Top 10 Digital Marketing Strategies And Tips For Yoga Studios

There are about 35,000 Yoga Studios in U.S. and while the student participation in classrooms have spiked continuously and constantly over the past 20 years, and while by far the majority of yoga instructors are highly talented and devoted, yoga businesses are facing challenges when it comes to markting cost-effectively.

Even Yoga Studios that do well financially, can at any time meet a major drop of classroom participation and experience lack of interest in existing or new classes.

To stay profitable and continually grow, even for a multi-discipline and eclectic school of yoga offering many different styles, and focused specialties (for instance, focus on anatomy and biomechanics), there seems to remain many marketing challenges. Almost all Yoga Studios have to offer major discounts to bring people through the door until competitors offer even a more aggressive discount.

Many Yoga Studio owners eventually find acquisition by other bigger chain studios as a means of an exit strategy for their business while staying on to continue as an instructor without all the associated costs of running a business.

What is the single most significant challenge for most Yoga Studios and their owners?

Marketing profitably and finding new students with long term engagement with the studio.

Even chains with 10 or 20 studios in affluent communities offering high-quality teaching, exceptional customer service, cleanliness, with many different styles, have challenges with marketing that offers a sensible ROI.

The fact is that digital marketing is growing rapidly, changing constantly, and its effectiveness (with a sensible ROI) needs to be analyzed and monitored on a quarterly basis. That is hard work by itself. When one method fails, or one campaign has run its course, a new one needs to be implemented quickly and effectively to keep the business growing and profitable.

Digital marketing, for all its amazing opportunities and its potential customer reach 24 hours a day, seven days a week, does have one significant challenge that is also based on its greatest potential: content marketing works best at a much lower cost than paid advertising in digital media, but it needs to be compelling content.

So, that is the answer? For yoga business owners to do lots of content marketing through digital media? But when will they find time to run their business, teach their classes, and relax and enjoy their life if they have to produce content (especially good content) all the time and get it into their marketing channel to distribute and find and bring new students to the studio?

Well, that is part of the challenge. However, content marketing offers great opportunities and has incredible customer reach potential, expecially if you are looking for customers in your local market.

There is no doubt that digital maketing is the most significant marketing transformation in recent decades, as per the 2018 Annual Report: Business Marketing Trends.

No business can seriously expect to be successful and thrive by ignorning digital marketing methods, or disregarding the most successful techniques and tips applicable to their business. Digital media is how customers in B2C want to be connected with these days, and marketed to.

Yoga studios are no exception.

If you intend to have a cost-effective and thriving digital marketing strategy for your Yoga Studio, you need to consider the following 10 of the highest performing strategies and tips that can bring more visitors to your Yoga Studio website and allow you to sell your services, connect with new students, and reconnect with returning ones - AND do it profitably without wasting money on campaigns or paid ads that are a waste of money and don't produce much results.

1. The FACTS about digital marketing

If you have the time for a quick read, then here's the latest study regarding the current trends in digital marketing, in particular Social Media customer reach and the overall significance of current digital marketing trends.

All professionals current with marketing trends accept and would agree, to a great deal at least, that digital marketing has become a major component of modern day marketing strategies and without it, you cannot go far with your business.

Paid advertising alone (Google, Bing, Yahoo, Facebook, etc.) just isn't going to do it for your yoga business, or for almost any other business, especially small businesses.

Here at Anaxstar.com we often work on projects for clients with other agencies and they keep insisting that our mutual client should keep dumping more money into paid advertising. They suggest that it is essential and a "must". We disagree. We see it as a small companion not a major strategy. It is a waste of money for most small businesses to simply dump a lot of money into search engine paid ads.

Everything is now becoming a "Search Engine", e.g. Amazon, YouTube, Ebay, Craigslist, etc.

Most often than not, dumping more and more money into paid search engine ads just does not work. It is more and more becoming a waste of money. Even the traffic it brings, is not necessarily the traffic that makes a purchase.

This is specially more so with Yoga Studios than some other repeat business product-based online e-commerce companies.

Understanding digital marketing and what it can and cannot do for you and your business is essential.

