Did you know that 78% of consumers will not do business with you unless they can find you online? And many of those consumers may be members of your target market. Therefore, can you afford not to be marketing your group coaching services online?
Photo: © Angelika Bentin / PhotoXpress.com; Design: Carma Spence
The web offers a plethora of options for marketing your business and establishing your brand. But you don’t need to be doing it all to effectively fill your group coaching packages. Here are five of the most effective ways I’ve seen in finding and enrolling people into group coaching programs.
1. Your website
Your website is the hub of your online presence, and therefore should be the most obvious place to go to find information about your group coaching programs. How you promote your programs on your website depends on how they are integrated into your business.
If group coaching is your primary offering, then it should be front and center on your website. If its role is less prominent, then a link in the navigation bar to a page will suffice.
Regardless, you’ll need a page on your website that is dedicated to each individual group coaching program you offer. This is your sales page. It gives people enough information about the program to entice people to click the “Enroll Now” button, open their wallets (virtual or otherwise) and become one of your clients.
2. A dedicated mini-website
If your group coaching program is high-ticket, exclusive or your main offering, you may need to consider giving it its own domain and mini-website. This will give you the space to go into much more depth than would be appropriate on a page of your main website. It will also give your program an increased perceived value.
3. Joint venture promotions
If you don’t have an affiliate program attached to your group coaching, start researching how you can. Many shopping carts offer this for an additional fee. Or you can purchase affiliate software that either integrates with your content management system (such as a WordPress plugin) or integrates with PayPal or your chosen shopping cart.
The reason you’ll need an affiliate program is to help reward joint venture partners who promote your program. These partners will introduce you to the people on their email lists for two big reasons: They believe what you have to offer will be of value to their subscribers and they will receive a piece of the action when people on their list sign up.
Join venture promotions can be amazingly successful at filling programs and increasing your bottom line. I’ve seen successful joint ventures transform the businesses of clients virtually overnight.
4. Facebook and Twitter
Using a combination of Facebook and Twitter, automating much of the cross-promotion between the two platforms can be successful in drawing attention to your program. You just need to be careful that you are not being too “sales-y” in social media sites. Features of these two platforms that can be used to recruit students to your group coaching programs include:
– Facebook events. Create an event and invite all your “friends.” Encourage them to spread the word to their friends. The downside of this feature is that many people with click on the link saying they’re attending, but then not take the essential next step to actually enroll.
– Facebook commenting. If you’ve created a multi-step marketing campaign, including a Facebook commenting feature on your pages, can help increase your program’s visibility. As they comment on your page, it appears on their Facebook wall and in the feeds of their friends, so more people can hear about it.
– Twitter hashtags. Creating a hashtag that is unique to your event can help you track how widely or well your group coaching program is being talked about and shared.
5. Online video.
Using educational and promotional video online is rapidly becoming a must-have for promoting both online and in-person events and programs (if that hasn’t happened already). The better quality your video, the more professional your program will appear. But it is better to have something than nothing. I’ve seen some people use mediocre quality video with high-quality content and still fill their programs.
Of course, there are many more ways to use the web to market your group coaching programs. Be creative. Use the methods that are more likely to attract your ideal clients. Experiment with new techniques long enough to know whether they worked or not. Use the ones that worked again … until they stop working. Embrace the freedom and opportunity that is online marketing.
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