How To Find Your Yoga Target Market

Finding your yoga target market is an essential step for those looking for success in the competitive yoga industry, allowing you to market to the right people, and reach the most appropriate audience.

We’ll break this down into three steps:

• Step 1 - Identify The Style Of Yoga You Want To Teach
• Step 2 - Decide What Demographic You Want To Teach
• Step 3 - Perform Market Research For Your Yoga Target Market

But before we delve into this, a surefire way to expand your yoga target market is by developing your skills through continued professional development. 

With a Level 4 Diploma in Teaching Yoga, you’ll be able to specialise in a highly sought-after style of yoga that can significantly boost your prospects among your target market.

To find out more, download our course prospectus here.

Why Finding Your Yoga Target Market is Crucial

Who the target market is for your yoga business largely comes down to what you’re passionate about teaching and who exactly you’re looking to teach.

To make things clear, a target market is simply a specific group of people with similar characteristics and interests that a business markets its services to.

Yoga is a broad activity with many different styles, so it’s important to know exactly who you’re trying to target and how much success you'll have in doing so.

Trying to market yourself to a broad audience is less effective than narrowing the scope of people you’re trying to appeal to. Advertising your services to a smaller group of people you know are more likely to use your services means you’ll be more successful in the long run.

Each person who engages in yoga will have different:

• Backgrounds
• SMART Fitness Goals
• Needs
• Reasons for doing yoga
• Motivations

With this in mind, you should be targeting people who share these similar things. This will make it much easier to attract loyal clients rather than being lost in the range of yoga competitors who have more of a broad appeal.

To do this effectively, we’ll break down the steps to finding your ideal yoga target market.

Step 1 - Identify The Style Of Yoga You Want To Teach

As there are many different yoga styles, you may find it difficult to decide on which one you want to teach. However, it should always come down to what you’re passionate about or enjoy the most.

To help you get started, some questions to ask yourself include:

• What is my favourite part about instructing yoga?
• Why did I become a yoga instructor?
• What do I find most rewarding about instructing yoga?

Asking yourself these questions will help you determine what style of yoga you want to teach and make it easier for you to understand exactly who you want your target market to be.

For example, perhaps your main motivation behind becoming a yoga teacher was to help expectant mothers stay active, and so it's natural you'd have a preference for teaching prenatal yoga.

However, if you’re a beginner yoga instructor, you need to be open to teaching a range of styles as this will help influence your decisions for what you really want to teach.

The desired target market of most yoga instructors comes from their own experiences in the industry, or a style they wish they’d seen more of when they were a student. 

You can see what inspired other instructors and their service by checking out yoga mission statements or the ‘about’ pages of their website.

For example, take a look at the experience of Jenni Jones from Yoga Bumps & Babies:

As you can see, Jenni specialised in pregnancy yoga when she was pregnant herself. This influenced her target market as she developed a passion to help women positively prepare for giving birth.

However, your reason for wanting to teach a specific style doesn’t have to be as life changing as Jenni’s decision. It can simply be that you want to help others experience the benefits of doing yoga everyday and how it can have a positive impact.

For instance, take the about page of Nichi Green on Ekhart Yoga:

Nichi found yoga to be the perfect way to help manage stress and how her work could be emotionally draining. She simply wanted to share this discovery with people, finding it as a way to also shift trauma.

Once again, this is why you should think about why you started to practice yoga. It doesn’t have to be for medical reasons or a pregnancy - your target market could be as simple as stressed out workers or tired parents.

Whatever style you settle on is your decision, but it must be down to what you’re passionate about. This will make it easier for you to continue developing your business, especially in its early stages.

Step 2 - Decide What Demographic You Want To Teach

Finding your yoga target audience means identifying a specific type of profile for students you want to teach.

Ask yourself some questions about who you want your students to be on the surface. These could include:

• What age group do I want my students to be?
• What line of work do I want my students to be in?
• What gender are my students?

As this provides you with a surface-level idea of the group of students you want to train, you can then think of deeper questions to ask yourself:

• What level of experience do I want my students to be?
• Do I want to help students with medical or health issues?

This can help you determine how serious your students will be about your services. Understanding if people would be attending your yoga classes as a fun hobby or to alleviate medical issues is important for knowing how to plan and structure your sessions. 

With this in mind, you should create a market profile to specify the population of potential students you want to teach.

An example may look something like this:

Gender: Female

Age: 25-45

Yoga Experience: Beginner/Basic Level

Health: No serious health or medical issues. Those looking to lose weight or become more active, avoid mental burnout.