This is a significant first step if you are going to successfully grow your business, utilize online marketing, bring traffic to your website, and ultimately accomplish more conversions and sign up more Yoga students for your classes.

If you can find time in your busy schedule, talk to marketing experts who have actually done marketing campaigns and/or advertising and Social Media campaigns on behalf of Yoga Studios. You will quickly learn that the most important aspects of digital marketing, as it relates to a Yoga Studio business, are:

• a) Inbound-Campaigning For Your Website
• b) Creating Insights With Compelling Content
• c) Connecting with Your Community, Online

I will describe these in the following sections in more detail as I describe each of the Top 10 Digital Marketing Strategies and Tips that I believe are essential for Yoga Studios.

This first item on the list may not itself represent a "marketing strategy" as such, but in fact not wasting money on sources that don't bring you much value is in itself a strategy. If marketing strategy is the calculated means through which you bring in new business or increase your visibility and reputation online or offline, then it is important to consider how to avoid wasting available resources/funds on marketing methods that don't bring in much revenue. More on this later.

2. The essentials for Yoga Studio digital marketing success

Each marketing media or channel used to market your services online provides a different value proposition and you have to analyze which media you should invest time and money into, and which ones are not going to get you much results.

This may become even a more complex task since at each stage of your business you can expect to produce a different result from each of the digital marketing techniques or channels available. Early stage small businesses can expect to produce much more from social networks that paid ads in Google or Bing. As mentioned above, paid advertising does not do really well for most small businesses nor, in particular, yields much results for Yoga Studios.

At later stages of your business growth, you can do more paid ads in Social Networks to bring visibility to your best performing videos, or pinterest posts, or your most popular tweet or instagram image. You know what promotion/offer/discount performs the highest and that is what you promote to reach new customers at the lowest cost to achieve the highest ROI.

It is essential to evaluate each media/channel to see if it can produce results in a cost-effective and profitable way for you. For instance, search engine ad platforms, such as Google Adwords, work much better for known brands, (e.g. iPhones, Samsung SmartPhones, Honda Cars, etc.) popular products, high-in-demand products, and mostly for national or even international markets. For local small businesses, not so much.

If you want to target local people which most Yoga Studios do, search engine advertising is less effective, and even worse for a startup Yoga Studio that needs yoga students to fill up their classes.

You would have to create a campaign specific to your circumstances and the specific phase of your business.

Yoga is a fun way to be fit and relax in a somewhat social envirnment. Social media in this case is the best strategy for your digital marketing and you can target local people based on their profile and interests. This means you can target people who are likely to be interested in your yoga classes, whether they are searching for your business or not. And this can be done far more cost-effectively than paid advertising in search engines.

For instance, most yoga students are also interested in healthy living, nutritious diet, fitness, active lifestyle, emotional and spiritual connection, and are generally very compassionate and open minded with lots of energy and curosity. Now using this information you can develop social media campaigns that target their needs and wants, better and much more effectively.

You can design social media posts, images, and videos that attract them to you and to your Yoga Studio. And you can do this with a very low budget.

In the last few years, online video marketing has become the most significant and the most cost-effective marketing method and hence the most vital part of the marketing mix for many successful brands.

This is even more so for small businesses offering educational videos for fitness, yoga, spiritual guides, nutrition, and other similar topics.

But before you get started with any social media digital marketing, you should of course have a website, if you don't already.

This does not have to be an expensive website with features and options that you don't need. But ideally it does need to be a smart, well thought-through Internet presence that can achieve, "Inbound-Campaigning" as I mentioned earlier.

Inbound Campaigning Website refers to a website designed to be part of, and integrated with, an effective marketing strategy for your specific audience. It includes the methods through which you target your customers through marketing strategies that you employ and bring them to you, as opposed to you going to them to attract them to your services/business.

For instance, inbound campaigning would include the creation of videos for promoting yoga classes.

Such videos can include meditation, or Nidra meditation, morning ritual, spine routing, Hatha/Yin, heartbeat Vinyasa, or other programs for individuals that want to relax, meditate, start their morning with a burst of energy, and those looking for a calmer and more balanced lifestyle.

Such videos get traction with proper social media marketing and now you have individuals that are coming to your website, hence inbound-campaigning.

