Crafting Your Coach Branding: Best Examples & Strategies

Coach branding might be firmly outside your comfort zone as a helping professional, along with website design, marketing, and business planning, to name a few other aspects of running your own successful practice. So how can you nail it the first time, to build a relevant, engaging public image?

This article covers everything you need to know about branding your practice and services as a coach. Read on to learn how you can define what makes you unique and instantly memorable as a coaching professional online!

Want to promote your own coaching brand? Quenza’s $1 trial will give you unlimited access to all the tools you need to create branded coaching solutions easily and effectively, then share them with clients from anywhere.

Coach Branding: What Is It & Why Is It Important?

If you’re like most coaches, you chose your career to help others achieve their goals. You may not be particularly entrepreneurial or business savvy, which means that branding, marketing, and promoting yourself can be pretty daunting concepts.

But they’re not essential for you to make an impact, are they?

The truth is that you become a business owner as soon as you start your own practice. And in order to grow your impact and help more people, branding is particularly important.

What Is Coach Branding?

So what is ‘your brand,’ exactly?

The experts at personalbrand.com describe it as follows:[1]

[The] widely-recognized and largely-uniform perception or impression of an individual based on their experience, expertise, competencies, actions and/or achievements within a community, industry, or the marketplace at large.

Why Does It Matter?

While it may not be your forte, building your brand helps you grow your practice in a few critical ways, most notably by:

1. Building up your authority as an expert
2. Differentiating you from other coaches
3. Positioning you as a credible practitioner
4. Helping you attract your dream clients
5. Communicating your unique value proposition, and
6. Helping you grow your business with greater recognition, loyalty, and trust.

Strong, clear, and consistent branding is a very simple way to establish a relationship with clients, even when you haven’t yet met them personally.

The good news is that can create your own brand without any special marketing skills; a successful brand is built from your coaching philosophy and values.

Let’s take a closer look at how it works.

How To Create Your Life Coach Branding

Successful branding doesn’t happen by accident. As a practice owner, your goal is to create strong messaging that makes potential clients feel a certain (positive!) way about you, and the best way to achieve that is with a thought-out coach branding strategy.

Consider these elements of a strong coach brand, according to experts at The University of Rhode Island Small Business Center:[2]

• Originality. Your brand should differentiate you from other coaches in your niche, making you memorable and helping you stand out from the crowd.
• Purpose-driven. Branding communicates what you do and why you do it, so it needs to be relevant to your vision and mission.
• Authenticity. To build trust and loyalty, your brand needs to be true to who you are and what you do.
• Audience-oriented. Clearly-defined coach branding can speak powerfully to your dream clients – communicate your values and what you stand for if you want to attract your ideal audience.
• Consistent. Branding is far more than a logo; it’s all of your products, communications, and coaching solutions, too. With clear, consistent messaging through all of your channels, you can automatically build up trust and shine in a way that attracts even more of your target clients.

Actionable Strategies

Knowing what makes a great coach brand is one thing, but how can you get started if you’ve never built a brand?

Here are a few top tips.

1. Choose your values

A good place to start is by clarifying what you stand for and believe in as a coach, so that you can represent yourself clearly and authentically.

Completing an exercise like The Top 5 Values, above, can help you identify 3-5 core values that you would like to represent with your professional ‘face,’ and help you build consistent messaging from the very start.

2. Formulate your Promise

Among other things, having a purpose-driven brand requires strong knowledge of exactly:

• Who you help (your People), and
• What you help them with (their Problem or goal).

If you haven’t already created a coaching business plan, solidifying your vision and mission is a great way to establish what your brand will be communicating.

3. Know Your Dream Client

Clarifying who you help is a good start, but you can speak even more directly to your ideal client by fleshing out what they want and where they’re coming from.

If you’re starting up as a new coach, you can create a persona for your dream client by brainstorming where they can be found, what they’re struggling with, and what they are looking for as a solution.

This is an easy step to skip, but getting clear on what your dream client wants from a coach in your niche is at the very heart of crafting a brand they will love.

A little further on, we’ll cover how you can use these three elements to create a coach branding strategy and bring it all to life.

3 Examples of Successful Coach Branding

It’s much easier to create a strong first impression when you have something to aim for, so consider the following coaches who have completely nailed their branding.

