How to Find Health Coaching Clients Who Want Your Services
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When I was studying to become a health coach, I remember the biggest “question mark” many of us had about our future health coaching businesses was:
Where do I find clients… and how in the heck do I book them?
Finding (and booking!) the “right” clients is absolutely a cornerstone of your health coaching business.
The best health coach in the world isn’t helping many people (or making much income) if they have no clients. And, likewise, it doesn’t matter how amazing your coaching outcomes are if you’re not providing them to the “right” clients—that target audience of interested people who actually, truly want the wellness expertise and health coaching support you have to offer.
Health coaching (or any type of wellness service, like personal training or life coaching) is an interesting business ballgame because we, as coaches, don’t actually provide our clients’ health outcomes ourselves… we provide the tools and support for our clients to achieve those wellness outcomes themselves.
So, to be “successful” in that, we need to connect with clients who are actually interested in the health coaching services and guidance we have to offer, and motivated to do their part to create sustainable, healthy lifestyle change.
How to find clients as a health coach
There are a few standard ways to find and connect with new clients as a health coach—the methods I remember being taught at IIN, the health coach training and certification I received—as well as some newer, more “creative” ways that aren’t necessarily taught in health coach training.
Here are what I’ve found to be the most viable ways of connecting with new clients for your health coaching business. They’re ranked here in order from “toughest to do well” to “easiest to do well” (because it’s also important to know what makes the tough ones tough!):
Finding health coaching clients through social media
I think there’s actually a misconception that social media is a great way to promote your health coaching business… because it can be a great way, and there are some health coaches who do it very well. But that tends to be more the exception than the norm.
Social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter (and gotta throw TikTok in there to keep up with the times!) can certainly be important tools for building community, connecting with likeminded people, and even building an audience interested in your health coaching business.
But it’s also a pretty long road from starting your business Instagram account to booking a sustainable flow of health coaching clients through your DMs.
I’ve been pretty open about saying that I don’t see social media to be worth the investment for my businesses (Four Wellness Co. and Five Design Co.)—I think you can get a lot more bang for your buck in terms of time and actual dollars spent growing an audience via blogging and Pinterest-promoted content marketing.
So, social media might be a great place to find clients for some health coaches… but it’s not my top recommendation to invest in for new health coaches, because it’s so rare that people do it well enough to land their ideal clients from it. (Just sayin’!)
Finding health coaching clients with paid advertising
Now, a caveat to the social media commentary above is that social accounts do grow more quickly with paid advertising—for example, Facebook or Instagram ads or promoted posts.
But though that can contribute to more “likes” or “followers,” on your social accounts, it doesn’t necessarily translate into more paying clients.
Paid advertising is really only worth your dollar if you can strategically connect it to your paid health coaching services.
And that’s typically a bit easier to do if you offer smaller, more affordable paid products—people are more likely to click through an Instagram ad for a small, spontaneous purchase (like a bracelet or pair of shoes), rather than a $2,000 health coaching package.
Health coaching is an expensive and energy-intensive purchase (the client has to commit to some big personal work!), so not the type of quick, spontaneous purchase people tend to make right on the spot because they saw a nice Instagram ad.
And, of course, with a highly personal service like health coaching, it’s important to build rapport with clients and help them feel that they know and trust you as a health coach before they’re comfortable investing in working with you in that capacity.
So, health coaches tend to have more luck with “warm leads”—people who already know something about you and your health coaching services, and trust your wellness expertise, and are warmed up to the idea of working with you.
Finding health coaching clients via wellness workshops + free services
One of the ways many health coaches are taught to find new clients is to host wellness workshops and group programming.
The theory is to get people in the door with something interesting and free (or relatively affordable…“relative” to the cost of 1:1 health coaching), and then introduce the benefit and value of premium coaching services. So, someone perhaps joins a $20 mindfulness workshop, and then you introduce your custom health coaching packages at the end of that workshop, as a way to get more if they liked it.