In fact in YouTube the top 100 Yoga videos have anywhere from 500,000 to 18 million views, each. The top 1,000 Yoga videos in YouTube have a minimum of 5,000 views, each and many of them have anywhere from 25,000 to 250,000 views. That's a lot of potential customer-reach.

There are many other examples of inbound campaigning that you could use for your website. Among many that we have done for our Yoga Studio clients, here are a few of the most effective inbound marketing campaigning:

• 1)Yoga timeline for new students (information on how you can help your students over time),
• 2)Your own yoga journey story and how you started and what inspired you,
• 3)Weekend retreats for relaxation and rejuvenation,
• 4)Corporate private yoga class for sales teams, programmers, developers, engineers, etc.,
• 5)Yoga workshops for re-visiting students,
• 6)Fitness videos for individuals describing how yoga can make them more fit,
• 7)Video tips for beginners, or meditation, 15-minute warm ups, hot yoga options, etc.

These are all examples of inbound campaigning to bring people to your website where they can book one of your classes.

To accomplish inbound campaigning, here's a list of your bare essentials for your Yoga Studio digital marketing campaigns:

• a)An effective website (see below for details)
• b)Facebook page for your Yoga Studio
• c)Twitter page for your studio
• d)Google+ page for your studio
• e)Pinterest page for your studio
• f) Instagram page (in my opinion) absolutely essential for Yoga Studios
• g)Video content creation (video camera) for marketing
• h)A blog for posting articles and getting comments
• i) Collecting data from metrics and analytics of your website
• j) Analysing your website analytics to find insights

If you don't have the above already, you need to get these or get someone to put them together for your business. I could have added another 10 items to this list but I laid out the bare essentials.

3. Yoga and Instagram, a match made in heaven

Instagram ranks among the top 10 leading social networks worldwide. Yoga studio marketers or their outsourced marketing agencies use it every day to reach followers to boost interactions and promote videos, and classes.

Now Instagram is a little more involved and more time-consuming to use for marketing (since you have to plan and develop compelling content) but the per-follower engagement on Instagram is substantially higher than on Facebook and Twitter.

If you do decide to use Instagram as one of your main social media marketing channels to promote your Yoga Studio classes or other services, you should remember that this is more time-consuming than what it may appear on surface.

Here's a few tips to help you with growing your Instagram channel:

• 1)Understand the interests and habits of your target audience
• 2)Create and post quality content regularly
• 3)Design visuals in a way that truly resonate with your audience
• 4)Design your Bio effectively to make a very positive impression
• 5)Monitor and measure your marketing campaign
• 6)Devote the time needed to make this effort successful
• 7)Grow your list of followers and email subscribers
• 8)Make sure your feeds are coherent
• 9)Develop metrics analysis for your campaigns and visibility
• 10)Engage with other Instagrammers to grow your account
• 11)"Like" AND "comment" on other people’s posts regularly
• 12)Use hash tags properly to brand and market your studio/classes

According to Forrester Research report, Instagram has the highest interaction rate among the major 10 social networks. Instagram has 54 times more engagement per-follower than Facebook.

Here's some Insight that can help you design your images and posts to help you reach more people via Instagram. If these are used effectively by Yoga Studio marketers, significant results can be produced:

• 1)62% of Instagrammers in the U.S. are under 30
• 2)In U.S., Instagram is used by 38% of women, and 26% of men
• 3)63% of 13 to 17-year-olds use Instagram daily
• 4)According to Pew, 63% of Adult Instagram users have income $50K+
• 5)Instagrammers “like” over 4 billion posts per day
• 6)Instagrammers share 100 million posts per day
• 7)25+ million business profiles on Instagram
• 8)80% of users follow a business on Instagram
• 9)59% of users find new products/services on Instagram

4. Organic Search Optimized, Effective Website (SEO, Fast Download, Good Navigation, Mobile compatible)

As mentioned earlier, while most Internet marketing companies and agencies would stress that you spend money for paid search engine ads first and then followed by ad campaigns in social networks, I would stress that you work very hard and very intently on your website SEO and website effectiveness before you spend any money on paid advertising in search engines or paid ads in social networks. Let me explain.