Occupation: Working Professionals/Office Workers

Establishing this kind of profile helps you know exactly who you’re looking to teach and also lets you understand your own limits.

The last thing you want is to start advertising your services to those with disabilities, only to realise you're out of your depth and can’t provide them with what they need.

There are many ways to make money as a yoga teacher, and you shouldn’t be lying to potential students about your experience or skills to do this.

Using the information from the profile above, you can expand on your answers by thinking of reasons why these people may want to use your service. They could:

• Be wanting a new hobby
• Be looking to be part of a community
• Need an escape from parenting or work
• Find it difficult to motivate themselves to exercise while having a career

You can use this more detailed information to expand your services to reach a wider audience, while also keeping your search focused on a particular group of students.

After making this general yoga market profile, creating named avatars is a good way to have your own examples of different people you’re looking to help with similar desires and goals.

A couple of examples of ‘avatar’ profiles you could make can look like this:

Jane

• Gender: Female
• Age: 36
• Yoga Experience: Beginner
• Health: No serious issues other than minor back pain
• Occupation: Administrator
• Reason For Yoga: Single parent looking for a way to destress

Anna

• Gender: Female
• Age: 40
• Yoga Experience: Basic Level
• Health: No serious issues 
• Occupation: Dentist
• Reason For Yoga: Looking to lose some weight and get more active

Although they are both female and close in age, their yoga experience levels and reasons for wanting to practice it are different. However, the factors between them are similar enough that they can attend the same class while achieving their individual goals.

Now, this doesn’t mean you have to stick rigidly to these avatar profiles when identifying your yoga target audience. It’s simply a good idea to keep these in mind when thinking about the kinds of people you’re targeting. 

- - - - 

Aside from helping you identify your ideal yoga target market, we’ll help you build your yoga business with these articles:

• How To Make Money As A Yoga Teacher
• Yoga Business Names: Ideas & Examples
• How To Write A Yoga Studio Business Plan: Ultimate Guide

Step 3 - Perform Market Research For Your Yoga Target Market

Once you’ve settled on who you want your ideal yoga target audience to be, you need to make sure there is a demand for your services. 

Although it’s great for you to find a particular niche, it’s unlikely you’ll become a successful yoga teacher if you can’t find students to market your classes to.

Some things you need to consider include:

• How many students in my location are seeking my services?
• Is my kind of yoga service oversaturated?
• Will there be enough of a group to offer my services to?

This step will help you decide whether you’re appealing to those in the right location. There’s no point wasting time marketing to people in a particular location if it isn’t going to provide you with students to teach.

To help you go about conducting successful yoga market research, check out our tips below.

#1 - Conduct Yoga Target Market Research By Checking Out Competitors

One of the best ways to conduct yoga target market research is by checking out competitors online. This allows you to see what these businesses are doing successfully and use this as a way to improve your own business or offer services they don’t.

For example, you may have found an opening for a particular niche such as offering yoga classes for women to alleviate symptoms of menopause. 

By searching ‘hormone yoga therapy’, you can explore different websites and see what they offer.

For instance, Yoga Time With Emma runs ‘Yoga For Hot Women’, classes that use hormone yoga therapy to relieve the symptoms of menopause:

By looking at your competitors’ websites, you can see the classes they offer and tailor your own to reflect or improve upon their business model.

Let’s say that your yoga target audience is those who are pregnant. You can search for classes and see what their prices are. This means you can determine your own prices by basing them off other businesses in your area.

Using an earlier example, 6 week courses offered by Yoga Bumps & Babies are £60:

Using your target market research, you can use this as a guide to set your own prices. Offering the same type of classes or courses, even at just a slightly lower price, can make a difference in potential students wanting to use your services.

#2 - Use Social Media For Yoga Target Market Research

Another way to find your yoga target market is to use social media as a way to see what popular hashtags and accounts are doing successfully.

By taking a look at different yoga accounts, such as the page of Joaquin Gomez, you can tailor your own content to increase your followers:

Joaquin posts yoga demonstrations, inspiring poses, and photos from his classes to provide users with helpful tips and challenges. This is a great way to increase interest with your business and tailor your own posts as a way to engage with your desired yoga audience.

If you’re trying to target pregnants students or those wanting to alleviate chronic pain symptoms, create posts that are tailored towards these groups. 

For example, Unfold Motherhood on Instagram teach prenatal yoga students so all of their posts reflect this by being centred around yoga and pregnancy:

Instagram also allows users to search for locations and see other posts tagged with that same location or place. 