This is a more helpful form of booking health coaching clients than social media for a couple reasons:
You have more personal contact with potential clients than you’d have via a social media post or ad, so they can get to know you, your personality, and your health coaching style better (aka you build rapport more easily!).
The wellness workshop requires some attention span and focus, meaning you’re attracting people who are more likely to be interested in doing the work needed for health coaching services.
(So, offering a workshop is a good way to rule out people who are interested in health and wellness “in theory,” but aren’t quite ready to practice mindfulness for an hour or sweat their way through a trial workout, etc.)
All that to say: offering a free or low-cost wellness workshop or some sort of trial health coaching service can be a helpful way to connect with interested clients for your health coaching packages.
If you happen to have a successful way of implementing this, then fantastic! Keep at it. 😊
But, if you don’t, you’re not alone.
Many health coaches find it takes quite a bit of time and energy (and feeling sales-y) to book a new health coaching client this way. So, if you’re offering lots of “discounted” services to try to sell what you’d ultimately like to offer (a full health coaching package), it may not be the best use of your time.
Finding health coaching clients via word of mouth
Word of mouth is one of the best ways to grow your health coaching audience, because it’s free and minimal investment from you!
You provide great services to a client, and they in turn rave about you to their friends and family. We all love a good personal recommendation, and are more likely to choose services that come highly recommended by someone we know and trust.
Though this can be a nice side effect of running a quality health coaching practice, it’s not as helpful when you’re just starting out, as you don’t necessarily have that core audience of promoters who are naturally dropping your name in conversation because they loved working with you so much.
So, word of mouth can be a great source of health coaching clients down the road… but not so much when you’re a new health coach looking for ways to connect with your first clients.
Finding health coaching clients with organic search traffic
As a web designer (and someone who chats SEO at dinner parties 💁♀️), I’m a big fan of expanding your health coaching audience by crafting a great website with just as great SEO.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your website and its content to be well-regarded by search engines—and therefore rank higher in search results. Ranking well in search results means that your webpages show up in front of people who are actually looking for exactly what you have to offer. (Yay!)
This is a fantastic way to drive targeted traffic to your health coaching website, attracting those “ideal clients” we talk so much about.
(Here’s a full post on SEO for health coaches, if you’re interested!)
How to improve SEO as a health coach
There’s a health coach question form on our website, through which I answer questions about the Institute for Integrative Nutrition (the health coaching certification I received) for prospective health coaches, and one of the questions I get fairly often is some variation of:
How do I find health coaching clients? When I do a Google search to look for health coaches, all I see is information about studying to become a health coach. How will other people find me?
And that’s a great question!
The reason it’s tough to do a Google search for a health coach is that, for the most part, health coaches are operating independently, each with their own websites (if they even have one!). The large health coaching institutions that you may see in search listings have much better SEO for those health coach-related search terms than an individual health coach who doesn’t have the same resources to put into their website or SEO.
So!
Health Coach Directory
We’re in the process of compiling and launching a Health Coach Directory, an online database of available health coaches (and other wellness professionals!), searchable by service type and area of wellness expertise.
The goal is to turn our Four Wellness Co. website traffic (people interested in health, wellness and health coaching) into prospective health coaching clients for you.
We no longer offer 1:1 health coaching services here, as our business has transitioned to online wellness programs and helping other health coaches set up your own businesses. But we spent years building an audience of readers interested in wellness and health coaching, and who are actively looking for a health coach.
And, of course, I’m hearing from so many health coaches how challenging it is to find and connect with interested clients. So, this resource is being developed as a way to turn our interested readers into your prospective health coaching clients!
Each Health Coach Directory listing will include:
a business listing in our online Health Coach Directory
a Health Coach Spotlight blog post highlighting your practice + wellness expertise
promotion via the Four Wellness Co. website, email newsletter + Pinterest account
exclusive access to submitting guest posts for our wellness blog
The goal is to help expand your reach & connect you with new health coaching clients!
Coming soon… add your name to the list to be notified when the Health Coach Directory is here!
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