Yoga studio is a local business service. Google local and Bing local listing would ideally be great for your business. But, your listing will not show up in top of the search results page unless you have lots of traffic to your website already and if you think you can utilize paid advertising with Google (or others) to get to top, you are mistaking. This would cost you a lot. And it could cost you your entire business.

So how do you get to the top of the search results page without going bankrupt spending lots of money for paid ads? You would need lots of traffic, low bounce rates on your website, and high session duration.

That's the key, which most SEO specialists know and keep hidden to themselves, unless they themselves are unaware.

Let me explain these.

Low bounce rates refer to how relevant your website is when people search for a term and land on your website. If a person leaves your website from the landing page without browsing any further that is regarded as a bounce. If they browse through to other pages then search engines assume that your content is "good" and relevant. Search engines use bounce rate to reduce or increase your search engine positioning and ranking.

Session duration refers to how long a visitor stayed on your website or web pages, since that would suggest the visitor really likes your content and hence your content is relevant and useful. If visitors leave after a few seconds, then your website will indeed be ranked lower.

So, in order to get a high organic search ranking and show up on top of the search results page and get visitors to your website you need lots of traffic and visitors, good content, low bounce rate, and high session duration. If you can achieve all that, then you don't need to waste your marketing budget on paid advertising.

But how do you attract large numbers of visitors in order to have a comparable ranking with others on the top that are already getting lots of visitors, even if you have low bounce rate and high session duration?

What if you were to spend lots and lots of money for paid advertising in search engines 'local' (or even nationwide) to bring in traffic? Would that give you a large visitor ranking compared to the businesses that are already on the top and get lots of organic traffic already?

Having worked with many Yoga Studio owners, I doubt if too many Yoga Studios could spend enough money buying paid advertising to get ranked organically at the top of the search results page and beat the ones that are already on top and already getting lots of visitors without spending any money (in most cases) to remain on the top of the search results page.

Marketing companies and agencies would argue against my claim here and they would suggest that by getting traffic and visitors through paid advertising, a small business can get high enough numbers of visitors to their websites to compete for the top position in the search results page.

Well, my answer to that is simply this: you can have clients spend lots of money for paid advertising in, say, Google Local or Bing Local, or Adwords or Express, but all that money spent does not bring you up in the ranking against most top listings or even the large aggregator websites that have huge quantity of visitors. Their huge number of visitors will, almost always, give them high ranking in organic position of the search engines.

You have seen aggregators before, but may not have recognized them. Let me explain what these websites are.

We have many clients here at Anaxstar.com who are professionals that provide their service in the city or state where they live and work (e.g. Personal Injury Attorneys, chiropractors, dentists, accountants, plastic surgeons, etc.). Most of these professionals have to compete with an aggregator (sometimes refered to as a portal) website that provide marketing services for many local professionals in their city. While these aggregator websites are targeting specific regions/cities, their website has a very large national campaign and attract lots of visitors - far more than a local professional could. For instance, how can any one Yoga Studio compete locally with Yelp's national traffic and beat them to the top of search results listing?

Therefore the aggregator is often on top of the search results page and no way for a small business professional to beat them down in the organic search results.

Even worse, for some specific search phrases that describe a particular profession, search engines have a top 3 listing but if you are not among those 3, then you're not visible easily and would appear somewhere towards the bottom of the page. And therefore, there you will remain.

Small businesses in U.S. have to compete in search engines against these aggregator sites that get top listing in Google or Bing or Yahoo, even though these sites do not actually provide any service related to the "keywords" the user is searching for in the search engines. Aggregators exist to charge fees and provide other businesses with marketing services and bring them clients, knowing that they can beat everyone to the top of the list in order to force local businesses to pay marketing fees or pay for leads.

If an attorney or dentist or chiropractor wants to compete against these aggregators in their industry for search ranking, they will end up spending (or I would call it wasting) a lot of money to end up on the top - if that was even possible.

Unfortunately, search engines do not filter these (at least not at the moment) and hence professionals (and other small businesses) have to compete with such aggregators who don't even offer the service but are just opportunists that take advantage of the poorly organized search engines.

