7 Digital Marketing Strategies For Yoga Studios & Teachers

If you’re looking to start your own business in the yoga industry, you should get to grips with digital marketing for yoga studios. This will help you to properly promote your business and ultimately, make a living.

Below, we have 7 effective methods of digital marketing for yoga teachers and/or studio owners.

First off however, if you’re wanting to advance your business, why not enquire about a level 4 yoga instructing course. Find this and more in our downloadable course prospectus here.

7 Effective Methods Of Digital Marketing For Yoga Teachers

#1 - Running Paid Ads Is An Exceptional Yoga Teacher Digital Marketing Strategy

There are two different types of advertising you should consider when it comes to paid ads, and these are Google Ads and Facebook / Instagram (Meta) Ads, so let’s see how you can utilise these as a yogi.

Google Advertisements 

Google Advertisements are super easy to set up, all you need to do is create a Google Ads account and choose “new campaign”.

After that you can select your objective, goals for conversion and other relative options. But before you go ahead and set up the advert campaign itself, a little research would be sensible first on how much it is going to cost you.

The best way to find out the cost of Google Ads is by using softwares like either Google Adwords itself or AHrefs. Tools such as these can give you a really useful insight into how much you’d be expected to pay for your ads and even what your target market is searching for.

For example, let’s take a relatively common keyword like “Yoga studios London”, below, you can see some insightful information on this keyword:

This tool doesn't just show you the cost of the ad (which you can see highlighted as) but tons of other relative information regarding your targeted keyword such as the 'keyword difficulty'.

The cost per click is the amount you would spend (each time) should someone click on your ad link. The exact cost can often change which is why the likes of AHrefs gives you a ballpark based on average numbers.

If you're worried that these costs could get out of control, the first thing to know is that Google allows you to put a spending budget in place.

The second thing to consider is that you only spend this money when a user clicks on your Ad. Considering users will only find your Ad and click on your website by searching a relevant term like 'yoga studios central London' it's fair to say that they're pretty intersted in becoming a customer. 

We'd say $1.30 is a small price to pay to get a potential new student to your studio!

You can see below how they control spending to help your money go further:

In a nutshell, you would only spend whatever you have pledged to spend. You can set a budget cap for the month and even pause the ads all together when necessary. 

Once you have decided on an affordable keyword, you can put your ad live, which will look something like this:

You have a much greater chance at getting noticed if you’re right at the top of the page, just like that example above. Once you have a website that is useful in its own right, paying for the top spot can really increase your traffic and thus, client base!

Meta Advertisements 

Meta Ads work similarly to Google in the sense that you can set a budget, choose your audience and be super specific with who you want the ad to reach. We have an extensive guide on how to set up Facebook Ads if you’re ready for this step but, we want to briefly reiterate what this can look like for your yoga studio. 

So, another popular yoga teacher digital marketing strategy is utilising social media as a driver for advertisements. 

Meta includes two huge social media platforms, Facebook and Instagram. If you use these platforms you will have come across many different adverts that have been tailored to people just like you. 

Below, you can see what some different Meta Ads can look like on somebody's feed:

These are just a small selection of the huge array of yoga studios and businesses that use Meta ads, so there are some things to pay attention to.

On the advert itself, you can see a CTA (call-to-action) on each one, whether it be a link, a special offer or a booking redirection. So while Meta Ads can help you to increase brand awareness to the right people, it can also work as a direct link to conversions. 

Start by browsing through the Meta Ad library, you can search for different relevant terms like “yoga teacher” or “yoga classes” and search through for inspiration on what to put on your adverts. 

Assess relevant adverts, if there are particularly successful small yoga studios that you aspire to, check out their adverts and try to replicate it in your own style. 

Both of these advertising tools can really help to boost your business but we understand that investing your money right away might not be viable for every yogi just yet, that’s why we have more budget friendly and even free options that we will talk about next.

#2 - Registering On GoogleMyBusiness Is A Top Yoga Instructor Online Marketing Tip

If you’re looking for the more budget friendly ways of digital marketing for yoga businesses, then GooglemyBusiness (GMB) is a great tool to utilise (it's worth also noting that GMB is now also known as Google Business Profile).

The chances of your business being discovered on Google relies heavily on how you optimise your presence on GMB and your location.

This is because first off, there are many attributes to a GMB listing- it holds factors such as:

• Service options
• Your business address
• Opening hours
• Appointment links
• Phone number
• Question & answers
• Reviews
• Popular time chart

GMB is free of charge, and it’s a perfect way to professionalise your business and have a reliable and accessible place for interested clients to retrieve business info.

