Marketing Tips for Yoga Teachers: Offline Marketing

Marketing Tips for Yoga Teachers: Offline Marketing

This set of tips is largely focused around how to get people to classes you have set up in the local community. Once you have covered the basics of what class you are going to teach and where, along with setting an appropriate price, you then need to start getting to word out about it. See our blog articles on market research and putting a value on your time for more information on these first two stages.

Marketing yoga classes via posters or flyers

Your first port of call should be at the venue you have chosen. Do they have a noticeboard for posters or even railings where you could fix a banner outside to capture the attention of people walking by? This is a really easy way of raising awareness of your class to the people who live in the local area. If the venue is a community centre then there will be plenty of people using it already for other means and your class may even appeal to them – but only if they are made aware of it.

Make sure to include all the essential details on your marketing materials:

  • Style of yoga
  • Timings and dates
  • Exact location
  • Pricing plus any introductory offers
  • Essential information, like the need to bring a mat
  • Contact details, like your website or Instagram

Build relationships with local businesses

Next, are there any relevant businesses in the local community willing to display your poster or flyers because it would be of interest to their customers? For example, a holistic café or health and wellbeing shop. If you are teaching a specific class such as yoga for runners, then you may find a local sport shop or running track that’s willing to help.

Local businesses generally like to support each other, you may like to consider ways you can also support them in return. Collaborations with relevant brand partnerships is a popular marketing tool and there’s no reason why this can’t work on a smaller scale in your community. Perhaps there is a self-employed personal trainer in the area that you could collaborate with. Your potential customers are likely to be quite similar and could make for valuable referrals for both businesses.

Offers, loyalty schemes and referrals

When you first start out, you may wish to incentivise people along to try your class. An introductory offer such as a half price first class can be a great way of doing this. There may be a bit of a hit financially to begin with but the long-term gains hopefully outweigh this as your popularity grows. When you reach the stage of comfortably filling your classes each week, you can always discontinue the offer.

Once you’ve got those customers through the door and found a few regulars, the next thing will be to incentivise them to attend as frequently as possible. Consider offering them a reward for attending a certain number of classes, for example, attend four classes in a row and get the fifth half price.

Alternatively, come up with a pricing scheme which rewards customer loyalty upfront by giving them a discount for buying in bulk. For example, a drop-in class may cost £10 but a pack of 10 classes paid for in advance costs £90, saving them £10 or the equivalent of a free class.

Once you have built up a fairly loyal customer base, consider giving them an incentive for referring their friends to attend your class too. Recommendations are one of the strongest forms of word-of-mouth marketing, especially coming from a trusted friend. Once you have built up a good relationship with your students, perhaps offer a half price class for them plus any friend they bring along. The chances are they will have plenty of friends or work colleagues with similar interests to them, who are equally into yoga!

Host a yoga themed workshop

A good way to earn a bit more money from your time and raise your profile locally is to run a workshop. Workshops will allow you to go into far more detail than a regular class, lasting for an approximate average of three hours. You could even use this as a way to collaborate with another local business and tap into their audience too.

Find a reason to run the workshop – what need is there in the community that you are fulfilling? Perhaps your city is hosting a half marathon in the next month so you could off a workshop on yoga for runners. Or if you are looking to attract some new yogis to your weekly classes, consider running a workshop around yoga basics for complete beginners. It can be a bit intimidating to turn up at your first yoga class if you’ve never done it before, and so something specific for this set of customers can be far more appealing.

1-2-1 yoga classes

Often the dream of many yoga teachers is to achieve a number of reliable and regular private clients. Not only do these allow you to charge more for your time but they enable you to give the student your undivided attention. These types of classes are often achieved after you have created some regular group classes; once students have become comfortable with your style and know you a bit better.

The best way to market these is through word-of-mouth to your existing customers, they will only know you offer 1-2-1 session if you talk about them. Using some of the introductory offers and loyalty schemes we have already covered can be a good incentive to encourage your customers to try these classes too.

 

 

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