When it comes to branding, life coaches often default to one of two approaches:
1. As a paradigm (or way of thinking) that turns branding into a time-consuming, overcomplicated process.
2. As a part of how they show up in their business and naturally develop as they grow.
Beginner life coaches typically don’t launch as a result of approach #1 and psych themselves out before tapping into their full potential.
In approach #2, they understand that while designing their brand is an important part of their business, it’s not a prerequisite.
So, if you’ve been stuck trying to figure out your life coaching brand, let’s focus on building some momentum. We’ll explore the basics of branding in this post, and also how you can start a successful coaching business without the stress of “getting your brand right” the first time.
Then, we’ll walk through proven methods for attracting dream clients you can begin working with right away – all by showing up as your most authentic, highest self!
Why is a Life Coaching Brand Important For Your Business?
“Your brand is a gateway to your true work. You know you are here to do something – to create something or help others in some way. The question is, how can you set up your life and work so that you can do it? The answer lies in your brand. When you create a compelling brand, you attract people who want the promise of your brand – which you deliver.” – Dave Buck
Branding isn’t just a concept; it’s a mindset and a practice.
It involves creating a clear identity that represents what you stand for, how you operate, and why your ideal client will choose you over any other life coach.
And the key to branding is intention and consistency, not extravagance and complexity.
The good news is that it doesn’t take a degree in marketing or design to build a strong brand. But it does take an understanding of how every aspect of your brand is aligned with your values, mission, and goals.
With this foundation in mind, let’s start building on the fundamentals.
The Fundamentals of Crafting Your Unique Life Coaching Brand
To create a more meaningful life coaching brand, ask yourself how you would like others to perceive your business.
For example, while there’s nothing wrong with choosing your favorite colors for your brand palette, it helps to think about the meaning and energy it creates for your audience.
Consider the following:
- What colors express the message you want to share with others?
- Which emotions do your colors evoke?
- How do those colors best tell your story?
You can use this list as a guide to understand the power behind colors:
What Colors Mean in Your Branding:
- White: purity, simplicity, light, cleanliness, and innocence.
- Black: luxury, exclusivity, grief, sophistication, and professionalism.
- Brown: simplicity, earth, stability, comfort, warmth, and honesty.
- Purple: royalty, spirituality, royalty, calm, and creativity.
- Pink: playful, love, compassion, friendship, affection, tenderness, and excitement.
- Blue: truth, sadness, coolness, peace, sensitivity, clarity, and softness.
- Green: nature, wealth, growth, sustainability, nature, freshness, harmony, and healing.
- Yellow: enlightenment, optimism, communication, confidence, caution, and loyalty.
- Orange: health, energy, adventure, heat, freedom, and success.
- Red: passion, love, desire, sexuality, power, determination, and confidence.
As you read through this list, let yourself be guided by the emotions and energy you would love people to experience when they engage with your brand.
How to Make Branding Decisions Faster
Most beginner life coaches get caught up in choosing the perfect branding elements for their business. As a result, they don’t launch at all. Or, they prevent themselves from getting to a level where they can scale their coaching practice.
But by establishing a standard to base those decisions on, you’ll make the process a lot easier and faster. That way, whenever there’s a fork in the road or a hundred different options, you’ll be guided in the right direction.
Reflect on the following guiding principles to ensure you’re being as intentional as possible in your branding decisions:
- Consider your audience and what’s meaningful to them.
- Reflect on the problem you solve and how that story is best expressed.
- Think about what you would love instead of comparing yourself to other life coaching businesses.
- Your uniqueness is a strength. If you’re afraid to stand out so you could reach “everyone”, you’ll end up talking to no one. It can be as simple as presenting yourself as a transformational life coach vs. a traditional life coach, for example.
If you would love to explore these questions deeper and gain more clarity about what you offer as a life coach, check out our blog post on discovering your coaching superpower!
Examples of Transformational Life Coaching Branding That Win Clients Over
Connecting to the hearts and minds of your ideal clients starts with connecting to your own inner truth. If you maintain a set of core values and a mission statement, for instance, you’ll naturally start to attract clients who meet that energetic threshold.
For the following branding examples, we’ll use our own work here at Brave Thinking™ Institute.
The Brave Thinking Institute Mission Statement
Our mission is to empower people to create and live a life they love. This mission is the foundation where everything else is set – including our core values.
Before we were Brave Thinking Institute, each of our Faculty members had their own separate website for their respective thriving coaching business.
In 2020, we strategically decided to bring our coaching businesses together under one name, website, and overarching purpose. This includes 5 divisions with different brand personalities, messages, and audiences.
The Life and Transformation Division
Founded by Mary Morrissey, this division uses blue to convey clarity, dreams, and peace. This works well with Mary’s superpower of helping people shift their paradigms, build dreams, and create tangible results in all areas of life.
We designed this division to be perceived as trustworthy, wise, and timeless. To be as welcoming as possible for anyone, from anywhere, to join us and create a life they would love. In short, we branded it out to feel like open arms and open hearts.
The Love and Relationships Division
My division, Love and Relationships, uses the color pink to represent love, playfulness, and excitement. This works well because it speaks to potential clients who want to attract the relationship they desire and manifest greater love in their life.
If you check out my YouTube channel, you’ll notice that I have a signature energy and vibe. It’s fun, a little silly, and approachable. For people who might feel intimidated or uneasy about their relationships and/or romantic life, these elements play a huge role in creating a welcoming and safe environment for them.
The Business and Leadership Division
John Boggs, the Founder of the Business and Leadership division, works with the color teal (a blend of blue and green) to denote balance and reliability. He helps people tap into the leadership skills that create breakthrough results and transform businesses.