So you know what information is displayed on your listing, but how do you do it purposefully? 

First, set up your profile, the home page to navigate from looks like this below:

We have an extensive step-by-step on how to set up a GooglemyBusiness account here but it is super easy to navigate. Google will take you through a step by step process to fill out all of the necessary information.

However, anybody can fill in some business details, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to spring to the top of the GMB listings page. There are some things that you need to do after the basics to actually pursue online marketing for your yoga business.

For example, you should pay attention to what Google suggests you do as a business in order to get your GMB listing as the most relevant since these are the ones that will be coming up first. For your reference, this is what the first GMB listing would look like:

In order to get to this point, Google shares what can help to increase your business visibility, these include:

#1 Entering Complete Data: Google states that you should “Provide information like, but not limited to": 

• Physical address
• Phone number
• Category
• Attributes

#2 Verify your business locations: This way, they’re more likely to show in local search results across Google products, like Maps and Search.

#3 Keep Hours Accurate: Update them regularly and specify holiday hours.

#4 Respond to Reviews: Though people can leave reviews willingly, your response shows how much you value your clientele and their contribution to feedback. As well as this, you can also expect business visibility to improve the higher the reviews you receive.

#5 Include Images: Showcase your services for transparency, this way interested clients can see relevant imagery like the inside of your studio, logos etc.

All of these things can help you to communicate your services to Google’s algorithm so the more descriptive you are and the more information you put out, the better your chances are at ranking as the most relevant. 

Google determines local rankings on 3 factors, including:

• Relevance
• Distance
• Prominence

This is why you need to communicate what you offer as efficiently as possible, so that Google can show interested clients the most relevant results. For example, even if there is a yoga studio closer in terms of physical distance to the searcher, your studio might have the discipline that they’re searching for and thus, is more relevant.

This would mean that your listing would be higher up on the results due to the fact that you have communicated that you offer a specific discipline, say Iyenger yoga for instance, within your GMB listing.

Take your time building your listing, use high quality photographs and encourage your current clientele to leave reviews. All of these small tasks mount up to greater reward.

#3 - Optimising Your Website For SEO Is A Must For Yoga Teacher Digital Marketing

We spoke earlier about how to optimise your GMB listings, well this is directly linked to the strength of your yoga teacher website.

There are similarities between optimising GMB and your website, but using search engine optimisation (SEO) for your website is much more extensive. This is because there can be a lot of competition when it comes to web pages so there are many ranking factors that decipher where you’re placed on the search engine results page (SERP).

The most important page for you as a yoga business owner to optimise are your sales pages. These should follow certain best practices that Google is super transparent about so taking your time and putting effort into making sure this is right is the best thing you can do. 

You should use softwares to help you along with this if you’re not familiar with running a website, the aforementioned AHrefs is the perfect tool for this. Similarly when we are looking at the ‘cost per click’ information we can see in the same place what kind of traffic you could expect and what keywords to use to communicate with Google effectively.

For example, take a look below at a yoga discipline specific keyword:

As you can see, this is a pretty specific keyword and so, the amount of people on average searching for this every month is low. This is a good thing for you as a small business though, as it makes getting on the SERP more achievable. 

By targeting smaller keywords such as this, or whatever discipline is appropriate for you, you’re able to target your market much easier. This is the keyword that should be at the core of your sales pages. 

Mention it in your titles and within the content itself, but as well as that, you can also use related keywords to optimise your sales pages. For example, using AHrefs can help you to do that by looking under the “Terms Match” section:

You can even look for what people are questioning surrounding your target keyword. By implementing these keywords, you’re able to boost your optimisation and communicate with Google’s algorithm more effectively.

It is important that you include these in your content of the sales page and also in your meta title and description. For example, below you can see an organic ranking yoga studio who has successfully utilised keywords among other SEO tactics to rank highly for their target KW:

These are the organic results that have clearly been optimised. Aside from the clarity of keywords being in there, they also have their location laid out clearly. This is super helpful for your business since the search for “near me” can narrow down the search results further to make it even more relevant to the end user.

