As a yoga teacher, the digital world can be a little overwhelming if you’re just getting started. But with a little know-how, you can soon start building valuable relationships with your community online.
Having a little marketing knowledge will help you grow your classes, fill your workshops, and start making long-lasting connections with your students. It’s about being found in the places your students are hanging out online and delivering value outside of the yoga studio.
Digital marketing covers so many areas and the key is not to try and do all things at once, but instead focus on getting started with a few key activities. Here are my top 10 digital marketing tips for yoga teachers to help you do just that.
1. Build a Yoga Website
This might seem like a huge job, but it doesn’t have to be. You can get started with a simple one page website that just includes your teaching schedule so that potential students can find (and book!) your classes.
From there, you can go on to develop your website over time with information on how you can help your students, your yoga journey story and pages on your offering such as corporate and private yoga and events such as retreats and workshops.
You get plus points if your website is easy to navigate, incorporates your brand look and feel, and offers a freebie (e.g. 30-minute flow, tips for beginners, free meditation) that your visitors will receive in exchange for their email address.
2. Create a Facebook Business Page
Lots of yoga teachers I know use their personal Facebook page as their yoga business page. What they don’t realise is that you can only have a limited number of friends and you can’t take advantage of the features that are available to business page owners.
Whilst it’s true that it’s becoming harder for business to gain organic reach through their pages, there’s still many reasons to keep your page going. Not only do you gain insight on your fans, but you can also run Facebook ads through a business page, which is super helpful if you plan to run retreats or create online products such as yoga courses in the future.
3. Become (Socially) Visual
Sign up to Canva (free) and start playing around with all of the graphic design tools, templates, and inspiration at your fingertips to create visual content for your website, blog posts, and social media.
Canva is great for creating your own quote images and adding copy to your images to promote your classes. It’s super easy to use and is something I use on a daily basis. It’s the best way to start developing ideas for your yoga branding so don’t be afraid to experiment and let your creativity flow!
4. Capture moments
Get used to snapping “moments” throughout the day that can be shared on social media and start building a bank of images to make the process of posting easier.
Your post-yoga glow, morning smoothie, home practice, walk in the park, class planning, posture progress…whatever it might be, there’s always a story “moment” you can share. The important thing is to get into the habit of collecting content and posting regularly.
5. Be Insightful
The beauty with digital is that everything can be tracked, traced, and backed up with data. Start learning more about your students and audience by getting into the data.
Knowing more about those who are engaging with you online will help you target potential students with the same characteristics. Both Facebook and Instagram provide robust follower insights and Google Analytics provides data on your website visitors.
6. Stay Connected
Make sure you connect everything up. Provide links on your website to all of your social media accounts using the platform icons and share buttons.
A very simple tactic is to cross-promote and this is something that most people forget! You can post a link on your Facebook page to your Instagram profile and vice versa. Give people a reason to follow you on another platform by running a competition there only.
7. Build an Email List
Sign up for a free MailChimp account and do this today! This is the most important tool in your digital marketing toolbox. It’s super easy to set up a subscriber form on your website (or webpage!) to collect email addresses and you can even connect it to your Facebook page to collect email addresses there.
Make sure you have an irresistible opt-in offer (freebie) that you can email to your new email subscribers in exchange for their email address…but even if you don’t have that yet, sign up to Mailchimp and set up a subscriber form to get started.
8. Offer (Inbox) Value
Always offer value in your email newsletters that will supplement your student’s yoga practice.
You could break down a different asana in each newsletter, theme your newsletter to your weekly class theme, offer some tips or a link to a guided meditation. Get your subscribers excited about receiving your newsletter!
9. Get Blogging
If the idea of this scares you, fear not! You definitely learnt something about yoga, philosophy, postures and anatomy during your yoga teacher training that you can share in words.
Blogging has so many benefits from creating content for your website packed full of relevant keywords that search engines will pick up, to driving people to your website from social media to read your posts. You could also submit your work to other yoga websites as a way to increase your visibility and gain new traffic to your website. It’s a win-win.
10. Use Video Content!
You’ll have noticed that video is everywhere on social media right now. Facebook in particular is on a mission to fill their platform with video. Use video instead of an image and you’ll be rewarded with increased organic reach.
If you use Facebook or Instagram Live, your followers will even receive a notification to tell them you’re currently live in the platform. Video is definitely the place to be right now so start experimenting and give it a go!
Remember to try a few of these digital marketing tips out first and see how you get on before moving on to the next.
Image credit: Drinie Aguilar