Ever since its introduction in America, Yoga has never gone out of trend. Yoga is increasingly popular among adults in the United States. The number of people who practiced Yoga jumped from 17 million in 2007 to nearly 30 million in 2018, which means yoga has nearly doubled in just a few years. IBISWorld had speculated yoga to generate the fifth largest revenue among all the fastest growing industries in 2017. Even during vacation, yoga is one of the most popular activities, with eight percent of U.S. travelers saying they practice yoga during their summer vacation. COVID forced gym and wellness centers owner to pull down their shutters forcing many gyms to close permanently (owing to financial losses) while many shifted their services online to survive through the lockdown.
But Yoga found a renewed popularity during the pandemic. The importance of yoga in everyone’s life has increased manifold during pandemics backed by endorsements from celebrities, doctors, and health agencies. Many studies highlighted how Yoga can help improve the immune system since it is a combination of physical exercise, controlled breathing, and mental concentration — all of which are known to have health benefits. Practicing yoga is also advised to those who have recovered from the virus. During the pandemic, 86% of people said that yoga helped them with anxiety and fear and considered it good for mental health.
Today, the situation is much different than it was two years before, the fitness industry is once again reviving itself. While the majority of people are thronging back to gyms, many have opted to take online classes and subsequently, most fitness studio owners have adapted the hybrid model. In 2022, the fitness industry is expected to regain lost ground, and Yoga is expected to maintain its popularity. It is low impact and easy to learn and does not require special equipment or preparation. It can be done at home through video classes too.
But the task is not as easy as it seems, to make your yoga business a success, you need many things – a good location, décor, trainers, and marketing. You can check our 9 step guide to open a yoga studio here. Marketing is one of the most important ingredients if you want to make a good start. If you want instant success with your yoga studio you need to focus on marketing and advertising. In this article, we will discuss share with you six effective marketing tips that are going to make all difference for you and your business studio. Let’s get started!
A yoga marketing plan is a document that details your studio’s advertising strategy for generating leads and reaching its target market/audience. A good marketing strategy outlines the outreach and public relations activities that will be implemented over time, as well as how the organization will measure the impact of these initiatives. A yoga marketing plan will be based on a company’s overall marketing strategy. It has serves following objective -
Meditation and yoga classes are in demand and especially online but still many yoga studios are struggling with attracting customers or running their yoga business properly. Most often what they lack is a good yoga marketing plan. Here are a few reasons why you need a yoga marketing plan -
A good yoga marketing plan will make sure you stick to your goal and do not lose sight. A marketing plan ensures all activities that are taking place, are in line with the direction of the strategy rather than taking decisions sporadically.
Establishing a yoga studio requires a good deal of one-time investment followed by smaller, regular additional costs. The yoga marketing plan will enable you to keep track of spending and channel resources properly.
A good yoga marketing plan allows you to keep track of progress and analyze performance metrics. It allows you to reform strategy from time to time and see if your marketing investments in SEO, yoga advertisements, digital marketing are paying off or not.
Yoga studio marketing requires effort. To market a yoga studio, you have to brand your yoga studio, implement a combination of community-based outreach and digital marketing strategies. Making these yoga marketing strategies part of your yoga marketing plan will not only help you attract new members but also run your yoga business efficiently.
Humans are social animals and we value human-to-human dialogue. People crave real interactions with brands. Humans want to buy from humans, not automated bots. Reaching out to people in an old-fashioned manner is still effective, and it's one of the quickest methods to form a local community. Most of your customers will come from the local area and very few from outside it. As a result, before pursuing other options, you should market to your local community. The main ways to do it include holding fun events, partnering with other businesses, conventional ways like leaflets, newspaper ads, radio bytes, etc. Yoga advertisements in local newspaper or radio can be an amazing way to reach local customers.
You can hold celebrations if you have a new yoga studio you can throw an “Opening Party,” and invite everyone from the community. Another thing you can do is to visit local places like schools, gyms, or clubhouses and talk about your yoga studio. You can go to schools or colleges as a guest yoga teacher or speaker too. After that, you can ask them to sign up for classes. Their parents will likely bring them to your studio and enroll them in courses. This can be an effective way to build connections and names within your local area.
Pricing is an important parameter and decision-maker for your customers. The average price per yoga class is $15-25 and has not changed much since the ’90s. Price your classes keeping in mind location, square footage cost, staff charges, and additional maintenance costs like electricity. You can start an incentive program for your clients who bring you more clients. Your students will have an incentive to bring their friends and relatives to your studio.