Aside from keywords, there are some other things that can help you to improve your SEO, these are also known as ‘Ranking Factors’ including:

• Efficient page speed: If your page speed is low, it can affect how well you rank. You can check your page speed regularly on your Google analytics page under ‘reports’.
• Mobile user friendly: Since a huge percentage of users are on mobile, you should focus just as much on development of your mobile view as well as desktop.
• Domain Authority: Domain authority is a score out of 100 that determines the health of your site, the higher the better. You can improve this number by utilising the aforementioned SEO practices and the likes of backlinks (links from other websites).
• Links: Outward links, internal links and of course backlinks are all beneficial for improving your probability of ranking. 

You should do some intense research on SEO and how to implement these practices to really get your yoga instructor online marketing plan off the ground. 

This is one of the more budget friendly ways to improve your online presence so it is certainly worth your time investment.

#4 - Content Marketing Is An Advanced Digital Marketing Strategy For Yoga Instructors

Content marketing is a staple technique across all industries, it is consistently increasing in popularity within businesses and for good reason too. 

Below, you can see a snippet of useful statistics from HubSpot, a reliable source, regarding the state of content marketing in 2022.

As you can see, we have highlighted some of the main points that you should pay attention to, these highlight the importance of including content marketing in your digital marketing plan for yoga studios.

Content marketing clearly is responsible for direct sales, as you can see in the first statistic, more than half of marketers measure the success of content marketing through sales. However, there is more than just trying to sell within content marketing.

As a yogi, it gives you the opportunity to show off what you know, your experiences and ultimately define your authority in the industry. By having a blog, you have the ability to contribute to your SEO practices since this can be a great place to implement the likes of keywords.

You can use content marketing for many different reasons and benefits, plus, it is a budget friendly way of achieving these said benefits. You can add blogs to your site within free website builders like Wix and Wordpress, so you don’t have to spend a penny to start distributing your knowledge and getting your name out there.

Below, you can see an example of how you can do this with your yoga website:

As you can see, among the likes of classes and programmes, you can also browse through their blog with relevant articles. 

It can really help your business to become a reliable source of information and thus, a reliable business and studio overall.

#5 - Building Up Organic Social Posts Is An Effective Yoga Studio Digital Marketing Tactic

Another tactic of digital marketing for yoga teachers includes the utilisation of social media. 

Social media goes further than just posting on Instagram every now and then, you should pay attention to your statistics and link this to what we spoke about earlier in regards to paid advertisements on social media.

First off, sign up to Instagram and Facebook (Meta). You can use these pages as business accounts so that you can keep track of important statistics such as:

• Insights
• Reach
• Engagement
• Followers
• Website Clicks
• Demographic of users
• Popular online times

If you’re just starting out, this is some super valuable information that you’re getting at no cost. It is how you use it which will affect the success or failure of your page. 

For example, using the same tactics or themes that you have used before in posts that have high numbers of engagement is a good way to self-reflect on what you have done well. This goes for the posts with little engagement too, since there is no use in repeating content that hasn’t had good reception. 

Below, you can see what insights can look like for each individual posts so you can compare and find which ones are doing better than others:

As you can see, there are different variables that can be insightful, but this doesn’t mean that you should have an exact copy of what you’ve done before. Instead, think of the bigger picture and asses things such as:

• Was it a video post or image?
• Was it an infographic?
• Was it informative or entertaining?
• Did it follow a current trend?

These are more holistic things that would help you to better understand what type of posts do well, not the content specifically.

Once you become a little more advanced and have taken your time researching other successful yogi social media pages, you might see your follower count start to climb. Once you reach this stage and are getting busy, you might want to utilise a software that can help you manage this. 

You don’t want your social media to suffer the consequences of you not having the time to keep up with it, so there are softwares that can help like Sprout Social for example. You can see below what one big time content manager said about this software.

It is worth noting that it might take some time to build your account and get to this stage, but once you do, it is a great opportunity to communicate with potential and current clientele.

Plus, you can advertise, run competitions and show off your branding more than ever in this space. It is definitely one of the more budget friendly ways of digital marketing and you can have fun with it too!

#6 - Respond To Journalist Requests To Boost Your Yoga Studio Digital Marketing Efforts

Finally, one more way that you’re able to get your name out there and pursue yoga teacher digital marketing is to respond to journalist requests.

Signing up to the likes ResponseSource or Haro grants you the opportunity to get your business in the mainstream media big and small. This can help you to build authority in the industry, a crucial part of improving your SEO and domain authority. 

It can show people who read the publication that you’re mentioned in what you offer, since the quote used will have your name and company. This can look something like this below:

As you can see, the author name and the company in which they retrieved the quote from is included, plus a link. This can improve your image as a yoga studio and even send any interested readers straight to your website. 

