Don't make these mistakes with your online coaching business. You could be losing clients or missing opportunities to grow your client base if are steering in the wrong direction.
1. Spending on Brand & Marketing
As your business grows, and your audience on social media increases, you might get questions like...
"Do you have a website?"
"Do you have a business card?"
"What's your company name?"
Or some variation that presses on some insecurity and fear that you might not be legitimate, or taken seriously. Then that sparks another thought, "Oh I better get a logo, and a brand, and a website up and together!" nevermind the fact you only have 5 clients.
Off you go to find the perfect design and marketing team to get the job done. Many thousands of dollars later, you have a website, and a brand and you feel completely credible, and legitimate. Build it and they will come, you keep repeating to yourself.
Then you start posting "Now accepting clients!" on all your social platforms...
... but there's nothing ...
... no response ...
The secret to growing your client base is not in your website. The secret is also not in your logo or marketing designs.
Comparing yourself to other online fitness professionals naturally you are just mimicking what you see. It seems like those who have amazing marketing, and branding and websites all do really well! What are you doing wrong?
After spending thousands of dollars, getting no new growth in clients, no matter how much you push out on social media, you're not getting the flood of new clients you were hoping for. Not even with your new found unofficial license in being "legit".
The problem is, you can't see what those fitness professionals were actually doing that got them to where they were as successful online coaches.
But before you discover the actual secret to getting more clients, you might jump right into this next big mistake online coaches make.
2. Offering discounts
So you are fully confident in your professional logo and new website design, it must be your prices. You start to doubt your service offer or the price you're offering it at.
That should be an easy fix right? There's a holiday coming up. Surely a holiday themed discount promotion will be just the trick to snag all these clients on the edge of their seat.
Are discounts always bad? no. But if you're trying really hard to grow your business, discounts are not ideal.
If you are a coach, there is a good chance you have hired a coach of your own. If you have, think about how you discovered them?
A friend told you about them?
Had you been following them on social media for a while?
You trusted them, and had seen the value that they would provide in coaching you if you hired them.
When you desperately offer a discount to get more clients, you communicate so perfectly that exact message. You need them more than they need you.
In case you don't see it yet, the take-away is, don't offer discounts, it sends the wrong message, either that you are desperate, or that your coaching services is not that valuable.
Wait, 1 & 2 don't apply to me!
But client's keep leaving me
Ok so you don't offer discounts and you aren't emptying your bank account on needless marketing and design assets. What other mistakes could you be making with your online coaching? Great question. Let's get to it.
3. Too many clients
So having too few clients is a problem, but so is too many. Great. But what does "too many" mean?
It means too many too fast.
Maybe you recently acquired your own set of rippling washboard abs, or some extra size in your glutes and hamstrings, and everyone around you seems to ask for your advice.
You might be getting really popular on social media, and have a strong knack to attract the crowds. Or maybe everyone in your personal network is clamoring to get your help on their next big health and fitness goal. Naturally eager to grow your business, as fast as people ask you to sign up, you sign them up!
Quickly you start to feel overwhelmed and unable to meet all your clients' needs and expectations. You have created unmanagable communication chaos. You aren't using a platform like Fitspace Pro to organize your online coaching clients and check-ins. Trying to manage everything through email, text messages, facebook messages, or otherwise, things quickly get out of hand.
If you take on too many clients before you have processes in place you’ll feel overwhelmed and the client won’t have as good of an experience - @trainerlindsey
Too many clients too fast, ends up as lower quality coaching for all of the clients including your pre-existing clients. Soon you start to drop the ball, and clients are getting frustrated, feeling neglected, or upset and they start dropping like flies.
They don't want to work with a coach that seems to not care or fails to follow up when it matters most to them (because it's easy to lose emails or forget where you said certain things to them).
There's a lot of things to keep track of with each client. A lot decisions to make on how to organize when you suddenly ramp up your online coaching client base. It can get very overwhelming and frustrating for both you and your clients.
Grow slowly, in small increments, and use a tool like Fitspace Pro to consolidate and streamline your online check-in process.
4. Not building a personal connection
One of the only potential down-sides to remote personal training clients is the challenge to build personal relationships. Sometimes there's a lack of natural bonding that might happen a bit more fluidly in person. Without knowing it, you (and other online coaches) struggle to keep your clients around and don't realize that it is because of this missing connection.
Well now that you know, you can proactively create that personal connection with your clients. And you can do it at scale to help more clients and increase your business.
Two major ways to focus on this connection are videos and community.
Video
Sending a video helps your clients feel connected to you. From what we've seen 1-way video is best if you don't have a lot of spare time. They can feel your emotional investment in them and their journey in short 1-2 min clips.
Sending a video with your program updates explaining why you've given them the program can also have that effect.
Ultimately clients need to feel your human side. Not just your trainer side.
Client community
You can also create a community chat, or facebook group to let clients build up and support each other. This has created a lot of success for coaches and lengthened the amount of time a client will stay with them.
The main take-away here is that when client's aren't able to connect emotionally with you, they are less likely to stick around.
