Yoga studio marketing and advertising can be overwhelming if you don’t understand where to start. With so many options and ways to post and spread the word about your studio, it can be hard to choose the right avenue. Maybe you’re trying to pursue them all, yet nothing is filling your yoga classes, or maybe you don’t understand how to begin with any of the marketing options available to you.
In this article, we will be looking at some yoga marketing ideas and how to advertise your yoga studio, including both digital and traditional ways that can get new clients into your classes.
If you’re a yoga studio owner who wants to skip all the hassle of learning marketing yourself, contact professional yoga business coaches at the Yogapreneur Collective today. They have experience and expertise in helping yoga studios maximize their marketing for more profit and peace of mind.
Why Yoga Studio Marketing Matters
Marketing is an important access point for potential students to learn about your yoga studio business. Whether you are using traditional forms or newer digital media, marketing educates people on what your yoga business has to offer. Building that awareness is important for service businesses, such as yoga studios, and different types of marketing can help with that.
If you try to grow your yoga studio without marketing, you’ll lose a significant amount of potential students. If you are mainly relying on word of mouth to attract clients, you are putting a lot of stake in the assumption that current students are talking about your classes outside of the studio. This assumption can be unreliable and will realistically only grow your business so much.
By marketing your brand, you are putting yourself in front of potential clients and growing that connection all the way to conversion. There is no longer placing all hope in growth on the possibility that someone talks about your studio. You’re spreading the word to the right people in a very tangible and trackable way.
Below we’ll outline the six best yoga marketing ideas to grow your yoga studio so you can have enough students to keep your doors open.
1. Build a Brand Presence on Social Media
Social media marketing is a huge opportunity for spreading the word about your business. With social media platforms such as YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, you can release announcements about class updates and new editions to your schedules and connect with your existing customers.
This presence online can attract new students to your yoga studio. Social media algorithms are centered around spreading information and posts to new people they think would enjoy your content.
Let’s break down how this happens. You post about a class you offer and your current student likes it. Then, one of their friends sees it on their feed because they’re connected to your student. This type of chain reaction can help you convert viewers into clients.
Using hashtags also creates opportunities to show up in “discover feeds.” Discovery feeds show content based on topics—it’s a way to categorize your content. Hashtags like #yoga or #nycyoga can help algorithms understand that the post is about yoga and can push your post to new accounts who are actively looking through this hashtag feed. This is great for connecting with potential students.
Reviews are also a powerful way to get your studio discovered and convince potential students that your classes are worth attending. On many social media platforms, you can post comments or reviews. Those are very likely to be read by someone searching for a yoga studio to go to. Having a presence that allows people to leave recommendations, thoughts, and reviews can be very beneficial to your growing yoga studio business.
Having a presence on social media can not only help promote your yoga studio but also help uphold your brand image. Keeping your social media marketing in line with what you wish your image to be, whether it’s fun, relaxing, or something else, can help send that message to the right people and turn them into clients.
Ideal Social Media Platforms for Yoga Studios
Every social media platform is different, whether it’s how their algorithms show content or what content performs best on each one. When it comes to yoga businesses, there are a few that you should focus on to try and advertise your available services.
Instagram and Facebook are great platforms for sharing things with your existing followers. These two platforms have post feeds, which are the first thing you see when you open the app or website. They focus on showing content from your friend circles and accounts you follow. This means that if you post an announcement about a promotion or change in your yoga studio, your followers, who are likely regular visitors to your profile, are going to be the majority of those who see the post.
Facebook and YouTube are great platforms to post demos and classes on. These can work like shortened versions of what the class would look like and what the potential students can expect if they sign up.
Facebook is also great with events. If you have a special class happening once a year or a promotion such as yoga with your dog, you can announce it and have users RSVP. Not only can this help you keep track of attendance, but it will also be promoted to attendee’s friends, showing that someone they follow is attending something in the community.