You can see below a snippet taken from ResponseSource, from real businesses that have utilised this site and improved their digital marketing efforts. 

It is clear that this can help your business, no matter the industry. Knowledge is a huge seller within the yoga industry, the more you know the better so by showing off your background and expertise in publications you can make a statement.

#7 - Establish An Effective Yoga Studio Email Marketing Strategy

Something that is arguably a little more difficult to achieve if you're new to the industry or yoga online marketing as a whole is getting to grips with email marketing. Email marketing is a way to communicate to interested subscribers to increase brand awareness, make sales and ultimately build a strong B2C relationship.

Email marketing isn’t something that will happen overnight, it is something you must be prepared to work at for sometime in order to feel the efficacy of it on your business. Nonetheless, it is certainly worth the wait as the statistics speak for themselves.

We have a full guide on creating your fitness email marketing strategy, but here are the essential things you need to know:

HubSpot has an array of statistics regarding the projection of the level of ROI due to email marketing. You can take a look below at a graph encapsulating this with a projection going up to 2027.

This projection is huge, which is why you shouldn’t waste time on building up a core base for your business to thrive within email marketing.

That being said, what comes first and how do you set up a campaign?

This might seem daunting at first, but it can be super easy with the help of relevant softwares such as Campaign Monitor or MailChimp.

These are specially designed softwares to make large or small email campaigns accessible to everyone. With that in mind, there are some things that you should do in chronological order for it to be as simple as possible.

First, Decide The Purpose of Your Email Campaign…

To begin, simply ask yourself, what is it that you want to achieve from this? Being in the industry of yoga, digital marketing, email marketing in particular is probably not at the forefront of your mind most of the time. 

That is okay, but this is why it could and should take some time to decide on the most effective purpose. For example, is your goal to:

• Gain more clients e.g through referrals
• Convert existing subscribers to paying customers
• Increase brand awareness
• Distribute informative pieces to gain authority in the field

It could be any one of these but it could also be plenty other things. The point is, you should have a definitive direction for your campaigns before you start designing them.

Next, Choose What Your CTA Will Be or What You’re Offering as Incentive… 

You may notice that any successful email campaigns will have a call to action button, this is completely subjective to what your email is offering so it could be different every time. 

For example, if you decide to create a referral programme for your current email subscribers, meaning if they successfully sign up to the mailing list, you both get one class free. 

In this instance, your CTA may be a redirecting link button taking the end user to a page on your website regarding referrals and how to process one. 

Finally, Begin Designing your Email Funnel

Lastly, Begin Designing and Implementing an Email Funnel... 

If you’re unsure on what an email funnel is, it is a common term used to describe the stages in which email journeys take depending on the interaction of the user and your intent as the sender. 

As the sender, you should be anticipating the needs of your subscribers and timing is everything in order to see any return from your efforts. To explain email funnels as simply as possible, first, think about the journey you want your recipient to go on, often, this can look something like this: 

• Awareness - Think about how you can build brand awareness through regular communication.
• Engagement - Come up with ways to encourage engagement within your emails.
• Consideration - This is the stage in which your recipient may start to consider the purchase you have advertised.
• Purchase - This is when you can give the nudge to encourage purchase.
• Adoption - At this point, you hope that your recipient begins to learn more about the product and integrate it into their life.
• Retention - Consumer retention is particularly important for yoga studios, this is about not just getting new clients but making them stay.
• Expansion - This is when you can encourage current recipients to buy more, rather than go through more effort within customer acquisition you can work with what you already have too.
• Advocacy - Encourage your recipients to spread the word and to build discourse surrounding your business.

As you can see, there is a particular logistical order to this, it slowly turns from simple awareness tactics to the end user advocating for your business. Simply put, in order to get as many users taking this journey, you should follow these steps chronologically.

The Top of The Email Funnel Should Generate Leads

To set up a campaign, you’re going to need email addresses first and foremost. This means that your first step is gathering email addresses of relevant end users who would be genuinely interested in being on your mailing list. 

The way to do this is by creating incentive, in other words, to exchange something useful for their email address. Some ideas on how to do this include:

• Run contests: Entrees require an email address in order to be in the running, however ensure you give them an option to Opt-in to marketing materials.
• Utilise an Exit-intent pop-up: This is a pop-up as the user intends on leaving the site to make them stay or sign up, offer them a % code off for example.
• Include subscribe boxes within insightful blog content: If you have content on your website, include capture boxes that require an email address in exchange for something relevant, for example, a discount code for classes, a yoga pose library PDF download etc.

