauline Wiles found that in-person speaking events, which had initially worked well to generate clients in the early stages of her business, were increasingly draining and less effective for her over time. Instead, she switched to niching down to work primarily with authors and put a significant amount of energy into blogging in order to generate SEO traffic for her website, which has been very successful. This switch also suited her temperamentally - as an introvert, she finds working on articles as and when she has the time to do so is something that integrates much better into her life and is much more suited to her energy than all the travel and socialising that was a necessary component of her previous commitment to public speaking.
On the other hand, web designer (and fellow introvert) Yarrow Magdalena focuses on relationship marketing and gets much of their work from client referrals, saying,
“The best ROI without a doubt comes from doing a really good job, being kind and then reminding people to pass my contact on.
Eight years ago I did a big online business training course. At that point I had no intention of becoming a web designer, but because I had time and people had questions about Wordpress and software and design, I answered their questions - and that was the one thing that changed everything. About 80% of my subscribers and listeners and clients are in the US, and that’s because I started in an American programme.
I appreciate recommendations so much, because when people are making bigger investments in tech work, they really need to trust me. I’m so pleased to say that about 80-90% of the people who book a feeler call with me end up signing up to work with me. I’ve taken that for granted in the past, but then I realized that around 50% is usually considered good.”
Three Key Takeaways About Marketing for Coaches & other Service-providers
Whatever tactic you choose has to fit your temperament, your capacity and your budget. There’s no one-size-fits-all in marketing.
That said, people often overlook the power of relationship-building as the driver for new clients and referrals.
Ideally, work with two-to-three marketing tactics which can build on one another’s effectiveness.
If this approach sounds good to you - check out working together in a Mentorship.