For instance, look at Yelp. It is always on top of most search results. Why should they be on top for every category of every type of professional in U.S.? Why is that fair that they are ranked high even though they don't provide any of the services? Yelp doesn't have to appear on top of the search results when you are looking for a dentist or a plumber. Yelp does not offer any dental services nor do they fix plumbing.

So what is the solution then?

The smart solution is high SEO ranking organically and based on content and social media networking with great compelling content that attracts highly targeted visitors. It doesn't matter how large the aggregator is if you get large number of highly targeted traffic from all over the Internet. You can then beat them at their game.

How could that be done?

If your content is unique and very useful, (for instance, a video discussing yoga for pregnant women and how it could help them with stress and outlines various benefits), the traffic from the whole country will ensure that you can beat an aggregator's traffic and you don't have to spend $5,000 per month or more just to advertise in a search engine in order to be able to get the large number of traffic to compete for being listed on the top.

Your traffic and number of visitors can now match or may be even beat the aggregators, especially since your content is more relevant and specific than an aggregator.

Some aggregators have decided to beat the local businesses by offering content of their own through videos, blogs, newsletters etc. in order to pay less to search engines and still stay on top of the search results page and/or retain their advantage in the number of visitors they attract.

In my opinion, they cannot outmatch YOU. Because local businesses do not have the expenses (sales force, marketing, infrasturcture, etc.) that an aggregator has. For you to produce a video about your studio and post it to social media and bring traffic to your site, is a lot cheaper than an aggregator.

Some personal injury attorneys pay as much as $5,000 per month (some as much as $75,000/month) to aggregator websites in their industry to get customers. Almost all of the 100+ personal injury attorneys we provide services for here at Anaxstar.com, have never been able to get consistent number of leads from any aggregator source and that is why they came to us for a solution.

I am currently producing a 30 minute video about how aggregators work and how their websites harm (without producing much value) the marketing campaigns and customer reach of professionals and local businesses. I will post it here for you to look at when I am done.

So, here's my recommendations on how to achieve a search engine optimized and effective website that makes sense long-term and still meet any sensible budget for a Yoga Studio, without dumping and wasting lots of money on local/national search engine or social network paid advertising campaigns:

• 1)Make your website elegant and professional looking
• 2)Make your website fast to download (on smartphones and desktops)
• 3)Make your website mobile / smart phone compatible
• 4)Make your website navigation clear and easy to use
• 5)Make your website H1 tags and meta tags short, smart, concise and relevant
• 6)Your website search engine is now optimized (SEO) after doing 1-5 above (mostly)
• 7)For B2C businesses: make videos about your business and promote in social networks
• 8)For B2B businesses: make videos about your business and promote in LinkedIn
• 9)Promote your content (web pages, videos, blog, newsletters, etc.) daily in social networks

Now that makes sense to me. The hype of spending lots of money on paid advertising in search engines and social network advertising is, in my opinion, a waste of money unless you are an expert at it and know precisely how to get maximum out of it with a clear and smart strategy to compliment everything else you are doing. Even then, you must have a huge budget to make it worthwhile. Believe me, many so called marketing experts I have met over the years, fail misreably at it but they learn by spending their clients' money, not their own.

5. For Yoga Studio marketing: Which platform is better, Instagram or Facebook?

In a few words: Instagram is great for images used for branding and engagement and Facebook is better for video marketing (especially smartphones users), while Instagram offers a much higher engagement per-follower, Facebook allows yoga videos to get a huge number of views.

In my opinion, if you can do it and have the time, they are both needed for a comprehensive and smart social media marketing plan. If you have to choose one or the other, then if you can produce lots of videos, I would stick with Facebook, if you have good images and can't readily produce videos, with great content, then stay with Instagram which is great for local-based small business marketing, e.g. Yoga Studios.

But do not ignore the fact that both Instagram and Facebook are needed as part of a smart and cost-effective social media marketing plan for your yoga business - to connect with your community, online. Eventually you will need to use both to help maximize your customer reach. If you are not using both, you are missing out.

