Copywriting for Coaches: Best Practices for Winning More Clients

Copywriting isn’t just about creating content; it’s an essential tool for building relationships and achieving success. As a coach, your words are your bridge to potential clients, which makes your marketing copy a crucial aspect of your professional toolkit. 

This blog post delves into the heart of effective copywriting for coaches. You’ll learn:

• The significance of copywriting in the coaching industry.
• Eight best practices for crafting compelling copy.
• The various types of copywriting that coaches should master.
• When you should write your copy yourself, and when you should hire a copywriter

Armed with these insights, you’ll be equipped to communicate your value more effectively and connect with your ideal clients. Let’s explore the art of copywriting for coaches and unlock the secrets to winning more clients.

Why Does Copywriting for Coaches Matter?

In the world of coaching, where personal connection and trust are paramount, copywriting emerges as a critical skill. It’s not just about writing; it’s about communicating your unique value proposition and connecting with your audience on a deeper level. 

Effective copywriting helps you: 

• Articulate your coaching philosophy 
• Showcase your expertise, and 
• Resonate with your potential clients’ needs and aspirations.

There are three main reasons you need great copy if you’re an online coach.

First, great copy can elevate your visibility in the crowded coaching market. It allows you to stand out and be recognized for your unique approach and insights. 

Second, great copy fosters engagement. Well-crafted messages encourage your readers to interact with you, seek more information, and eventually commit to purchasing your services. 

Finally, great copy builds trust. By consistently delivering value through your words, you establish yourself as an authority, making clients more likely to invest in your services.

In essence, mastering copywriting is not just a marketing tactic; it’s a way of enhancing your coaching practice across the board, ensuring your message reaches and impacts the right audience.

Copywriting for Coaches: 8 Best Practices

If you’re an online coach, copywriting may not be your greatest asset. That’s not taking a shot at you; it’s just that coaching and copywriting are completely different skill sets. Most copywriters wouldn’t make great coaches, either.

But, if you’re like most coaches, especially solopreneurs, you may not have the necessary cash flow to hire a copywriter to create all your marketing copy.

So, the question is, can you learn the basics of copywriting–enough to do a decent job at writing your own copy? And thankfully, the answer to that question is an unqualified “Yes.”

In this section, we’ll give you a quick run-through of some of the most important copywriting principles. If you follow the guidance we provide here, you’ll put yourself head and shoulders above 90% of the other coaches out there who are trying to do their own copywriting, but haven’t taken the time to learn a little bit about the craft.

So, without further ado, here are eight key principles of effective copywriting for coaches:

1. Identify Your Dream Client

Understanding who your dream client is forms the foundation of pretty much any business, including a coaching business, and it’s also the foundation of effective copywriting. 

As a coach, you need to have a crystal-clear picture of who you’re talking to when you write your copy. This involves knowing their demographics, psychographics, and most importantly, their pain points and their aspirations. 

The trick is to tailor your message so you’re speaking directly to your ideal client, making your copy more relevant and impactful. And you can only do that when you know what makes these people tick.

So, as a starting point, think about the clients you’ve already served in your business and ask yourself, “What are they like?” Use any data you might have at your disposal to look for clues to answer this question.

Here are some thoughts to get you started:

• You can scan your opt-in list to see what the male-female breakdown is. 
• If you’ve segmented your customer list in any way, what data does that give you?
• If you sell products in addition to coaching services, which of your products have been the most popular, and which have fallen flat? What does that tell you about your audience? 
• Look at your social media channels and your blog if you have one. What posts have proven most popular and garnered the most engagement? What does that tell you about your audience? 

Use every available bit of data at your fingertips to form a first rough picture in your mind of your ideal clients.

If you’re just beginning your coaching career and you’re thinking, “I don’t have any data to dig into,” that’s OK. Simply ask yourself, “What kind of clients do I really want to work with? Who is it I really want to help?” and write as complete a description as you can off the top of your head.

Once you’ve completed this step, it’s time to do a little research.

