How to grow a successful financial coaching business

Want to know how to grow a successful financial coaching business? There is a big difference between starting a financial coaching business and growing or building a successful one. Whether you’ve recently become a certified financial coach or you’ve been running your business for a while and want to see further growth you are in the right place.  Keep on reading to find out how to grow a successful financial coaching business.

 

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The difference between starting a financial coaching business and growing a successful financial coaching business. 

 

The coaching industry is a growing industry and that includes the world of financial coaching.  As a result there are more companies who run training courses to help you become a financial coach. A quick search on Google brings up numerous options (I’m based in the UK) such as:

• Octopus Money Coach
• Wise Monkey 
• The Money Panel

 

In the majority of cases, these programmes/courses are designed to give you the practical skills to be a great coach, but they don’t necessarily equip you with the skills and knowledge to build a successful financial coaching business.

 

This can result in financial coaches starting their businesses, signing a client here and there, but not gaining a steady stream of clients and not achieving the growth they truly desire.

 

It doesn’t have to be that way though and I’m going to show you how to grow/build a successful financial coaching business.

 

HOW TO GROW A SUCCESSFUL FINANCIAL COACHING BUSINESS

1: Set your business goals

What does having a successful financial coaching business look like? And what does it look like this quarter, this year and in 3 years time. Successful is a subjective word – it means something different to everyone. It is vital that you get clear on what success means to you. Otherwise it is too easy to get swept up with all the versions of success that are pushed online.

 

 

2: Decide what growth strategy you want to follow

There is more than one way to grow your business. As a business owner you want to choose the growth strategy that makes the most sense for you.

 

A common growth strategy tool is the Ansoff Matrix . If you use the Ansoff Matrix you’ll realise that there are four different ways to grow your business:

 

• Market Penetration
• Market Development
• Product Development
• Diversification

 

You can find out more about the Ansoff matrix and the 4 different growth strategies by reading this.

 

For ease, I’m going to go through some common situations.

 

If you are a financial coach who is happy with the ideal client you serve and the service you serve, but want to grow to be fully booked then you’ll be following the market penetration strategy.

 

If you are a financial coach who is fully booked and now wants to add in additional services (for example, you might be fully booked for 1:1 work so you want to launch a course or membership) then you’ll be following a diversification strategy.

 

 

WANT HELP TO GROW A SUCCESSFUL FINANCIAL COACHING BUSINESS?

 

Financial coaches are one of my favourite types of coaches to work with. I’m passionate about personal finances and truly believe in the power of financial coaching.

Growing a successful financial coaching business isn’t easy – and it isn’t getting easier with more people getting certified or just setting up a financial coaching business anyway.

 

If you are serious about cutting through the noise and have an outstanding rather than average financial coaching business I’d love to talk to you and see if I can help you increase your audience, revenue and impact.

You can book a free, no-obligation, introduction call here.

And you can find out more about my services for financial and money coaches here. 

 

 

 

3: Get clear on your superpower

To grow a successful financial coaching business, in an ever growing industry, you need to be able to stand out and become known for something. That means you need to get clear on your superpower. How are you different from other financial coaches? Is there an area that you specialise in? Do you have an approach or framework that makes you different to others?

 

For example you could be a financial coach that specialises in

• getting out of debt
• addressing your mindset issues so you increase our revenue in your business
• planning for retirement
• helping people to be Financially Independent and Retire Early (FIRE)

 

Finding your superpower, or area of specialism, can be difficult. Try to think about the area of financial coaching that excites you the most and what you would be happy to support clients with over and over again.

 

4: Refine your ideal client

Once you’ve decided on your superpower you need to think about who you want to serve/support – aka who is your ideal client.

 

Just because you can work with anyone, doesn’t mean you should. When you are trying to market your business to everyone your messaging will be bland and in most cases talk to no-one. Instead it is better to define your ideal client and work out exactly who you want to serve.

 

When deciding your ideal client you can look at demographics such as:

• Age
• Gender
• Relationship Status
• Location
• Level of Income
• Education Status
• and more.

 

However, ideally you want to go further at look at psychographics such as:

• Personality Traits
• Personality Types
• Interests
• Attitudes
• Beliefs
• Values
• Lifestyle

 

If you want to grow a successful coaching business then refining your ideal client is going to make your life a lot easier.

 

It can be scary to narrow down. You feel as if you are going to limit yourself, but the exact opposite happens. When you specialise in helping a certain type of people in a certain financial situation you make it easier for people to think you are perfect for them. You also make it easier for people to recommend you and being able to be easily referred will help you to grow a successful financial coaching that doesn’t rely on you constantly having to market it.