TikTok is a bit tricky to figure out algorithmically, as it isn’t as straightforward with followers and showing content. TikTok’s “For You Page” focuses on discovery with new viewers over relationships with existing followers, which is different from the previously mentioned social media platforms. Although there is a “following” tab available, which displays content only from people you follow, it isn’t the focal point of the platform’s feed.
However, if you wish to be a little lighthearted and fun with your social media, like following trends and sharing quick informational videos, TikTok can help you gain traction fast. This can be great to get in front of new people and get your brand name out. Depending on the services your yoga studio offers, this can be taken advantage of. This may work best for online stores, not physical aspects, as you may not go “viral” in your local area. Instagram Reels are a similar style in format. However, the numbers of likes and interactions are not comparable to TikTok.
Yoga Studio Social Media Posts
There are many different forms of content you can put into your yoga studio marketing plan.
On Instagram, you can post long-term and short-term content. Long-term content includes pictures and videos that will show up on your follower’s feeds. These can also show up in the discover tab, especially for people who enjoy yoga content. In your caption, use relevant hashtags to help push your post to non-followers.
If you want to promote something like an event, or a flash deal, Instagram and Facebook have stories that stay up on your profile for 24 hours. This will show up in a separate section of the feed for your followers to view. These can also be used for polls or other interactive aspects.
Facebook is mainly good for wordy posts. However, posting videos and pictures are also possible on the platform. Mixing the two together, like having a picture of the class and announcing a new time availability, is good for catching the eye of a Facebook feed scroller.
On Facebook, likes can help promote your posts to friends of the people who placed a like. Facebook also offers the option to create events that people can RSVP to, as mentioned before.
Videos on YouTube, which can also be cross-posted on Facebook, can help promote classes or new changes at your yoga studio. Introducing new staff can also be a good video idea when using these platforms for promotion.
2. Make an Appealing and User-Friendly Yoga Website
Confusing websites deter users from engaging with them. If your website is hard to navigate and users are having trouble finding information for your location, contact pages, or class information, they will probably leave the site and look for another yoga studio website.
One of the best yoga marketing ideas is to have an appealing website with coordinated colors and user-friendly menus. With a good website, you are more likely to retain visitors and convert them into clients.
3. Grow Organic Traffic to Your Website with SEO
Organic traffic comes from people going to your website without the help of sponsored or paid pushes. Search engine optimization, commonly known as SEO, is a yoga studio marketing tactic that focuses on ranking your website pages in search engines like Google. This allows you to be seen in searches related to your business, leading to more clicks and conversions.
SEO uses a few different strategies to help your yoga studio grow. Keywords on the pages, what pages you have, and monitoring Google’s indexing are all part of getting your pages to rank in the results.
Website Pages
Your website should include pages like the home page, a contact us page, and services offered page. Apart from pages that include basic information about your business, there are many ways you can share information about your business, all while taking advantage of Google’s search algorithm.
Service Pages for Specific Classes
If your studio offers multiple types of yoga classes, it would be ideal to build out special pages for each one.
If someone is interested in taking a specialized class, such as hot yoga, they are probably looking up where to take that specific class near them. For example, if someone was living in New York City, they might search for something like hot yoga NYC.
By having a page available that is optimized around the class, your yoga studio website will be shown to people who are looking for that specific class. Having pages like this for every class ensures you’re showing up in front of your target audience—people who want exactly what you offer. By doing this for every class, you maximize the opportunity to gain new students and grow your studio.
Product Pages for Yoga Products
Much like service pages, having product pages can be beneficial in similar ways. If you sell items such as yoga mats, water bottles, or similar yoga essentials, having built-out pages for them can increase your chances of being found by someone searching for those products.
Location Pages for Specific Locations
Yoga studios are very local businesses as people need to go in person regularly to take the classes. Location pages are pages optimized around a single town, city, or county, helping you show up for more specific searches. These pages highlight that the studio is either located in the optimized location or is accessible from that location. Having a page on your site dedicated to a city will help it show up for searches like “yoga studio near me” and “yoga studio (location).”
