4 things to know from this article
- 11,377 coaches' headlines average 2.56 out of 10. 70.1% score 3 or less.
- 420 have written "Executive Coach". 364 have written "Coach". 299 have written "Therapist".
- 4.3% name both who they help and what changes for them.
- 41.5% share their headline word for word with at least one other coach in the set.
Every coach has been told to show up consistently. Nobody gets told to fix the one line that appears above every single thing they post.
So we scored it. 11,377 coaches' LinkedIn headlines, out of 10, on four checks: does it name a niche, does it name an audience, does it state an outcome, does it show a credential. It's one piece of what the counting says about marketing for coaches, and it's the cheapest piece to fix.
The average is 2.56 out of 10.
Two hundred and forty-seven coaches out of 11,377 score 8 or more. That's 2.2%.
What does a headline score on?
Four things, and almost everybody gets one of them.
| What the headline does | Share of 11,377 coaches |
|---|---|
| Names a niche of some kind | 68.2% |
| Is a multi-part headline rather than one flat line | 33.2% |
| Is a bare role word and nothing else | 32.5% |
| Names a specific audience | 25.2% |
| States an outcome, what actually changes | 7.5% |
| Shows a credential | 6.9% |
| Names both an audience and an outcome | 4.3% |
Read the first row against the last two. Two thirds name a niche, which is why two thirds of coaches feel they've done the positioning work. Seven and a half percent say what changes for the person reading.
Naming your field tells somebody which shelf you're on. It doesn't tell her whether to pick you up.
Why does the same headline keep appearing?
Because a role is the easy thing to type and it's the same easy thing for everybody.
There are 7,220 different headlines across 11,377 coaches, and 41.5% of those coaches share theirs exactly with somebody else. The commonest ones are exactly what you'd expect.
| Headline | Coaches using it |
|---|---|
| Executive Coach | 420 |
| Coach | 364 |
| Therapist | 299 |
| Business Coach | 178 |
| Career Coach | 167 |
| Leadership Coach | 165 |
Four hundred and twenty people have written the same two words. Search "executive coach" on LinkedIn and they're interchangeable on the page, and the only thing left to choose on is the photo.
Is a credential worth putting in it?
6.9% have one in there, and on its own it does less than they think.
6.4% of the whole set show a credential and state no outcome at all. That's the shape of a headline that answers a question nobody asked: she isn't wondering whether you're qualified yet, she's wondering whether you're for her.
The buyer research says the same thing from the other side. Across 918 coaching markets, authority supports the decision in 87.9% of them, and authority in that data means the sense that you've seen this problem before. A certificate is the weakest version of that. Having lived the exact thing she's living is the strongest, and it costs nothing to say.
What does a headline that scores well look like?
It names a person and a change, in that order, with the role in there somewhere.
Not a formula to copy. The shape is: who, what changes, and only then what you call yourself. "Executive Coach" names the third thing and stops. The 2.2% that score 8 or more get all three into one line.
The test is the same five seconds we use on a homepage. A stranger reads the line and either recognises herself or scrolls. 70.1% of coaching headlines give her nothing to recognise, which is why posting harder underneath one doesn't move anything.
If you're not sure what to put in the "who" slot, that's a niche question rather than a social media one. And the same sentence has to work on your homepage, where 86% of coaching websites fail the same check.
What this doesn't cover
We scored headlines. We didn't read anybody's posts, count their followers, or watch a single enquiry arrive.
So this says nothing about whether posting works, which platform is better, or how often to show up. It says that the line sitting above all of that is, for seven coaches in ten, doing almost nothing.
Is a headline score a fair thing to measure? It's four checks on one line of text and on any given coach a human would argue with it. Across 11,377 it's consistent, and it's the same four things a stranger is actually looking for.
Are these all coaches? They're people whose LinkedIn title says they coach, which includes therapists and consultants who use the word. That's the market as it presents itself, which is the market a buyer scrolls past.
Questions coaches ask about this
What should a life coach put in their LinkedIn headline?
Who you help and what changes for them, before what you call yourself. Only 4.3% of the 11,377 coaches we scored do both, and 32.5% have written a bare role word and nothing else.
Does social media work for coaches?
We can't answer that from this data, and anybody who gives you a confident number has made it up. What we can say is that 70.1% of coaches are posting underneath a headline that scores 3 or less out of 10, so the reach they work for arrives at a line that says nothing.
How do I stand out as a coach on LinkedIn?
Stop naming the category. 420 coaches have written "Executive Coach" and 364 have written "Coach", so the category is the one place standing out is impossible.
Should I put ICF or my certification in my headline?
It can go in, but not instead of the outcome. 6.4% of coaches show a credential and state no outcome at all, which answers a question the reader hasn't got to yet.
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.