How to do Market Research for Your Coaching Business

Why is market research important for your coaching business?

Knowing how to do market research for your coaching business helps you connect with your ideal clients and understand what they need, so you can develop services to meet those needs.

The first step in serving your ideal clients is understanding what they need.

In order to understand what they need, you need to know them: their pains, their desired solutions, and what they want to achieve by working with someone like you.

The way you understand their needs and desires is by asking them. But you want to have a method of asking them that captures their real, unbiased, true answers and gathers answers that you can immediately put into action in your business.

How market research helps your coaching business

The main reason you do market research for your coaching business is to validate your offerings, but doing market research for your coaching or wellness business can help you…

1. Clarify your niche and make sure you truly understand who you want to serve, what they have in common, and how to reach them.
2. Ensure you’re creating coaching packages that meet their needs and that your ideal client will want to buy.
3. Understand how to talk about your offerings in a way that resonates with and attracts your ideal clients.
4. Decide how to market your offerings  to your prospective clients.

When you talk to your prospective clients, you not only learn WHAT they need, you learn WHY they need it.

You hear them describe their needs and desired solutions in their own words, which helps you create an offering that meets their needs and a core message that speaks to their needs.

Market research vs. marketing research

There is a difference between “market research” and “marketing research.”

Market research is research on the overall market for your business and specifically, on your target audience. The purpose of market research is to learn more about the market and your coaching niche. This can help inform your decisions about your offers and your messaging.

Examples of market research:

• Interviewing potential clients

• Surveying your email list or Instagram followers

• Exploring what your audience is Googling

• Reviewing client testimonials for patterns

Market research is useful when:

• Defining your niche

• Creating a new coaching package

• Trying to get client language for your messaging

Marketing research on the other hand, is research done in the name of marketing on your marketing strategies and channels. Marketing research is done to analyze how well your marketing is working to attract and convert your ideal audience.

Examples:

• A/B testing email subject lines

• Tracking ad performance

• Analyzing website traffic and conversion rates

• Researching which platforms your audience uses

Useful when you’re:

• Optimizing your funnel or sales page

• Deciding where to invest your marketing budget

• Testing content or ad performance

Market research can help you market your coaching business.

Market research actually helps with marketing and is the first step in marketing your coaching business effectively. This is because you need to understand who you’re marketing to for your marketing to be effective.

Doing market research for your coaching business will help you better understand those you want to serve and learn how they talk about their challenges and desires, so that you can better speak to them when marketing your coaching business.

When to conduct market research for your coaching business

Doing market research in your coaching business is key, especially in these specific times:

1. When you’re first starting out. When you’re first starting your coaching business, you have lots of ideas of what you want to offer, but you may not have enough information on what your prospective clients actually need.
2. When you’re creating new services. As you serve clients, you naturally start expanding your service offering to fit what they need… that’s great. But if you have an idea for a new coaching package, you’ll want to validate it first.
3. When you’re serving a new target market. If you’re branching out into a new niche, you’ll want to do market research to better understand their specific pain points and desired solutions.

How to do market research for your business

So how exactly do you get started with market research? It’s simple and easy! You simply need to follow this process:

First, identify your target market.

You’ll need to identify who you’re actually doing market research on and about. If you’re trying to figure out your coaching niche and are not sure who to speak to, start with who you *might* want to work with.

For example, when I first started coaching, I wasn’t sure if I wanted my niche to be upwardly mobile career women or women business owners. So I made it a goal to do market research on 10 of each.

Next, create a simple market research request.

This is where social media comes in handy. On any (or every!) channel that you have a presence (LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram or elsewhere), post a market research request. Yes, to your personal network!

Keep it informal. Simply share that you’re looking to speak with [description of target market] for market research purposes. Say you’re requesting 15-20 min of their time. See the full Market Research Guide for the exact copy you can use for this request.

Next, prepare up to 10 strategic market research questions to ask.

You’ll only have a bit of your interviewees time, so you want to be strategic about it. You can do so by preparing your questions in advance.

Prepare up to 10 solid, open-ended market research questions that match the information you need to understand about your target audience. If you’re not sure where to start with these questions, check the sample questions in the Market Research Guide.

Conduct the market research interview.

Next it’s time to actually conduct the market research interview. Ideally, you’ll use a platform like Zoom. Ask your interviewee if they would mind if you record the call. If they don’t want it recorded (and even if they are OK with it), I also recommend using Zoom’s AI assistant to summarize the notes and key themes.

Be mindful of the interviewees time, but make sure you can get through as many questions on your list as possible. Focus on listening intently. If you have the AI assistant taking notes, or if you’re recording the call, you can be more present on the call itself.

Aim to do at least 5-10 interviews with folks in your target market.

Finally, you want to extract key themes from your interviews

Your work isn’t done when the calls are done! The last part is arguably the most important. Now that you’ve completed all your market research interviews, you want to consolidate the data and look for key themes.

Use your notes, the recorded calls and transcripts, or othe AI notes to look for key themes, common answers, and frequently used phrases and words. Record this data in a place where you can reference it easily and often. (The Market Research Guide has a data spreadsheet created just for this purpose!)

How to do market research for free

When you’re just starting out, you definitely want to do market research. But how do you do do it on a small – or no – budget? 

You don’t need to have a huge budget or hire an agency. You only need to prepare, get resourceful, and be willing to reach out to some prospective clients (in many cases, complete strangers!), and be an excellent listener.

As a bonus, doing market research allows you to connect with potential clients who may be interested in what you have to offer!

Market research questions for coaches

So how do you know what questions to ask when you’re doing market research? There are a few different types of market research questions you’ll want to ask on your interviews.

1. Descriptive questions. You want to understand what your ideal clients identify as and what terms they use to describe themselves. Are they high achievers? Midlifers? Creatives? What you call them may not me the same as the terms they use to describe themselves, so be sure to ask them.

2. Demographic questions. You want to capture demographic information related to age, education level, life stage, family situation, and profession as it pertains to your ideal clients. Now, by doing this, you might realize you serve a wide variety of ages or income levels, and that’s OK! But you don’t know for sure until you’ve done this research. You might be surprised about the demographics of your ideal audience!

3. Psychographic questions. I consider psychographics even more important than demographics when it comes to knowing your ideal clients. Psychographics are the deeper qualities that go beyond demographics. You want to understand their values, beliefs, challenges, desires, and life goals. You’ll likely see that your ideal clients have similar beliefs, values, and goals… and once you know that, you can talk about those things in your messaging and in your marketing.

4. Questions about what they’ve tried and what has/has not worked. It’s important to understand what your prospective coaching clients have tried before and how that has worked or not worked for them. This gives you valuable insights into how you can ensure that your coaching offer serves their needs and gets them the results they desire.

Next steps: How to get started with market research

If you’ve never done it before, market research can seem intimidating. But you don’t need and advanced degree or course to learn how to do it. In fact, informal market research can help you glean the exact information you need to create offers that sell and to understand the language your clients use.

As a holistic business and marketing coach with past experience in market research, I want to make the process easier for you. My Market Research Guide for Coaches takes you through all the steps of conducting market research, so you can better understand your ideal coaching clients and so you can create offers that sell.