However, since this is a very localized industry, you must be aware of where the locations are in relation to your studio. In different areas, like rural communities, an hour commute may be regular. However, if you’re living in an urban community, that would be much too far to consider.
Understanding the area your yoga studio is located will impact how far out you can go with your location pages and still get in front of your target audience. For example, someone living in Manhattan will not be traveling upstate to go to a class, especially since they may not have a car. However, someone three towns away from a studio in Kansas may travel a few tens of miles with no problems. By understanding your local target audience, you can correctly pick which locations you want to build out pages for and get in front of people who are the most likely to actually attend a class.
Internal Linking
Internal linking is an easy-to-implement SEO tool that you can use throughout your entire website. There are many benefits to doing so. However, before we get into the benefits, it’s important to ensure you know what this tool is. Internal linking is when you take the link from one of your pages or blog posts and insert it into other pages throughout your own website.
This is important for helping your pages rank because Google uses these links when it crawls your website. This crawl must take place before Google shows you on its search engine.
Googlebot uses these internal links to find and discover other pages on your website. If there is a page without any internal links leading to it, it may be undiscovered by Google and not indexed. Unindexed pages, or “orphan pages,” are not shown by Google searches at all.
Google also uses these links to better understand what your page is about. If you have a hot yoga class and a page dedicated to it, you should use the anchor text, or the text you choose to hyperlink, related to the class. Using an anchor text like “hot yoga class,” Google will understand that the page should be about hot yoga.
This whole process also allows better keyword listing on Google’s end, making your page rankings in searches more accurate.
Link Building
Backlinks are just another way Google determines if a website is trustworthy and authoritative enough to warrant showing it in results.
If Google crawls a page that other trustworthy sites are linking to, it recognizes those as recommendations. If other sites trust you and your information, then Google will determine that your content must be valuable and show it higher in search results. This can be beneficial in the long run, as a higher rating from Google can help you be seen by more searchers.
Guest Posts
On many blogs around the web, it is common to find posts written by people who do not own or run the blog. We call those types of posts “guest posts,” meaning a guest has written them. There are many ways these types of posts can help your website and clientele grow.
There are a plethora of blogs on the internet that allow guest posts to be submitted and posted, giving you the opportunity to advertise yourself and link your blog inside the post. As mentioned above, by placing links on other websites that point back to your pages, Google will understand this as a type of recommendation and show your pages higher in search.
Guest posts also give you the opportunity to control the content your pages get mentioned in as well, allowing you to quality control your backlinks. It’s important to understand that not every website can offer you a good backlink. Before you reach out to a blog or allow a guest post on your website, look into the blog’s domain rating and other ratings to ensure it’s a trusted source. If it isn’t, Google may not count the link as a reputable backlink to your site, and it won’t benefit your standing or ratings with Google’s systems.
Broken Link Building
Sometimes, when a blog on a site links to another blog, it may end up leading to a 404 error if the linked page gets removed or deleted. In these cases, it is a great opportunity to reach out to the site and “fix” their broken link by offering a substitute from your own blog. This benefits both your blog, as you get a backlink, and the blog that had the 404 error linked.
Broken links, also known as 404s, can hurt a website’s reputation with Google. If Google notices that people are clicking out of a page fast after opening it, as many people do when clicking on a broken link, it will recognize that page as unreliable. These unreliable pages can reflect on the site as a whole, making them bad for your search ranks. Removing these broken links and replacing them with working ones is important to avoid this from happening, which is why when you reach out to websites to fix their broken links, they are often very eager and willing.
4. Get Instant Leads with PPC
Using ads that are pay-per-click, or PPC, can help spread the word about your studio and track leads that are converting into clients. Much like the name suggests, these types of ads are only paid for if the viewer clicks on them. So, if your ad is shown to 20 people, but no one clicks it, you do not have to pay for anything.