These are great ways to get people interested, since it is important that in this case you have people who actually care about yoga and are interested in your classes. You probably see these around more than you realise, for example, a very common approach is using the aforementioned capture boxes which can look something like this:

Remember though, that it must be relevant to the content that it is embedded in. This is because if you don’t take this into account and send emails to those who aren’t particularly interested, you will damage your email deliverability.

In other words, your emails may start to be marked as spam or you might receive a high amount of unsubscribers. These are damaging to the success of your campaign so ensure that you’re only sending emails to the relevant parties and are sending useful material.

The Mid-section of Your Email Funnel Should Nurture Current Subscribers

You’ve completed the vital step of gaining email subscribers, and it isn’t easy so well done! After this though, the hard work continues since it is time to utilise these leads you’ve gained. 

This is when you would start to get to grips with email automation and softwares like the aforementioned Campaign Monitor that can help you to build a funnel and journey. 

Essentially, email automation saves time and effort because it is unrealistic to sit and assess and send each email individually, but what automation can do is set triggers; let’s use an example to explain this clearly.

One of the most important stages of an email marketing journey is the welcome email. 

If you have signed up to something and don’t receive a ping right away welcoming you to the brand, business or service, chances are you probably assume that you’ve inputted your email wrong!

A welcome email kicks off the relationship and ultimately, the funnel. This should come straight after subscription. This welcome email can be triggered by using email automation, it can also utilise details such as the end user's name to make it more personal and thus, increase open rates. 

After this, email automation can begin the nurturing process by triggering different routes of the funnel you have created depending on the action that the user takes. 

For instance, if you have included a CTA (which you definitely should have!) within your welcome email such as “Grab your FREE class pass here” then your automation software has data on what action your end user has taken.

This is when automation really gets to work as you can create different trigger routes depending on the action. You could have those who have clicked the CTA take one route and follow different email material, while those who didn’t click it could take another route in which you continue to attempt to nurture the lead.

It is important that you think about using some automation tools because the data it can provide is invaluable and is the key to retaining interested subscribers and turning them into paying clients arriving to your yoga classes.

Focus on keeping the nurturing emails as personalised, relevant and useful as possible. This isn’t the time to sell just yet, you need to first sell your value as a resource before you start to actually advertise and sell your services, in this case yoga classes.

The Final Section of Your Funnel Should Focus on Conversion

Finally, it is time to start seeing the results of your email marketing funnel. 

While these emails should still be nurturing the relationship you have worked hard to build, this is the time to introduce conversion tactics. As a yoga business, some of the most effective tactics you could use are things such as:

Time-sensitive Offers

This creates a sense of urgency, for example, in order to increase membership options you could include something along the lines of:

“Get 15% off your first month when you sign up to a rolling membership if you join before the end of the month!” 

This would be a good time sensitive conversion based email during the last week of the month. This gives the end user a week to decide and puts a time cap on the offer. Similarly, if you have sent this a week before, after 5 days you could send another reminder, such as:

“You only have until the end of this weekend to grab your discount off of our monthly membership for UNLIMITED yoga classes!”

You might want to include components like a countdown clock and highlight any buzzwords like unlimited, discount or free. 

A Focus on Retargeting 

Something else that you can do to increase conversions is to retarget clients who have a clear interest but need that extra push to make the purchase. For example, if you allow clients to join up online and buy class passes or memberships, you can use email automation to view abandoned carts. 

This is a clear indication that they have been close to purchasing but haven't quite converted. 

You can give them that extra nudge within an email with a discount or relative material like positive reviews that will help them take the next step and join.

Repeat the Funnel to Retain Clients 

Once you have gone through each of these steps, you simply start again. 

Keep changing up your content and focus on how you’re going to keep your current subscribers while still working to gain more new subscribers all the while. 

If you keep this up, you will certainly begin to create a strong professional bond that will increase your conversions and professionalise your business overall. 

Before You Go…

Hopefully you feel confident in how to get started with digital marketing for yoga studios, our advice is to start with our first couple of tips and the more budget friendly ones and soon, you’ll be able to grow into the more technical ways of boosting your business.

Don’t forget, if you’re ready to advance your career to the next level then why not check out OriGym’s level 4 diploma in yoga teaching? Find this and much more in our downloadable course prospectus.