More insight that may help your social media marketing decisions:

• 1)Instagram has about 150 million active members in U.S.
• 2)Facebook has about 200 million active members in U.S.
• 3)Instagram has 1 million advertisers (majority in Europe)
• 4)Facebook better for visibility, while Instagram better at engagement
• 5)Instagram offers 55% more engagement per follower than Facebook
• 6)Facebook better at reaching: 30-50 year olds, Instagram: 20-40 year old
• 7)Instagram highly engaged users for niche products and services
• 8)Facebook better for distributing information, Instagram better for images/branding

6. Offer well constructed class routines and sequences to bring back students again and again

Yoga class routines are very important to not only retain your yoga students and have them come back and again and again, but it is also important for achieving a very positive word-of-mouth to help you grow your business.

While most routines are contemporary (a linear approach) that is one posture follows another in a logical step-by-step direction, moving from less challenging to more challenging and back to less challenging, there can be a more creative and fun approach to keep the classes more enjoyable.

Most routines start with simple warm-ups and then intensifies to more challenging postures, moves, poses, and finally slows to cooling postures and ends with relaxation.

Bikram, Iyengar, Viniyoga, Ashtanga, Hatha, and Vinyasa and others tend to vary their routine but still stick to main sequence.

Every super successful Yoga Studio that is often packed with new and returning students, design their routine not around a linear sequence but more towards what they want to achieve, be it energizing, or relaxing, or balancing, or medication, with hip and groin openers, or for headaches, menstruation, depression, backbends, or others.

Obviously a Yoga Studio has an instructor and he/she will design the routine. Just make it fun, flexible, exciting, with a focus on different aspects of posture and get feedback on what people want. This could be a great way to design a sequence around particular needs.

Of course most Yoga Studios offer various levels of classes, e.g. beginners, intermediate, and advance.

To keep students keep coming you have to make it interesting and offer many different variations and types if you can. Popular classes are: Beginner Yoga, Viniyoga, Body Heat Beginner, Body Heat Intermediate, All Power Level Vinyasa, Hot Power, Yoga Sculpt, Ashtanga Yoga, Baptiste, CandleLight, Bikram, Birkram Hot, Yin Flow, Yoga Beats, BH Restorative, Balance Yoga, and may be even other fitness classes to compliment Yoga classes, such as Hot Pilates, Pilates Extreme, Hot Body Sculpt, Barefoot Bootcamp, Booty Barre, Cardio Barre, Body Heat Ryde, among others.

7. Google Adwords/Express Is Too Expensive And Does Not Work Cost-Effectively, In Most Cases

This is also true for Microsoft Bing Ads, Yahoo Ads, and Facebook (lately).

Now I have suggested repeatedly above that these marketing channels don't work all that well for small businesses. Let me explain when and where they do work and what you may be able to do to produce real worthwhile results.

In the cases where a pay per click (PPC) is very low cost, say about 50 cents or so, depending on what search terms you are targeting, then this becomes a possible avenue for you to spend advertising Dollars to attract customers.

And it cannot be done quickly and right away after you start your online advertising campaign.

Our company manages hundreds of client PPC campaigns. Only after a long process of campaigning and marketshare acquisition, marketshare development, and marketshare retention does advertising in these sources start to pay off. For small businesses, they often produce next to nothing at the start.

Don't assume that you are going to initiate an ad campaign in one of these search engine channels and start getting clients right away - or anytime soon.

We have done this more than 20+ years and we have a hard time putting together a campaign for a new client and get it working first time, right off the start.

It takes time, it takes a lot of patience and lots of trial and error. You have to go through many steps that allow you to reach and have access to your target audience and then market your products or services to them, in a way that is cost-effective and profitable for you.

Social Media campaigning works much more effectively and, for the time being, at much lower price than the average $1.79/click that you get from Google or $1.21/click in Bing Ads or the $1.07/click in Yahoo Ads. These search engine "wild wild west gold prospecting snake oil one-fit for all" will soon come to an end. These days, everything is becoming a search engine. Amazon, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, Ebay, Craigslist, etc.

Facebook was much better during the first year they offered advertising. But then it also joined the rest, the cost per click became exuberant, and the performance and results became illogical and unworkable for small businesses. Now it's just a hype. It joined the rest pretty quickly and is, in most cases, not a profitable campaign.