 

5: Review Your Pricing

It is common when someone says they want to ‘grow’ their business that what they mean is they want to ‘make more money’. There are multiple ways that you can make more money in your business. In fact, I share 5 ways to make more money in your coaching business here  and the first way I suggest is by raising your prices.

 

It could be that you can grow your business without doing anymore work by simply raising your prices. Now I’m not one to encourage people to raise their prices just for the sake of it. However, you should definitely be reviewing your pricing at least on an annual basis. So if you haven’t reviewed your prices in a while then I’d recommend you do so.

 

 

 

6: Become a Marketing Whizz

The most successful financial coaches in the world aren’t necessarily the best financial coaches in the world. But they do have one thing in common – they’ve learnt how to successfully market their business.

 

Marketing Channels
It is common when first starting a financial coaching business to use organic (free) marketing channels and there is often a high reliance on social media or one specific marketing channel. As you start to want to grow your business you’ll need to review the marketing channels you are using to ensure that the return-on-investment (ROI) makes it a worthwhile channel to continue to  use. You should also consider whether you need to add further marketing channels to improve the effectiveness of your marketing.

 

Not sure if you have the right marketing channels for your business? Check out ‘How to choose the right marketing channels for your business’.

 

What is key is that your marketing channels allow for a clear buyer journey. This is the journey someone goes on from first becoming aware of you and then going all the way through to becoming a client. You can find out more about mapping a buyer journey in ‘How to map out a customer journey’.

 

Content
Knowing where you will market your business is just one part of marketing your business. You’ll also need to think about what you are using to market your business. Content has become an increasingly important part of marketing and are your copy (words), images (graphics and photographs) and video successfully attracting your ideal client and encouraging them to work with you. To successfully market your business you’ll need to ensure your content is growing your audience, but also turning your audience into clients.

 

One of the major difficulties financial coaches face, particularly when relying on social media, is that it is easy to get included in the world of finfluencers or financial influencers. These individuals have a completely different monetisation strategy, which is based on sponsorships and ads. However, it means there are people on social media who expect to get endless free financial content. As a financial coach you need to make it clear to your audience that they can actually work with you and ensure your content turns your audience into clients. Otherwise you could end up with a growing audience, but no money in the bank.

 

Plan
Consistency in marketing is key, especially if you want your business to grow. As a financial coach people need to really trust you. Showing up consistently online will help people see you as reliable and lower the risk they associate with working with you.

 

Staying consistent as you add in more marketing channels and do more work with clients can be tricky. That is why it is essential you have a plan to follow. A plan will help you to stay consistent and it will help you to be efficient with your time.

 

As I hope you can see, a lot goes into being a marketing pro, but the success of your business depends on it.  I know that a plan will massively increase your chances of being consistent so I have created a workbook to help you create a content marketing plan for the year ahead. You can grab a copy by filling in the form below.

I also  go deeper into  how to create a content marketing plan for your business here.

 

7: Review and optimise

Last, but definitely, not least you need to regularly reviewing how your marketing is performing and optimising it as necessary. As a financial coach I’d hope you are comfortable with your numbers, but what about those non-financial numbers. Do you currently have KPIs set for your business and how often are you reviewing them?

If you don’t already have KPIs I share the top sales and marketing KPIs here to help you start to put together your own KPIs.

You’ll want to be looking at the analytics from your website (Google Analytics is perfect for this), as well as analytics from your email service provider and any other social media platforms or channels you use in your business.

You can then use that information to inform future activity so you double down on what works and stop doing what isn’t working.

That’s it!  You now know how to grow a successful financial coaching business. 

I know I covered a lot, but I hope you have found this blog post useful. After marketing and business, money is my favourite thing to talk about. A number of times I’ve considered being a financial coach myself, but I decided that it makes more sense for me to help existing financial coaches to improve their marketing so they can impact more lives.

WORK WITH ME 1-TO-1

If you are a financial coach that is serious about growing your business to increase your revenue, as well as the number of people you impact, I’d love to see if I can help you to achieve that growth.

 I’m a Chartered Marketer, with a decade of professional marketing experience who now spends my days supporting solo coaches and consultants to improve their marketing, grow their business and ultimately build a business they love. 

I’m passionate about the world of personal finances and truly believe in the power of financial coaching and how it can help transform the lives of millions whose financial situation isn’t what they’d like it to be.

You can find out more about my services for financial / money coaches here.

You can book a call to discuss your personal needs here.

 

In the comments I would love to know who your ideal client is and how you help your clients.