2. Conduct Market Research

Market research is vital for understanding the landscape in which your dream clients operate. This involves studying trends, common problems faced by your target audience, and the language they use. This research will inform your copy, ensuring it’s not only engaging, but also that it resonates with the current needs and desires of your audience.

The best entry point into your market research is to identify and study your closest competitors. To get started, all you need is a list of targeted keywords and Google.

If you’ve already identified the keywords you want your website or blog posts to be ranking for, fantastic! You can use your existing list for this step. 

Simply enter your top keywords into Google search one at a time and scan the top 2-3 pages of results, looking for other coaches who seem to be targeting the same audience as you. Capture the URLs of these sites in a doc or spreadsheet as you go.

Once you have a list of at least 10 close competitors, spend a few hours doing a deep dive into their websites. Here are a few things to look for:

• Who do they seem to be speaking to?
• What pain points are they promising to alleviate?
• What solutions are they offering?
• What language do they use to communicate their offer?
• What free materials (lead magnets and other resources) do they offer? (Next level strategy: sign up for all their materials and study those in addition to their website copy.)

Capture whatever information seems valuable for you in getting to know your audience. 

If you haven’t yet created a list of target keywords, simply sit down with a piece of paper and brainstorm a list of no less than 50 keyword phrases that you’d like your business to rank for. Then complete the Google process as described above.

You now have a much better understanding of your target audience–at least, as seen through the lens of your competitors. Now it’s time to get down to the nitty gritty: actually talking to some of your target audience members.

3. Interview Your Ideal Client

Nothing–I repeat, nothing–beats direct input from the people you aim to serve. If you can, conduct interviews or surveys with your ideal clients to gain insights into their thinking. 

The goal is to understand their goals, pain points, and what they seek in a coach. This first-hand information makes your copy genuinely reflective of your clients’ voice and preferences.

The best place to start is with former and current clients. Reach out to them and ask them if you could schedule time for a short 30-minute interview over Zoom. When you talk to each person, record the calls and run the transcript function on Zoom to generate a transcript of each call (more on this in a moment). Shoot for doing 20 such interviews if you can, but even 10 will prove enlightening.

If you don’t have direct access to people to interview from your target market, a good back-up plan is to find where they gather online and “lurk,” seeing what they talk about when they post on their favorite social media sites. You can also identify specific online groups in which your target audience participates and join in those conversations, as well. 

Read their posts and the comments they leave on others’ posts. Pay special attention to whenever they’re talking about the problems they’re dealing with or the solutions they’d like to find to those problems. Capture this information in a doc or database.

4. Understand Your Ideal Client’s Goals and Pain Points

Deeply understanding your client’s goals and pain points allows you to craft copy that speaks directly to issues close to their heart. 

Your copy should not just highlight what you have to offer, but also address how it solves their specific problems or helps them achieve their specific goals. This creates a direct link between their needs and your coaching services.

So, how do you get your hands on this information? That’s what the previous step was all about. Take the transcripts of the interviews you conducted and go through them with a highlighter. Highlight every passage where they’re talking about a problem. This is their “problem language.” 

Next, type all of those passages into a doc or database. Once you’ve entered everything, look through all the entries and identify the top 5-10 themes that keep showing up over and over again. These are the themes you’ll want to address in all of your copywriting moving forward.

If you went the social media lurking route instead of conducting interviews, use the language you captured from your prospects’ posts and comments and go through the same process of identifying problem language and themes.

If you go through the process we’ve laid out in these first four steps, you’ll be head and shoulders above most of the coaches in your field, at least as far as understanding your audience goes. In the following steps, we’ll focus on how to use what you’ve learned in your copywriting.

And if you want to do an even deeper dive into how to get inside the minds of your ideal audience, check out our post, “Target Audience: What it Is and How to Find It.”

5. Make Use of Copywriting Formulas

Since you probably don’t have professional training in copywriting, you may not be aware that there exist proven copywriting formulas that experienced copywriters use as shortcuts to structure many of the pieces of copy they write.