As a business leader, it was a priority to brand this division in a way that excluded confidence, clarity, and professionalism. However, you’ll also notice in John Bogg’s videos that his warm, friendly disposition makes business and leadership less of a cut and dry topic.
The Health and Well-Being Division
The Founder of the Health and Well-Being division, Jennifer Joy Jiménez, uses purple throughout her brand to express divine radiance and spirituality. Jennifer serves her clients by helping them reconnect with themselves and infusing confidence, joy, and abundance in mind, body, and spirit.
Jennifer Joy Jiménez hosts an inspiring, fun, and empowering space for her clients to thrive in. Her energetic, vibrant personality shines through her branding, and we designed her division to match that signature vibration.
What brings us all together like pieces of a puzzle is our mission and core values. As a result, no matter how large our brand grows, we share the same foundation and guiding principles.
This is a fantastic way to look at your own brand:
How can you establish a memorable, meaningful life coaching brand that can scale with you?
Reflect on how you can incorporate your personality into your business. Use colors, images, and language that are representative of your mission and values. If you start feeling lost, navigate back to how you’d love your clients to feel when they work with you.
Start with that, and you’ll be well on your way to an inspired life coaching brand that’s both memorable and meaningful.
How to Build Your Brand in a Way You Love
There is a lot of “have to” and “supposed to do” energy when it comes to building a successful coaching business.
Most of it comes from a place of comparison to other coaches and more established brands. What beginner coaches tend to do is force themselves into a box and follow what worked for someone else.
But the truth is, what might’ve lit someone else up doesn’t mean you’ll experience the same level of excitement or energy. And you don’t have to.
Aligned action happens when you start embodying the energy only you can offer and infusing it into your content, messaging, and however else you show up in your business.
In the end, all the actions you take that feel forced or untrue to you will only lead to burnout and hustle, not growth.
Make the “Experience” a Part of Your Life Coaching Brand
The experience your clients have with you starts from the very first touchpoint. That could be online, in-person, or even by word of mouth!
This is a powerful part of your brand to be aware of. It has less to do with your colors, language, and other visible elements, and more to do with your energy, personality, and perception.
The experience your clients will have with you is the centerpiece of your life coaching brand.
That means, even if you don’t have anything else prepared (like a website, a color palette, business cards, etc.), you can still start building your brand simply by creating experiences for your audience.
Maya Angelou said it like this, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
And the good news is that you can surprise and delight your clients in a myriad of ways. For instance, you could send clients custom gifts or freebies (like tickets to an upcoming event). And the best way to effortlessly build your brand is by creating a positive experience with the people you work with.
Notice I used the word “with”.
As a life coach building your dream career and helping yourself and others create a life they love, it’s essential to set yourself up for success.
That means designing a brand experience that works best for you AND your clients. And it starts from the moment they meet you (or even hear about you) and stretches all the way through your coaching sessions and after graduation!
And the best way to get the experience right is by working with clients who make it easy and fun!
3 Easy Methods to Start Magnetizing Your Dream Clients
Effective branding is all about intention. So if you want to work with aligned clients who are ready to invest and value your worth, you can make it as effortless as possible by using your brand as a natural magnet.
Whether you’re working on landing your first client or want to learn how to attract more, let’s explore three ways you can amplify your magnetism with increased ease and flow.
1. Ideal Client Avatar
Defining your ideal client avatar isn’t about getting it perfect or right the first, second, or even the third time around! It’s about being able to hold an image in your mind of your ideal client (a person you could help at that moment) and making decisions based on their pain points and desires. Your avatar will naturally evolve over time.
But once you have that foundational vision, you can use that avatar to inspire how you design and execute everything else in your brand and how you magnetize your dream clients!
2. Client Intake Questionnaire
We have an entire post about what to include in this questionnaire, but in short, it saves you time in research, back-to-back discovery calls, and pursuing clients who aren’t that interested or compatible with your services.
It’s essentially a form potential clients fill out that gives you better insights into who they are, their motives, their commitment, etc. After reviewing their responses, you’ll have a much better idea of whether or not it would be worth moving them forward into an enrollment call.
3. Lead Magnets
This also deserved a dedicated post, so you can check out the link to learn more about crafting lead magnets specifically for coaching clients. Lead magnets “magnetize” potential clients by trading valuable, relevant content for contact information like an email address. This allows you to add them to your contact list (following permission marketing etiquette and GDPR regulations, of course) and continue nurturing their relationship with your brand.
When designed in a strategic, intentional manner, lead magnets will automate the process of attracting high-quality leads who are more likely to invest in your services! Trust the process. And as your life coaching business grows, your brand will flow with you — and so will your dream clients.
Conclusion: Building Your Life Coaching Brand Can Be Fun, Effortless, and Easy!
The above steps will help you build a strong foundation for your life coaching brand. And as a quick recap:
Put yourself out there and share your story with the world. That includes sharing your message, mission, values, and your unique voice and coaching superpower.
That’s the fastest, easiest way to build an authentic life coaching brand.
But if you still feel dead in your tracks or simply feel overwhelmed with the process of building your life coaching brand, I invite you to take the next step in growing your business!
Learn how to launch your career as a profitable life coach and make a real impact on others by grabbing a free copy of our e-book:
>> 8 Surefire Ways to Get 10 New Clients in 90 Days or Less
Inside you’ll discover:
- Proven client attraction and enrollment techniques used by leaders in the life coaching industry.
- What to look for in a coaching certification that will provide the proper training necessary to grow your business.
- A guide to heart-centered sales while staying true to your sacred calling.
Whether you’re ready to launch or lean in, we’re here to support you in accelerating your results in the direction of a life you would love living!
Think bravely and act boldly,
Mat Boggs