• Tony Robbins: Life coach Tony Robbins uses his own face in place of a logo, and his ‘rags to riches’ story is incredibly well known. His mission of helping clients “toward higher achievement and deeper fulfillment” is clearly communicated through all his communications, including podcasts, resources, books, videos, blog posts, and social media posts.
• Brian Tracy: Motivational speaker and life coach Brian Tracy has a very clear, consistent brand identity. His own tips for his potential clients include being as visible as possible and specializing in one focus area, something he has personally achieved by becoming a thought leader in his field.
• Jody Michael Associates: Business and executive coach Jody Michael is crystal clear on who her dream client is, and speaks directly to them with a corporate, professional language and a clean, minimalist, and formal website and social media. Jody’s blogs, which feature on her front page alongside famous clients, all tackle day-to-day pain points for the audience she is marketing to, giving them a first taste of what it’s like to work with her in person.

3 Branding Strategies and Tips For Coaches

If you’ve already started brainstorming ideas for your unique coaching brand, here are some tips to make it even easier.

1. Clarity is key: It’s hard to define your dream client, your niche, or your unique value offer too clearly, so don’t worry if this initial step takes more time than you’d expect. Consider creating a reference resource that covers the ‘why’ for each of these critical points, and the ‘what’ elements such as a style guide, logo, and brand voice should all become much easier to formulate.
2. Specificity matters: You have to choose to be chosen, which can be hard for many coaches. But trying to be everything to everyone only can make your branding seem vague and easily forgettable—your goal is to stand out as the perfect solution for a small but very specific subset of clients.
3. Outsource: Graphics, web design, and content creation may not be your forte as a coach, so don’t spread yourself too thin trying to do everything on your own. Consider outsourcing the elements that you’re not confident with to an expert or freelancer, and don’t be afraid to test out the results on your dream clients until you’re satisfied that it’s making the impact you want.

Once you’ve got the visual and written elements of your brand ready to go, you can start to feature it consistently on all of your coaching resources!

Best Digital Solution For Your Coaching Practice

A coaching platform like Quenza makes it fantastically easy to promote your coaching brand by adding your logo to all of your activities and client touchpoints using the White Label feature.

It’s also the easiest way to develop bespoke, true-to-brand content such as packages, e-courses, and information products!

If you have your practice logo saved as an image, you can use Quenza’s White Label feature in a few simple steps:

1. From your Dashboard, navigate to Settings > Customization
2. In your Customization settings, as shown below, you can upload your brand logo to feature it in your Quenza app menu, login screen, client emails, and activities:

   

3. You can also customize the Quenza app to feature your brand Colors, allowing you to create a consistent visual appearance for all your clients’ activities, exercises, worksheets, and results forms.

Because Quenza’s suite of tools gives you total control over every aspect of your coaching, you’re free to create an entirely unique and consistent experience in a way that is true to your brand.

6 Ways Quenza Can Provide Value To Your Clients & Brand

Ready to get started? Here are a few other things you can accomplish easily with Quenza:

1. Group coaching – manage cohorts, stay in touch via chat, bulk import clients, and bulk export results for low-maintenance, high-impact group solutions
2. Note-taking and documentation – using Quenza’s GDPR- and HIPAA-compliant Client profiles, you can create private notes during sessions, or comment on notes that your clients choose to share
3. File sharing – Quenza’s organized file feature simplifies how you store and share documents, images, videos, and other coaching resources with those you help
4. Expansions – with your in-app Expansion library, course and resource creation is as easy as customizing pre-made templates
5. Results tracking – it’s easy to monitor engagement and progress with Quenza’s automatic real-time results tracking, which is great for habit diaries, mood journals, and other interactive content
6. Notifications, reminders, and updates – Quenza’s unique client engagement toolkit includes a host of ways to keep your clients motivated or send on-brand messages about your latest promotions and updates.

The unique customizability of Quenza is exactly how you can take charge of your brand, keeping your clients engaged while you grow your business through a strong, positive, and consistent coaching presence.

Final Thoughts

If you’re just getting started as an online coach, coming up with a public face for your business can seem intimidating, not to mention a lot of work.

But these tips, strategies, and best practices are a wonderful way to help you channel your professional identity, and we’re sure you’ll find that a little effort goes miles to helping you build a recognizable and unforgettable identity as a coach.

References