The American Marketing Association defines marketing as:
Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.
For our purposes we’ll discuss marketing as any activity which leads to new signups for your classes, new buyers of merchandise, or new event attendees in an effort to generate revenue and profit for your yoga studio / business.
Imagining that you’ve never done any marketing for your yoga studio or business, here are the steps you should take after you’ve gotten any licensing & certificates.
1. The very first thing you need to do is build a website
2. The next thing you want to do is make sure you have a solid business address for your business (note if you’re doing private yoga lessons in your clients home or yoga events elsewhere then you should be able to skip this step)
3. Make sure to claim your business name on all current major social media networks such as Facebook (as a page and group), Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.
4. Create a plan for the rest of your online marketing including blogging, content marketing, email marketing, selling online courses, and selling merchandise online.
5. Create an offline marketing plan including community outreach, networking, flyers, and powering word of mouth marketing.
6. Repeat what works, tweak what doesn’t and try again.
Digital Marketing for a Yoga studio will include a combination of social media, lead generation, local SEO, ecommerce marketing, email marketing, and paid advertising. Start off your journey into digital marketing by easing into it with a website and selecting one marketing platform to work with for just starting out. A marketing platform is any website, app, or service you might use to market your new Yoga business. Examples include Google, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, Groupon, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Meetup, Eventbrite, Yelp, and YouTube.
Carefully choose which platform to start off with, not all of them will be beneficial in growing your classes and not all of them will drive cost-effective results. While digital marketing is rich and diverse in the number of platforms and ways you can reach your local audience, it is also filled with pitfalls and that can stress you out and bring you growth to a halt.
Make sure you select how you’re going to build your website first, as this will impact many of the decisions you make on selecting your first digital marketing platform.
For example you could build your website with a free or low cost website builder like Wix, Squarespace, or Weebly. These websites frequently do not perform well in search engines like Google and Bing but could get you started on the right foot if you instead wanted to focus on Instagram or Facebook for your marketing efforts.
If you want to take a more long-term approach with SEO or Local SEO you may want to instead build a website with a CMS that you host yourself such as WordPress or Joomla.
Every business needs a website with a good, memorable domain name. Consider this, 81% of people research a business before doing business with them. This research is most-frequently done using a search engine like Google, Bing, or DuckDuckGo. Without a website, you greatly reduce your chance of appearing in front of your potential customers.
Some Yoga studio owners opt to use a social media platform in lieu of a website. It makes sense at first. Your costs are reduced, there’s no concerns about technical issues, and most of your target audience is probably using that same social media website or app. Unfortunately, we’ve discovered that social media gets tougher and tougher as a platform ages making it more and more difficult to reach your own audience and increasing your total operational cost over time. Compound that with the years of lost opportunity by not having a website at the same time, and you’ll find your studio in a jam.
As stated earlier you can start with a website builder and host like Wix. These builders often look and functional really nice. Unfortunately though, you’ll have little technical control and if you’re in a large metropolitan area or have surrounding competitors, using a builder would actually hurt your website traffic from search engines. We recommend only using a builder in situations such as when you’re one of only 2 yoga studios in a town or when you’ve decided to place all of your marketing efforts offline, in paid ads, or in social media.
If you want to rank in search engines, then you’ll want to use a CMS + web host to build your website. WordPress is by far the most popular among Yoga studio owners and outperforms all of the others in ability to rank highly in search engines. WordPress also has a large and active community of developers building new plugins and is constantly being upgrade to thwart would-be hackers. You also don’t need to be a programming genius to build a website with WordPress. You can find a good looking theme on the web for as low as $25 and use one of the major drag and drop page builders like WP Bakery, Elementor, Divi, or Beaver Builder to help make your yoga website look stunning with little effort.
Your website should have at least 5 different pages:
1. Your homepage – This should contain a great call to action, at least a brief view of your schedule, an overview of your studio or gym, some testimonials, and contact information.
2. Your schedule page – This page should contain a full schedule. You can use a third-party service like Mind Body for this or simply write it out in text.
3. A page describing the types of yoga you specialize in – As yoga continues to grow in popularity some yoga enthusiasts seek out very specific types of yoga. You’ll at least want one page on your website explaining what attendees can expect.
4. An about page explaining who your main teachers / instructors / yogis are and their level of experience.
5. A contact page with more in-depth contact information like explaining how to reach your business from local landmarks.
We offer a yoga website development service. We have proven, gorgeous, templates ready to go and even filler content to help kick your business off. If you need a new website or want a custom build, see our work and let us know how we can help you.