Free trials are the fastest way to fill up your studio when you’re starting. You can offer one free class or a free class for a week. By using this approach, you will have at least a few dozen paid students who remain at the end of the month. This yoga marketing strategy could potentially drive hundreds of students to your yoga studio and make the word go out.
Placing your ads online on a search engine can bring in traffic to your website or page and generate essential leads. One of the best ways to attract new members to yoga classes is to start a paid online advertising campaign for your yoga studio. For this, you can take the help of various online ad agencies but if you are confused or can’t find one, then Google ads are the best place to start because it allows you to place ads in Google search results. Google is one of the most used and powerful search engines.
PPC works on a bidding system. You select some target keywords (like best yoga studio in Jersey or good yoga studio to join) and your yoga studio advertisement flashes in response to them. One of the biggest advantages of PPC is that (as the name implies), you only pay when users click on your yoga advertisement. This means you don’t have to worry about wasting your budget on people who aren’t interested in your yoga business or ignore your ads. If you are desperately looking for a client or have been unable to make a mark then PPC can be a way to go ahead for you.
Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram present huge opportunities to reach and connect with your target audience. Nearly 4 billion people in the world use one or another kind of social media. Eighty-one percent of American adults have a social media profile - meaning the chances are high that at least part of your audience is active on social media. You can also use social media for advertising. In 2019, marketers spent over $89B on social media advertising in the US alone. It can attract countless new students and be a really useful tool to spread your name.
The first step is to build a good social media profile. Post stuff that attracts customers or people want to see like educative posts on yoga, you can take pictures of the studio while you’re holding class and publish the images online. Post stories of your classes and even share things about your daily life to increase personal engagement with your students. You can ask your students for their Instagram profiles and tag them to further reach more people. Once you’ve established a presence, the next step is to market the content using free viral and paid marketing campaigns. Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest are the most preferred channel for yoga marketing.
SEO refers to search engine optimization. Your website can be a great marketing tool but only if you optimize it for search engines. The best way to do it is through SEO. Search engine optimization can improve your yoga studio website rank well in search engines like Google for searches related to your products or services. The goal of SEO is to get your website to the top of the first page of results. Ideally, you want it to be one of three topmost links. It is done by publishing original content around your target keywords, as well as earning links from other authoritative sites online. Content marketing and SEO go side by side.
Content marketing is a great way to advertise your yoga business to consumers by providing them with helpful or interesting information. You can create content in the form of blogs, videos, infographics, and virtually any online format. What you need to do is to – curate content around the most sought-after search questions (best yoga asana for pregnant women, yoga for depression) and use target keywords in them strategically. This overtime will establish your website and company as an authority. Publishing original content is also an interesting way to connect with your target audience and an effective yoga marketing tool.
Your business website is one of the most essential parts of your yoga business. It’s your home online, and potential customers to your website for information about your services. For successful yoga marketing, you need to build a website that is simple, easy to access, and navigate. Each yoga studio needs a website. In 2018 61% of consumers said that they’re more likely to contact a local business if they have a mobile-friendly site. If you don’t have a website, you can use the class schedule and membership and class-pack sales pages of your yoga studio booking software as your web presence.
Along with a website, you will need good fitness business management software to provide for client and business management. The software will help you organize various tasks like class schedules, making appointments, staff payrolls, merchandise sales, reaching clients, online booking, collecting membership fees, etc. Good software means happy clients and a good reputation. It will be conducive to the growth of your business. It should be easy to use, glitch-free and attractive.
Bookee App is a fitness business management software laced with all industry best features to run your yoga studio effectively. It is easy to use software designed to increase online sales and bookings — for in-person and virtual services. It does everything an ordinary fitness management software does and much more than it like live streaming, video on demand at much lower prices. It also provides you with a free multi-page website that does not require an external developer to manage it. It offers unique URLs for marketing purposes with a mobile-first design.
A good yoga marketing plan can sail your business through anything and everything. These few yoga marketing tips will surely help you to plan your own marketing strategy and the general thumb rule is to combine all marketing avenues and channelize their influence to your benefit. The above ways have a lot of potentials if used the right way. Figure what's the best way for your yoga studio and take it to the next level.
If you run your own fitness center or are a group fitness instructor, its time for you to switch your business to Bookee app. Bookee is the best fitness management software laced with industry best features and everything your fitness business might need.
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