The yoga industry has been dramatically changed due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. It’s no secret that many physical yoga studios have closed down throughout 2020 and 2021 due to the impacts of social distancing policies, but the industry has also shown signs of bouncing back as we enter 2022.
It’s definitely a great time to start a yoga business on your own—whether it’s a physical studio, mobile yoga classes, or virtual classes— with increasing demands, decreased competition, and availability of discounted, vacant spaces for rent.
However, it doesn’t mean you’ll automatically achieve success as soon as you’ve started your yoga business. You’ll still need careful planning for your business, and especially figure out how you are going to promote the business to attract prospective clients.
Below, we will discuss some of the most effective tips you can use to market your yoga business while staying genuine and true to your business’s mission.
Identify and Focus On Your Target Audience
With the rising popularity of yoga post-pandemic, and the increasing variety (virtual, mobile, etc.), it can be hard to stand out amongst the tight competition.
The key is to identify the ideal audience for your yoga classes so you can direct your efforts only to this audience. The more unique the experiences you can offer to this specific audience, the more likely you can attract them and keep them coming back for more.
If you’ve already got some clients—even if it’s still a fairly small clientele—, take a look at these clients and analyze demographic data such as age, gender, location, income level, ethnicity, and so on. You may uncover surprising patterns so you can begin to identify what your ideal audience should look like.
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You should also look at the geographic segmentation of your client. For example, if a large number of your clients live in a certain location, you can focus your offline marketing efforts on this area. You should also try to identify their motivations for choosing your business (psychographic data) so you can tailor your marketing efforts around it.
In short, the better you know and understand your target audience, the more effective your marketing efforts will be.
Have a Professional Website With an Online Booking Feature
In this digital post-COVID age, people simply expect businesses to have an established, credible online presence and reliable 24/7 online booking functionality on their websites.
Fortunately, today there are platforms like Wix or Squarespace that provide an easy and affordable way to build a professional-looking website, so you don’t really need to hire an expensive website developer for this purpose. If you have a bit of programming know-how and would like more versatility, there’s also the handy WordPress (that’s totally free).
Then, it’s just a matter of integrating a yoga scheduling software solution into the website to enable a 24/7 online booking function.
Do you know that more than 40% of service appointments nowadays happen after business hours? If you don’t ensure it’s as easy as possible for prospective clients to book your service, 24/7, you are going to miss out on a lot of them.
Strengthen Your Social Media Presence
Building genuine relationships is the key to successful and sustainable yoga businesses.
Nowadays, most of your yoga students should be active on social media, so it would only make sense to be active on relevant social media platforms and connect with prospective and existing students.
Make sure to regularly post fun, informative, and engaging content, and be visual. Posting attractive photos and videos of your attractive classes, unique events, informative content, and even inspirational quotes are some of the effective ways you can use to engage your followers on social media.
You may also want to take advantage of the paid options offered by these social networks (i.e. Instagram Ads), provided you have the budget, and partner with relevant influencers in your area.
Build Your Google Maps Presence
One of the main ways today consumers learn about local businesses is via Google search for queries like “Yoga classes near me” or “Yoga studio in (city name)”.
The thing is, for these kinds of queries, Google prioritizes results from Google Maps above the organic results, so if you really want to put your business in front of your target audience, ensuring your listing is ranked on top of the Google Maps results is crucial, which we can achieve via local SEO.
Establish Your Email Marketing Strategy
Even with all the newer marketing technologies and channels, email marketing remains one of the most effective marketing tactics available, with one of the highest ROIs. For yoga businesses, it is especially effective for retaining your students by keeping them engaged on a regular basis.
If you have reliable yoga scheduling/appointment software like Bookeo, then it should automatically collect your clients’ email addresses so you can start building your email list effectively.
Ask for Positive Reviews
In this day and age, prospective students will check for online reviews before they decide to book your class, so establishing strong social proof is very important if you want to ensure success.
Ask your students to review your yoga classes on Google Maps, as well as other relevant platforms like Yelp, Facebook, TripAdvisor, and so on. If necessary, incentivize them, for example by offering discounts for their next classes if they can show their reviews (or social media mentions.)
Encourage Referrals
The best way to ensure growth for any business is when you can convert satisfied customers into advocates: let them promote your yoga businesses to their friends and peers for free.
You can, for example, offer group discounts so your students will be more encouraged to bring their friends to your classes. You can also start a referral program, offering commissions to students who bring in friends or family members to your classes.
Closing Thoughts
While there are certainly other marketing tactics you can try to get more clients and grow your yoga businesses, the 7 we’ve shared above can be a solid foundation you can use to develop a comprehensive marketing strategy for your yoga business.
The secret remains to identify and really understand your target audience: the better you understand who your yoga classes are for. The better you can tailor your marketing strategy to put your business in front of these ideal students.