Some of the best-known formulas include: 

• AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action): This formula guides you to grab the reader’s attention, pique their interest, create desire for your product or service, and prompt them to take action. 
• PAS (Problem, Agitate, Solution): Identify a problem your audience faces, agitate their pain points, and then present your product or service as the solution. 
• The 4Ps (Promise, Picture, Proof, Push): Make a promise, paint a vivid picture of the benefits, provide proof or testimonials, and push the reader to take action.
• Before-After-Bridge: Show the current situation (before), the desired outcome (after), and bridge the gap by explaining how your product or service can achieve that transformation.

If you can learn just a handful of these proven formulas, you can leverage them to structure your content, saving you hours of time that you might otherwise spend staring at a blank page or revising copy that doesn’t seem to work. 

These formulas aid you in creating compelling and persuasive copy that leads your clients through a journey–from capturing their interest to compelling them to take action.

If you’d like to learn more about proven copywriting formulas, take a look at our post, “10 Tried-and-Tested Copywriting Formulas (& Examples).”

6. Develop Your Distinct Voice

Your voice is your brand’s personality in words. It should align with your coaching style and values. Whether it’s inspirational, pragmatic, or empathetic, your unique voice helps you stand out in a sea of generic content. It also helps you build a deeper connection with your audience, as they come to recognize and appreciate your unique style.

Since your voice is such an important part of your brand’s identity and since it serves as a differentiator between you and your competitors, it’s worth taking some time to actually think about this.

Do you want to come across as bold and brash? As steady and professional? As witty and snarky? Do you want to be seen as someone who’s been around the block and earned a solid reputation? Or do you want to be seen as the new kid on the block, ready to disrupt traditional ways of doing things? Whatever kind of personality you want to project through your business, your words and tone are the main tools you’ll use to do so.

So spend a little time and think it through. One warning, though: make sure that the personality you choose to project in your business is an extension of your real personality. You can exaggerate it for effect, certainly, but don’t try to pretend to be someone you’re not, or it will just come off as fake.

And once you’ve decided on a brand voice, stick with it. Be consistent over time, and people who resonate with your voice and personality will be drawn to you.

7. Tell a Story that Resonates with Your Audience

Stories are powerful tools in copywriting. They can make complex ideas relatable and evoke emotional responses. And brain research has proven that people remember information embedded in stories better than when it’s written in some other form–which means that your prospects will remember your sales pitches better if you embed them in stories.

There are many ways to use stories in your copywriting. You can share your journey as a coach and other personal stories about why you’re in the coaching business in the first place. You can also share client success stories in the form of testimonials or case studies. And you can even create fictional stories and use them as metaphors for something you teach.

Using stories not only makes your copy more engaging, but also helps potential clients envision the transformation they can achieve through your coaching. So, every time you sit down to write copy for your business, ask yourself, “Is there a relevant story that I can use in this piece?”

If you’d like to delve deeper into this topic, we suggest that you seek out Lisa Bloom, AKA The Story Coach, whose business of the same name is one of Mirasee’s partner businesses. Lisa is an international expert on using stories to achieve your business goals.

8. Challenge Your Clients’ Objections and Limiting Beliefs

Address common objections and limiting beliefs in your copy head-on. Whether it’s skepticism about the effectiveness of coaching or concerns about the investment, your copy should provide reassuring answers and evidence. This approach helps break down barriers, making it easier for clients to commit to your coaching services.

The first step is to make a list of your ideal clients’ most common objections. If you follow the process we discussed in the first four of these eight best practices, you’ll not only know what these objections are, but you’ll very likely have your ideal clients’ exact language for how they express these objections.

Then it’s simply a matter of surfacing these objections in the proper spots in your marketing copy. For example, if your ideal clients worry that they won’t be able to pay for your services, you can bring that objection up when you’re writing about your fees. This would be the place to talk about your three-payment installment plan or your 15% discount for paying up front–or whatever other solutions you have to offer to combat the objection.

One thing’s for sure, you know that your readers are thinking about these objections while they read your copy. You might as well be proactive and bring them up so you can knock them down.

With these eight best practices in mind, you now have everything you need to start crafting copy that not only attracts but also converts your ideal clients.