Sooner or later, they will all have to put aside fancy marketing hypes and deliver real results for small businesses that need profitable advertising for their marketing budget.

Small business advertisers are moving away and these ad channels are becoming nothing more than a tool for very large companies, like car companies and luxury products, to serve their branding strategy.

Why do some agencies keep pushing these paid advertising channels, even though the performance is such catastrophe? Because PPC management services, is their bread and butter.

If they tell you that you have do paid advertising in Google to help your website's search ranking and SEO ... that is not true either. There are much more cost-effective ways to do SEO without burning through your marketing budget and have little to nothing to show for it.

8. Offer Unique Incentives To Bring people to your studio

Every successful Yoga Studio owner I ever worked with, at some point, decided to offer very flexible and unique incentives to bring new students in and even went further and gave very creative incentives to keep students coming back again and again.

Now a days almost all yoga businesses offer incentives so how do you stand out and attract customers?

Offer unique, creative promotions and incentives that grabs the attention of potential new students as well as keeping your current students returning.

You can offer packages that have more value for your customers and can bundle a number of different classes into one low package. You can also make the packages based on different days of the week or different time slots (morning, afternoon, evening) and that way you have most of your classes filled and avoid overcrowding one class and have only a few people show up in another.

You can also offer “Bring a Friend” days or even “Friend comes Free” days where a student can bring one friend per week for free and that way you now have more people coming to check out your business and the classes.

If you have not, you certainly should pick up the phone and call the local businesses that have 50 or more employees and offer them a group discount for their company, may be their sales team would like to have a Yoga day for fun, entertainment, team building, and relaxation. Companies love "lunchtime" Yoga classes at a local Yoga Studio.

There are also many other types of organizations or interest groups that you can approach and offer them a discounted group rate, such as local college students, elderly meetups, expecting moms, new moms, special needs children, and others.

Above, I suggested that you can pick up the phone and call a few of these but don’t forget you can reach these groups online, or through their social media pages. For Yoga Studios this is more doable since yoga is fun and social and you can reach so many in such a short time campaigning.

In addition to unique incentives, you can also offer unique value.

You can offer very unique services to compliment your yoga classes such as nutritional classes, Tai Chi classes, couple classes, teenagers group classes, special needs children, among others. In addition to offering unique incentives, make sure you also offer unique value classes that your competitors don't offer.

9. Cross Promotion

Cross promotion is a marketing technique that most Yoga Studios tend to overlook. It is a dynamic approach that makes online marketing more efficient and productive in building your brand without costing too much. It is indeed a smart approach to have cross-promotion in your marketing plan, with suitable partners.

You can attract many more customers with less effort through the right online cross-promotional marketing campaigns than many other methods.

Cross-promotion has an incredible potential for a major payoff for partners where they could successfully reach and sell to each other’s customers based on their partner’s credibility and existing relationship with their customer base.

Word-of-mouth is a powerful and very effective marketing approach. This is where cross-promotion can offer so much value.

Also, the partners involved can share the costs and hence make the joint campaign(s) much more cost-effective.

Yoga Studios can join forces with credible social media influencers as well as with other similar non-competing businesses (e.g. spas, hair salons, fitness centers, organic food stores, etc.) and together you can reach your market and attract many more customers, and often, more efficiently and with little effort.

Social Influencers are a big thing these days in Social Networks. They are the new ‘portals’. They can bring you many customers and all they have to do is mention your product and/or your business. Many of them would happily do that, especially locally, for little or even no compensation. Most will do so with the right offer of a credible incentive.

Social media networks are a perfect platform for cross-promotion because they offer many different ways whereby you can do cross-promotion with other similar non-competing businesses and provide a much discounted "bundled" offer in jointly promoted contests, events, guides, e-books, videos, and even live appearances.