You’re going to need to optimize your website if you want to gain traffic and new customers from search engines. To do this you’ll need to perform various types of search engine optimization. Here are some of the basics you’ll need for yoga studio seo.
Title Tags – Each webpage has a title tag. You can see this display in your browser at the top when you visit a page on desktop or mobile. In SEO the title tag helps search engines understand what topic or concept a page is targeting.
Meta Description – Often times a search engine will use this to tell users more information about what kind of content is on your webpage.
On-page Optimization – Your webpages should use keywords, phrases, and other text based information relevant to the topic you chose for your title tag.
Image Optimization – Most pages on today’s web should have at least one image. Images should load fast for mobile users, use a relevant file name, and have an alt attribute that helps vision disabled users understand what the image is.
Link Building – Modern search engines use hyperlinks between webpages to help determine which webpage might be the fest fit for a specific query. You’ll need to find ways to gain inbound links from other websites.
Local SEO – Making sure your business location has correct information across the web where people search for yoga fitness centers or other local businesses.
Authority – A more recent addition to search engine algorithms seeks to use information from around the web about a brand, person, etc… to determine how authoritative they might be on a specific topic of groups of topics.
Social Media can be a great marketing tool for your growing yoga studio or gym. Social Media works best when you work to create a community out of your target audience and create content that entertains and inspires them.
Facebook – The older of all current viable social media platforms, Facebook is a great way to reach an audience with video content and to reach groups of local potential customers.
Instagram – Home to a younger and more visual userbase, Instagram can help a yoga studio stand out by showcasing the teachers / owners and the facilities. You can also use Instagram Stories to showcase events and other things. Instagram users tend to respond to beauty, style, and motivational content the most.
Snapchat – A great platform for a younger generation that expects video and brevity from brands they follow. Use Snapchat to take clips during your day, give shoutouts, and get a little goofy if that’s your thing.
Pinterest – If you have content that could help yoga enthusiasts in your local area, Pinterst might be a great way to help spread that content. Users on this site build boards filled with pins, usually as a way of collecting ideas around a specific subject.
Reddit – There are subreddits (i.e. groups on the site) that discuss various types of Yoga and also numerous ones that cover most cities or municipalities in the world. Join other local residents in discussing topics and find opportunities to mention any upcoming events or promotions you might have. Many of the city focused subreddits put out calls for this type of content from time to time. However, be careful to follow their rules and not spam or you’ll end up getting banned from your community.
YouTube – While YouTube doesn’t have great local appeal, it could help you build up a loyal online following, especially if you can create, edit, and produce video content about yoga that has a more broad appeal. In each video description include a link to your website near the beginning.
Meetup – If you’ve decided to grow your yoga business by hosting events like special sunrise sessions, then meetup could be a great way to advertise your events to a group of local people who follow your meetup group. You can also find various other networking or meetup groups to attend in your community to meet new people and possibly gain them as clients.
LinkedIn – LinkedIn may not have the most direct benefit for your yoga studio. However, you should make sure your personal profile on here is complete and up-to-date so anyone checking out your credentials on the site can see them. You should also have a brand page on here that you post to from time to time.
Yelp – Yelp is a powerful website for Yoga studios, though an often times nemesis too as they’ll “hide” reviews they don’t currently want to ‘recommend’. Make sure your business information here is correct and add photos about your business over time.
Digital PR for your yoga studio is all about connecting with journalists, bloggers, and podcasters from various online publications.
Your goal with Digital PR will be to gain more visibility, notoriety, or authority for your yoga studio brand or your personal brand. The simplest form of Digital PR is to respond to requests from journalist seeking sources to quote in their articles. You can use tools such as HARO and PR Hunters for to help connect you with these journalists.
Content Marketing for your yoga studio is where you generate content that you think will attract new customers or at least gain their attention in a positive fashion. This guide is a good example of content marketing at work. You likely found it via a search engine or from an advertising campaign designed to promote it.
Content Marketing can be simple text-based content, blog posts, photography, videos, memes, top lists, how to guides, podcasts, guides, etc…
To be the most successful create content that you believe your potential customers would like and create content that you believe in.
Email Marketing can be a powerful force for your yoga studio. You can build a list of people from your website by placing email capture forms on your pages requesting that people signup. You can use this list to email out a periodic newsletter, send out updates about your business, or to try and get your active customers to help spread the word about upcoming specials or events.
There are several email providers you can choose from including Mailchimp, Constant Contact, and Aweber.
Now that you have your own yoga studio or gym, it’s time to make it work for you double time. Get a camera and microphone and record classes to sell online. This is a great way to supplement your income and help you build a more loyal following which will in turn help grow your classes.