Types of Copywriting Coaches Should Master

Now that you have some tips and tricks for writing copy that resonates with your ideal clients, you might be wondering where you should put your new skills into practice. Here are the four most important places for coaches to employ their copywriting skills.

Website Writing for Coaches

Your website is often the first point of contact for potential clients. It’s crucial that the copy here is clear, engaging, and reflective of your coaching style. Key elements include a compelling Home page, an informative About page, and detailed service descriptions. Each page should guide visitors towards a call to action, be it booking a consultation or signing up for a newsletter. Use your copywriting skills to drive your website visitors step-by-step through the buying journey.

Email Copywriting for Coaches

Email remains a powerful tool for personal and direct communication. Coaches should master the art of crafting newsletters, promotional emails, and follow-up sequences that nurture relationships with their audiences. The key is to provide value in each email, whether through tips, insights, or personal stories, encouraging readers to engage further with your coaching services. In addition to one-off email sequences (your welcome sequence, a sales sequence for a promotion), you should try to send at least one nurture email per week to give your readers valuable information and to keep them engaged.

Social Media Copywriting for Coaches

Social media platforms offer a unique opportunity to connect informally with your audience. Your posts should be concise, relatable, and crafted to encourage interaction. Use these platforms to share quick tips, inspirational quotes, or brief insights into your coaching process. And you don’t have to create your social posts from thin air; take “nuggets” from your blog posts, podcast episodes, or videos and repurpose them as social media posts. Just remember, each post should align with your overall brand voice and strategy.

Sales Page Copywriting for Coaches

Sales pages are crucial for converting interested individuals into clients. These pages should be persuasive, focusing on the benefits and outcomes of your coaching services. Use testimonials, case studies, and clear explanations of your coaching methodology to build trust and compel action.

Each type of copywriting serves a specific purpose in a coach’s overall marketing arsenal, playing a crucial role in attracting and retaining clients.

When to Hire a Copywriter

The tips we’ve shared in this article should help cut down on the amount of time you have to spend copywriting. 

For example, the more clear you are about who you’re writing to, the easier it is to write for that person. Also, by employing proven copywriting formulas, you can plug copy into a template, ensuring that you don’t leave out any important persuasive elements.

That said, copywriting is still going to take some amount of time and effort. There’s no way around that.

Well, OK, there is one way around it–hiring a professional copywriter to do the work for you. Sure, it will cost you some money, but would it be worth it? 

That depends. If one or more of the following three situations sounds familiar, you might want to consider going this route.

You Don’t Have Enough Time

One of the primary reasons to hire a copywriter is time constraints. As your coaching business grows, you may find it challenging to dedicate the necessary time to writing high-quality copy. A professional copywriter can take this task off your hands, allowing you to focus on coaching and scaling your business.

You Feel Overwhelmed

If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the prospect of creating all your content, it might be time to bring in a specialist. A copywriter not only eases your workload, but also brings a fresh perspective and expertise to your content, which can significantly enhance its quality and effectiveness.

You’re Struggling to Write Effective Copy

Even with the best practices we’ve covered here in mind, writing compelling copy isn’t easy. If you’re struggling to produce copy that resonates with your audience or converts prospects into clients, a professional copywriter can help. They have the skills and experience to craft messages that align with your brand and speak directly to your audience’s needs.

Hiring a copywriter can be a strategic move for coaches who want to maintain a strong online presence without compromising the quality of their coaching services. But only you can truly understand if it’s the right call for you.

Enhancing Your Coaching Practice with Effective Copywriting for Coaches

In conclusion, mastering copywriting is not just about improving your marketing; it’s about connecting more deeply with your clients and expanding your impact. Through effective copywriting, you can articulate your unique coaching value, resonate with your dream clients, and grow your coaching business.

In this article, we’ve explored:

• The crucial role of copywriting in the coaching industry.
• Eight best practices to make your copy more effective and engaging.
• The different types of copywriting that are essential for coaches.
• Situations where hiring a professional copywriter could be beneficial.

As you move forward, consider how these insights can be integrated into your coaching practice. Whether you choose to enhance your own copywriting skills or seek the expertise of a professional, remember that words have the power to inspire, motivate, and transform lives–and your business!