4 things to know from this article
- Coaching websites average 9.03 out of 10 on being well built and 4.49 on being understandable. The money goes to the wrong half.
- The average coaching LinkedIn headline scores 2.56 out of 10. 70.1% score 3 or less.
- 420 coaches share the headline "Executive Coach". 364 have written "Coach".
- Proof decides the sale in 92.9% of coaching markets. 66.5% of coaching websites show none.
Most marketing advice for coaches is somebody's opinion dressed up as a system. Post daily. Batch your reels. Build a funnel. Niche down, but not too far.
In this article I'm showing you what happens when you count instead, across three sets of our own data: 10,954 live coaching websites scored out of 10, 11,377 coaches' LinkedIn headlines scored the same way, and 918 coaching markets mapped for what makes their buyers say yes.
The three agree, which surprised me. They fail at the same point.
Here it is. The average coaching website scores 9.03 out of 10 on being well built, and 4.49 on whether a stranger can tell what it's for. The average coaching LinkedIn headline scores 2.56 out of 10.
Coaches aren't bad at marketing. They're good at the parts that can be bought and bad at the one part that can't.
What are coaches actually spending their marketing on?
The build, the platform and the posting. All three are things you can pay somebody to do.
Look at what the scoring finds on 10,954 live coaching websites.
| What we scored | Market average out of 10 |
|---|---|
| Technical health: loads, works on a phone, secure | 9.03 |
| Clear next step | 5.60 |
| Five-second read | 4.49 |
| Being specific about who and what | 4.38 |
| Offer clarity | 2.89 |
| Story, anything human on the page | 2.54 |
| Proof | 1.51 |
The top row is the one with a supplier attached. Nine out of ten, across the whole market. Coaching websites are well built.
The bottom row is the one that decides whether a stranger believes you, and it's a 1.51.
Does the same thing happen off the website?
Yes, and worse, which is what convinced me it isn't a website problem.
We scored 11,377 coaches' LinkedIn headlines out of 10 on four things: does it name a niche, does it name an audience, does it state an outcome, does it show a credential.
| What the headline does | Share of 11,377 coaches |
|---|---|
| Names a niche of some kind | 68.2% |
| Is a bare role word and nothing else | 32.5% |
| Names a specific audience | 25.2% |
| States an outcome, what changes for somebody | 7.5% |
| Names both an audience and an outcome | 4.3% |
| Scores 8 or more out of 10 | 2.2% |
Four in a hundred say who they help and what changes. 420 coaches have written "Executive Coach" and stopped. 364 have written "Coach".
41.5% of them share their headline word for word with at least one other coach in the set.
That's the same failure as the website: the page is fine, the words describe the coach rather than the reader.
So what does the buyer side say?
That the missing half is exactly the half being skipped.
We mapped 918 coaching markets from 2,004 books those buyers paid for and 1,547 things real buyers wrote. Each one is tagged with what the buying decision turns on.
Social proof turns up in 92.9% of them. Authority in 87.9%. Scarcity and urgency, the thing coaches get taught hardest, in 4.4%.
And 66.5% of coaching websites show no proof at all.
There's the whole picture. The evidence says buyers decide on proof and recognition. Coaches are being sold funnels, timers and posting schedules.
What would I do first, then?
Fix the sentence before you buy anything.
Not because writing is cheaper than advertising, though it is. Because every channel you might pay for carries that sentence into the world, so getting it wrong multiplies. A bad headline on LinkedIn is a bad ad, a bad homepage and a bad bio all at once.
Three things, in this order, and they're the same three wherever the traffic comes from.
Be findable on a problem somebody types. In 38.9% of markets the buyer knows what's wrong and has no idea what fixes it. She isn't searching for a coach. That's a niche question first, and a marketing one second.
Be understandable in five seconds. 86% of coaching websites aren't. Neither are 70.1% of the LinkedIn headlines. More on why that one check decides so much.
Be believable before you ask. Proof, a price or something like one, a human on the page. The three jobs of getting clients covers this in full.
Then pick a channel. The four posts below take one each.
- A life coach marketing plan, in the order the evidence puts things.
- Social media marketing for coaches, starting with the 11,377 headlines.
- Content marketing for coaches, and what to actually write about.
- Branding for a coaching business, and why it's the last thing to fix.
Where the counting stops
Three datasets and none of them watches a sale happen.
We scored homepages, headlines and markets. We didn't sit in on a discovery call, read anybody's email list, or see what a coach earns. A coach with a 2 out of 10 headline and a full practice exists, and she got there through people who already knew her.
Is a headline score a fair thing to measure? It's four checks on one line of text, and a human would disagree with it on any given coach. Across 11,377 it's consistent, and consistent is what a market average needs.
Could all three datasets be wrong in the same direction? They'd have to be wrong about different things in the same way: one reads HTML, one reads a line of text, one reads books and buyer quotes. That they agree is the part I'd trust.
Questions coaches ask about this
What is the best marketing for life coaches?
The kind that makes a stranger recognise her own problem before you ask her for anything. Across 10,954 coaching websites and 11,377 LinkedIn headlines, the thing that separates the ones that work is clarity about who it's for, not the channel or the budget.
How much should a coach spend on marketing?
Less than you'd guess, until the sentence is right. Coaching websites already average 9.03 out of 10 on being well built and 4.49 on being understandable, so money spent on the build is money spent on the half that's already fine.
Why is my coaching marketing not working?
Two checks. Can a stranger say what you do and who for, in five seconds? Is there anything on the page she could check that isn't your own opinion of yourself? 86% of coaching sites fail the first and 66.5% show nothing for the second.
Do I need a marketing agency or a marketing coach?
Only after the sentence exists, because neither can write it for you. They can build, place and distribute what you give them, and if what you give them describes you rather than your buyer, they'll distribute that faster.
Is social media or a website better for coaches?
Neither wins on its own. They fail identically: the website averages 4.49 out of 10 on clarity, the LinkedIn headline averages 2.56, and both are describing the coach instead of the reader. Fix that once and it improves both.
The figures here come from our own corpus of 10,954 scored coaching websites and 918 mapped coaching markets. How we built and scored it.