How To Start And Grow A Yoga Business?
Looking for marketing ideas for your yoga studio? There is an ever growing awareness of how valuable our health is. More and more people are getting into yoga. So now is the perfect time to start investing some effort and resources into putting your yoga business online. Especially on social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook.
Yoga is gaining a lot of popularity in recent years, even among men and older people. Nowadays, it is estimated that there are no less than 300 million yoga practitioners worldwide. That’s quite the number. It’s not hard to guess how that number grew to be so large. Research continues to uncover more and more physical and mental health benefits from doing yoga regularly.
For many people, yoga is a meditative and spiritual exercise. It might almost feel like it’s inauthentic or contradictory to monetize yoga, and to create a marketing plan for a yoga business. But the truth is that marketing is always going to be necessary for a yoga center, in order for it to thrive and prosper. Nobody can live off an empty savings account. And if you’re a yoga aficionado, and you want to dedicate your life to it, then deep down inside, you already know… setting up a commercial yoga practice is the right thing to do.
Putting your yoga studio on social media platforms in all the right ways can be a challenge, if you have no idea how to go about it. If you don’t have any design skills to speak of, then you need to hire somebody who helps you with that.
Let’s think about some ways that you can take advantage of social media to put your yoga studio out there on Instagram and Facebook, without having to break a sweat, or the bank, for that matter.
1. Find Your Niche
The first question to ask yourself is what exactly you feel your target demographic should be. What kind of people would benefit from the type of classes that you are good at giving? Does your preference go to teaching beginners, or would you rather be teaching advanced classes? Or maybe you enjoy doing both? Do your yoga classes help alleviate back pain, stress, or yet something else? Find what you’re good at doing, and also find out what the market is asking for.
Before developing a marketing plan, you need to analyze and understand your prospects. You need to find out what they are looking for. Take a look at the people who attend your current classes, assuming you’re already actively teaching. Are they young or old, male or female? Why did they sign up in the first place? Do they have health issues or are they fit? Have they been attending yoga classes for a long time or are they just starting? Does any of that change a lot, depending on the type of class you teach?
If you’re a relatively new yoga instructor, it will probably be a bigger challenge to identify your prospects. It takes experience to get to know the trade. But we’ve all gotta start somewhere. So analyze either your own yoga classes, or the ones that others give online or in your local area, and really start to think about what benefits attendees might gain. Do you like to teach yoga classes in a fun way or a spiritual way? Or would you rather teach yoga classes that might be helpful for weight loss?
When you have understood your prospects, you can start choosing the best way to get your message out to the public.
2. Leverage Social Media For Your Business
Social media is all about engagement and has been found to work wonders for yoga studios. Platforms like YouTube, Facebook and Instagram are chock full of yoga content. Yoga has gained lots of popularity in recent years, and will likely continue to gain lots more in the years to come.
When it comes to using social media, posting consistently is key. It doesn’t always have to be original content. You can share third-party articles that you think might be interesting to your followers.
Another important aspect of your social media strategy is that your content remains aligned with your core values. Your customers want to see consistency, because it makes you look like you actually believe in your own values. Nobody wants to follow a leader who changes his mind about who he is on the weekly.
3. Use A Canva Bundle To Power Up Your Social Media Presence
Canva is a graphic design website that allows us to access free online tools to create any design you want. It’s suitable for both professional and personal use. You can design anything at Canva. From a business card, to a company invoice, to a story of your vacation. It’s also really good for creating promo content that you can then upload to Instagram.
Canva offers a catalog of freely available design templates for you to work with. However, many people have already used them before you. So if you use them too, then you’re at risk of becoming just another face in the crowd. For that reason, you might want to consider going with ready made templates from a third party, such as ContentBASE.
ContentBASE offers many different kinds of pre-made promo content bundles, all of which look different from each other. They offer both Photoshop as well as Canva bundles. Canva is way more user friendly. So even if you go for a Photoshop package, you can still export the graphics and upload those to Canva, so that you can easily edit and customize them. With just a few clicks you can change texts, colors, logos and make them unique. Some of the available bundles offer dozens, and sometimes even hundreds of templates. That’s a huge amount, which will keep you posting professional looking promo content for the next few months.
This is the perfect way to promote your yoga studio on social media, without having to take out a second mortgage, or a good chunk of your day. What you want to do, is to focus on what you love, while your business is also thriving online with very little effort. That’s the best of both worlds!