For example, if we take Scarborough and search ‘yoga studio Scarborough’, we’ll find posts related to yogis in this area, such as the one below:

The post above has used hashtags to tag their location, meaning their post can be found by people who search for yoga in Scarborough. Hashtags are great for targeting your ideal audience, which brings us to our next point.

You can use yoga and other top fitness hashtags to help your posts reach a wider audience and target those who follow these hashtags.

For instance, searching the hashtag ‘#yogaformentalhealth’, these are currently the top posts:

Hashtags are a great way to see what achieves consistent engagement and is also a way to find accounts similar to yours. 

You can encourage engagement with your own account and advertise your services by following and interacting directly with followers of these accounts and hashtags too. However, avoid doing this too much as it can look like spam.

#3 - Keyword Search Engines Can Help With Yoga Target Market Research

Narrowing down your yoga target market research can be made easier by using keyword research tools such as Ahrefs. This shows you the amount of people per month searching for a specific keyword or phrase.

Using this can help you understand what your target market is looking for and allows you to see industry trends depending on the popularity of certain keywords.

For example, if we search the general term ‘yoga classes liverpool’ in the Keyword Explorer, this is what we’re presented with:

The volume number indicates this is a term searched regularly by users each month. As you can see, the difficulty for this keyword is Medium. 

While this doesn’t mean it’s extremely difficult to get your business noticed with this term, it still shows other competitors are targeting this.

This shows why it’s important to narrow down your target audience using more specific phrases as it helps cut out competition and reach the ideal groups who are interested in your services.

For example, searching for a more targeted keyword will provide you with different results:

Compared to general yoga classes in an area, searching for a more specific keyword generates results that makes it much easier to have your business rank for. 

Although plenty of people are still searching for this keyword, it's much easier for your website to rank in the top 10 for this term and get your business on the first page of Google.

With this in mind, you can combine the two searches above to ensure you’re as focused on your audience as possible.

Although the keyword ‘pregnancy yoga classes liverpool’ only has a volume of 20, these are 20 searches that are exactly the students you’d be looking to target. 

This leads into better understanding what your target market is searching for, as well as who your close competitors are.

#4 - Be Present Wherever Your Yoga Target Market May Be

Our final tip is about where you’ll find your yoga target market. For example, if we stick with our earlier example of those seeking yoga who are going through the menopause, this will be people between 45 to 55 years old.

Where might you find this group? Here, you should think about both online and offline locations!

Examples of locations you may find these groups and can advertise your services include:

• Facebook support groups for women
• Social media pages for women’s health
• Comment sections of women’s health blogs
• Community centres who run women’s support groups

The easiest way to advertise your services to the right people is online. This is the simplest way to have people check out your business and trust you can help them improve their conditions or help them reach their goals.

Using the same type of example from earlier, Lotus Moon Yoga have optimised their website with ‘hormone yoga therapy’, making it much easier for those trying to find this kind of service:

This is a good marketing strategy as, by optimising your website, you’ll be among the first results for those searching for this. If we take a look at this keyword on Ahrefs, there’s a very small search volume for it (between 1 and 10 people per month):

However, this works to Lotus Moon’s advantage. While the search volume is low, there’s very little competition for site positions, meaning they’ll always be at the top of the page. 

This is a good strategy to really target your ideal audience as although people may not be searching for this regularly, those who do will easily find you, and will be the exact students you’re looking for.

When it comes to advertising your service to groups, these don’t have to be dedicated to yoga. You can simply target groups whose health issues or problems you want to help alleviate.

An example of a Facebook support group you can advertise your services to may include ones like this:

However, some groups or pages may be private so you’ll need to ask the administrator to let you join. Avoid advertising too much, and instead focus on building a reputation as a trustworthy yoga professional in the community.

And, if you’re looking to advertise offline as well as online, you could market your services by distributing leaflets or putting up posters such as this one from Downtown Desert Yoga, which specialises in prenatal yoga:

While this doesn’t mean people will automatically flock to use your service, by putting yourself out there in a public setting, you’re increasing the chances of your target yoga audience finding you.

Before You Go!

As your yoga target market is vital for lasting success in the industry, it’s important you follow our steps to find the ideal group of students for you.

Ultimately, though, further education offers the best way to ensure you provide for your target market, and OriGym’s Level 4 Diploma In Teaching Yoga is ideal for helping you achieve this.

Download our course prospectus to explore what else we have to offer.