You can sell your online classes at places like:
Discounts are a great way to drive one-time class attendees and help gain more long-term students as well. One of the top places for discounts online is Groupon and placing an offer on there would pack your classes pretty quickly, but be careful when setting up a Groupon that you don’t price your work so low that you lose money and risk closing your business.
Offering discounts to various local community groups can also be a wonderful way to help build your base of students. Groups like veterans, the disabled, seniors, school faculty, employees of large local companies, and government employees can drive more signups and word of mouth about your business.
Online Coupons are also a powerful part of your online marketing. You’ll use coupons for anyone purchasing online merchandise, classes, or if you use an online payment portal to signup new customers before them coming to your studio.
One of the earliest innovations for business on the web was the ability to design, print, and sell your own merchandise via third-party website. While Cafepress pioneered this space today dozens of websites offer a similar, if not better, service across thousands of products.
For t-shirts, the most common of these products, you can use websites like
For stickers you can use
And for Yoga leggings / pants you can use
Create your products and place them in your online store. If you built your website with WordPress you’ll want to add their WooCommerce plugin for ecommerce. You can also add products to several of the website builders including Wix, Squarespace, and Weebly. You can also use a stand alone shop provider like Shopify.
Your yoga marketing doesn’t have to be all digital. There’s plenty of value in marketing your business offline and in more traditional ways. Here we’ll discuss a few of these and how you might be able to use them.
Teaching yoga workshops is a great way to earn extra revenue, network with other yoga lovers in your local area, and showcase your expertise in the areas or types of yoga you specialize in the most.
Look at your class schedule and try to find time slots that aren’t getting filled or noticed by your community and use those times to host one-time workshop events that focus on specific areas of interest.
Here are some yoga workshop ideas
Hosting events at your yoga gym or studio or at public places can help you grow your monthly class subscriptions, build your local notoriety, and they’re also really fun. Unlike Workshops which are designed to bring prospective students to your place of business to do one specific thing, events are designed to more focus on a theme and not be about a highly specialized skill. This means events will most likely have larger attendance figures, even if they are one-time attendees.
Some yoga event ideas include:
Free Events
Also, you should consider hosting at least 1 free yoga event each month. Do this especially during times when your regularly enrolled students are away (i.e. on summer vacation) or during times of low enrollment. The key with free events is to not do them so often as to reduce the value of your teachings and your classes. Once a month is a great start, but you can try one free event per quarter to get started and see how it goes.
At your free events try and get as many of your attendees to enroll, signup for email alerts, leave an online review, or follow you on a social media platform of their choosing.
Find local charities and non-profits that are hosting fundraising events which include a silent auction. Donate to them 1 month, 3 month, or a 6 month membership to your yoga classes and notate the appropriate value. Whoever wins this prize may end up enrolling or coming back to events after its over, you’ve helped a local charity raise money, and you’ve shown your support for those in your local community that give back or volunteer.
You can also reach out to local charities and offer to host yoga events on their behalf (see above) and instead of charging a fee for the event request a donation amount to the local charity. When you do this you can make a suggested donation amount or require a minimum donation to attend. Depending on the size and nature of these events there’s a chance the local press will report on it, helping spread the word of mouth about your business.
Being a business owner is exhausting, which makes it odd that so many other business owners mingle at events across your city termed “networking events”. The idea behind these events is to help bring disparate business owners together to discuss topics, share struggles, and make new friends. While the amount of people you meet at networking events that turn into customers might be very low, by going to these events you may learn new ways to market your business in the local community by discovering whats working for others.
Consider purchasing advertising with your local media. Be careful though, while most consumers are looking online for local services, the prices of advertising in local media haven’t really come down from the 90’s. Make sure you don’t sign long-term advertising deals and use outlets that let you run smaller ad campaigns at a low budget as a test.
Aesthetically beautiful and catching flyers can still be a useful marketing tool for offline marketing. You can use them to spread the word about your new yoga studio opening or to promote upcoming events. Print flyers are low cost, but try and only place them in places that allow flyers. Restaurants like Freebirds, some apartment buildings mail centers, and laundromats are often good options to place a flyer for a yoga event. You can also stack them at your front desk and have customers take them home. Don’t expect incredibly high conversion rates from flyers though.
The success of your yoga studio or business depends on how well you do your marketing and SEO. This guide was built to help you through the process, but there is so much more that goes into a great online yoga marketing campaign.
Our campaigns start at just $69 per month with no monthly contracts and no long-term commitments.