♥ Do some research to find reputable companies and businesses that you want to associate your name and your business with

♥ Reach out to non-competing businesses or even non-direct competitors and propose a plan to see if they are interested in cross-promotion events and activities on Social Media or through each other’s websites or even through an App

♥ Craft your social media posts with your partners (influencers, non-competing local businesses, national businesses that have a foothold locally, niche markets, even associations, churches, and non-profit organizations) and reach an agreement on a cross-promotional arrangement to offer incentives to each other’s customer base

♥ Your Yoga Studio’s Facebook page (using such tools as ShortStack and PageModo) is great to use to include social tabs and share content with your partners

♥ You can devise a plan to share social media contests and events and/or special discounts and bundles through a joint newsletter with your partner to your customer base

♥ Share blog posts, or do ads in blog articles and embed social media posts (timeline scripts) on the sidebar of partners’ websites

♥ Add direct link for your partners inside your content of your web pages or blog articles

♥ Comment on each others’ Tweets, Pins, and Instagram and re-post and ‘share’ and ‘like’ images and videos

♥ Pin joint promotional messages in a customized board, and share the board among more and more partners and you can also create a group board and let partners promote products and services directly to all respective followers

♥ You can run social media contests with incentives and prizes that are provided by your partners, and they can run a contest that the prize is contributed to your services, for instance, a free Spa treatment in one and a free Yoga class in the other

Cross-promotion, done correctly and with the appropriate partners that have good reputation and credibility, is one of the best marketing techniques available to Yoga Studios and it will allow you to reach new customers and connect with established communities, online or locally.

Even better, it would be more effective if you integrate your online social media and local community campaigns (incentive-based events) into a cross-promotion with your partners and therefore advertise your yoga classes in front of new potential users without spending a lot of money.

10. Build your email list of customers and stay in touch with regular monthly newsletter

If you build an email list of your students that attend your classes and actively ask online visitors and individuals you meet in your social media interaction to join your email list or newsletter list, then before too long you have a very powerful and very cost-effective marketing tool.

If you manage to build such an email list for your business, then and only then, email marketing is the most high-impact, low-cost marketing method that can deliver your brand narrative and marketing message to both current students/customers and prospects.

Nothing else matches this. Really. Nothing.

This is the single most effective marketing method if you are looking for a low-cost marketing approach.

If you raise millions of Dollars from a venture capital firm, and want to dump $15 million into your marketing, then surely the high budget marketing would produce better results. But absent of such large marketing injection, email marketing is unmatched in its performance and ROI with a very little initial cost.

But, and there is always a “but” ... you need time, effort, and ingenuity to grow your business email list.

Here’s a few smart ways to grow your email list:

♥ Encourage everyone online, on social media, and on your print material to sign up for a newsletter or join your email list

♥ Host a local event (can choose a variety of subjects, e.g. Yoga for pregnant women, Yoga for children, Yoga for elderly, Yoga for business owners, Yoga for home-based businesses, etc.), and ask people to join your newsletter and email list

♥ Reward people with special offers for signing up (e.g. sign up for our newsletter and get 2 free Yoga classes to prepare you for Valentine’s Day, or sign up for our newsletter and get your mom a free Yoga class for Mother’s Day, etc.

♥ For B2C (businesses selling products/services to customers) market, you should optimize your website as much as possible to offer sign-up and join-now on every web page on your site to avoid missing the opportunity to have someone join your newsletter

♥ If you have a formal blog or even a few articles, don’t forget to offer readers the option to join your newsletter and email list

♥ Social media is all about reaching new audiences and making new connections so make sure you offer the ability for individuals to join your newsletter or email list

♥ Most Yoga Studios have other businesses around them and if you do, you can use this to your advantage and share a spot for them in your newsletter and they can cross-promote your services in exchange

♥ Offer “email only’ specials so that individuals join your email list to get those specials (works great)

♥ Every email you send should have an “opt-in” option for the recipient

♥ In your credit card receipts (where a customer signs for payment authorization) offer your customers the ability to provide their email address

Over time, nothing is as effective for a highly profitable business than growing and maintaining an email list of customers and sending them promotions, incentives, and latest news through an email system or an email newsletter.

While this is somewhat difficult at first to start, manage, and maintain, it is well worth it in the long run. Nothing is as cost-effective as newsletters sent to client email list to remind them of new classes and provide them valuable information. They would appreciate it and welcome it. Nothing works as good as opt-in emails to welcoming recipients. Nothing.