With PPC, you have a few options between where your ads show up, such as Facebook ads or Google ads. These ads can be tailored to show up for specific keyword searches or for a specific demographic that you can control.
If you are using Google Ads, these ads show up at the top of the page. This placement can attract more people to click through and look into your yoga business. It can also be designed to have multiple links inside the ad, helping viewers go exactly where they want (such as a link to your class pages, contact page, etc.). Having this type of information so high in a search can be extremely beneficial to your yoga studio marketing efforts.
When someone clicks on your ad, you’ll be able to see the lead conversion. This is extremely useful for finetuning your ads and getting the most out of your clicks.
5. Get Your Business into the Google Map Results
Another way to get potential customers to your website and eventually into your yoga studio is by utilizing Google Maps. For most results that have a location or a physical store, like a yoga studio, Google may insert a map result into the search. This will highlight three businesses and will show them as pins on a map.
Many people use the maps section of the search to find local businesses, as it’s easy to also get directions, phone numbers, and location information straight from the box. It is very common for searchers to also stop their scroll at the map results, meaning you may get discovered by more people through them.
To get yourself onto this list, you must first register your business on Google. Once that’s completed and Google is aware of your business address, you’ll begin showing up in these results.
6. Consider Traditional Marketing Efforts
The last of the yoga marketing ideas is all about traditional marketing efforts. Although newer yoga studio marketing techniques are important to successfully grow your business today, more traditional methods should not be dismissed. For decades, this type of marketing that is now considered older has stuck around and can help bring in clientele to your yoga studio. Here are a few you may want to consider.
Grow Your Email List
People still use emails on a daily basis. Offering a newsletter to send out to customers who are considering signing up for your yoga studio or who are regulars can allow them to have a place to find relevant information fast.
Newsletters are traditionally sent out on a regular basis, commonly every week or every month. This allows them to be fresh and updated, presenting only what is happening in the near future. Whether these newsletters have announcements about yoga classes or promotions available, it is worth having them as an option for your customers.
Get Seen with a Billboard
Billboards are a very localized way to get attention from a lot of people at once. As people drive, some billboards can catch the attention of passing drivers, giving your business about 2-3 seconds of their time. If designed correctly, you can grab the interest of some of those drivers or passengers who are regularly in your studio’s area. With big fonts, short and clear messages, and bright colors, you may find a billboard can bring some local passersby into your studio.
Promote Your Yoga Studio on a Podcast
Podcasts have seen an increase in listeners in the past few years, allowing them to be huge opportunities for advertising. There are smaller, local podcasts that can be “sponsored,” allowing you to get a “shout-out” or ad throughout the podcast.
Podcasts are also great if they are themed around a specific topic. There are plenty of podcasts that are centered around health and wellness – finding the perfect one to partner with your yoga studio would be the next step!
Host an Event or Promotion
Special yoga classes and one-day programs can also be a great way to attract attention to your business. Events can be simple and fun but also different, like a yoga class where everyone can enjoy a fresh smoothie made in the studio or some wine and chocolate to help relax during the exercise.
If special classes aren’t of interest to you, a promotion like “bring a friend for free” can help introduce new students by word of mouth and demo classes. If your regular class attendants bring their friends to try a class at your studio, you have the opportunity to double your customers.
There are many types of yoga classes, events, and promotions you can offer that will attract people to sign up for your studio. Having these offers can also convert one-time visitors into regular customers who come in weekly for classes.
Schedule a Free Yoga Marketing Strategy Session with the Yogapreneur Collective
The yoga professionals at the Yogapreneur Collective are some of the most sought-after business coaches in the yoga industry with experience and expertise in yoga studio marketing. As the founder of The Yogapreneur Collective and head coach at Nomad Business coaching, Josh Biro has the expertise and experience to run a yoga business, and he can help you do it too. If you are interested in learning more about yoga marketing or where to start, contact us today for a free strategy session.
