Getting Traffic to your Yoga Website
A few of my clients that I have worked with for their Yoga business’s online presence have found that though they have a beautiful website that does everything they want it to, and a thriving social network on Facebook, Twitter, etc, they find no one is really visiting their website, what I often call their “Home base” (I have been accused of militarizing many points in my business approach…).
Well, first recognize that you need to consider what exactly you want your website to do for you. In my own approach, I divide everything by a sort of Home base or head Quarters (HQ) and the Forward Operating Bases (FOB). The HQ consists of those points that you want the customer to go to: your website for signups or email for more direct correspondence. While the the FOB is your actual battlefield movements, the areas that you deploy to. Email is it’s own kind of special unit in htat it falls under direct marketing, you are able to reach out right to the markets pocket (cell phone), so I throw that one on it’s own, though like an espionage office in classical times, you keep them close to home.
So what follows is a simple marketing strategie geared with the small yoga studio in mind.
Head Quarters (HQ)
I generally break this down to three points: Your Business face (the website), customer relationship (a CRM software), and correspondence (email).
Website
First we decide that we want our website to be ready for class reservations, and we will assume that this site, like B0ssR00m, is hosted as a WordPress site. As such, Google indexes and looks at it as a source for news, news that needs to be updated regularly. Fortunately, there is a lot to be said about yoga, as in such a practice, there is as many paths as there are pilgrims. Thu, in order for Google to e feeding your site traffic, a few things need to be established:
- Make a daily, or weekly blog — Google picks up on, and prioritizes patterns, as such, I recommend writing something either daily, every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday; or weekly on the same day of the week. The big thing here is to write about what you think your target audience wants to read, as google is going to look at the words of your blog and that will contribute to it matching your site to your audiences searches on Google.
- Have an easy way for your audience to become a conversion (sale or registration). If you deal with memberships, then make sure it’s easy for them to sign up through your site, if you sell yoga mats, make sure they aren’t running around in circles trying to give you money. Most Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software has some way to easily do this (more on this later).
- Make sure your site is meaningful — don’t just have nice pretty pictures all over the place, and ABSOLUTELY DO NOT fall in the trap of making a website with the machine (Google, Yahoo, Big, etc) as the audience: Your website needs to look good and be useful to your audience. Making the search engines job easier, although quite important, needs to be back seat to your desired customer.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software
This is honestly one of my favorite topics in business management, Customer Relationship Management. depending on the scale that you are or expect to reach, you might not need software at all, and there are still many that prefer to pen-and-paper their student tracking. I’m going to say that in this day and age of come-and-go students, drop-ins, reporting taxes,and so on — if you are expecting to do everything by paper, you better not expect to make this your lifestyle career.
That might be a little harsh and over zealous, but theres a logic there, I swear!
Just think, if you are used to having one or two students in your class, it seems easy to keep tabs on that (and unlike martial arts, yoga doesn’t have levels and ranks, so less to track). But before long, you are finding that you have six or eight rotating students coming to class, are they all paying drop-in rates? At that point, hopefully not. After all, having dedicated students, it tends to mean a lot if you can give them a discount from time to time, but you need that guarantee that you are covering overhead, and that’s where a membership comes in. Now tracking by pen-and-paper is going to get difficult. And what if you need contact information (phone number, email, etc), well, now a system would come in very handy!
So you sign up to a popular CRM on the internet, but now you need to input the customer information for so many students from the last year or two! there’s a new headache, why didn’t you start this earlier? It didn’t seem so important back than, but in business foresight is rewarded!
And that’s a success story. Understandably, you might be content doing your yoga on the side and might well have a great day job that sustains things. However, I’m not that person, so I’ve been there, and you may or may not be that person, if you are, don’t worry about it, keep doing what your doing, but if you aren’t then I encourage considering this as early as possible. There’s three particular CRM platforms that I like and recommend: ZenPlanner, MindBody, and RhinoFit. Of these the first two are the most powerful, and RhinoFit is the cheapest.
This is where you keep all your customer information, and as such, you can track your finances for review and tax purposes through each of these platforms!
First of all, I would like to say, don’t be afraid to use a popular free email service, I’ve seen a lot of businesses suffer when they are in a rut and need to cancel their web hosting service, losing all their business emails jsut like that. I personally recommend using Gmail as this also gives you access to YouTube and Google Drive (good for backing up things like receipts and other important information).
It is also through email that you are most likely (besides social media) to be connecting with customers (prospective or current). It is through this that you will be able to reach out to every one of your students, customers, and clients through things like newsletters and email updates. Though this cannot be stressed enough, All I can really say is that MailChimp is the top of the line for this kind of marketing, and I recommend making proper use of them, and keep on top of their blog as well!
Forward Operating Bases (FOB)
Next is whats usually made up of Social media in various forms. The simple take home here is make sure that you have pages and blogs on your main site that these things point to. If you have a sale, make a post on your website, and share the crap out of it on all your plat forms (Share it to Facebook, post relevant pics to Instagram, and short video updates in YouTube) and make sure each has a link that points right back to your website. A big reason for this is that the more people that click on things that point to your website, the higher your business is going to rank on Google, Yahoo, etc. For the purpose of this article, I have selected three particular media platforms that are undeniably relevant to this particular strategy: Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.
This is pretty obvious, but what is apparently not so obvious is that you should not use your personal Facebook profile for your business, and I don’t mean that you need to make a second Facebook account and name the second account after your business (see image). Instead, you need to make a local business page.
This is where you will be posting your blog posts and website pages to, and often times interacting with your community in particular.
A whole article could be written on how to make this page beautiful and functional, but basically make sure that the images you use look good and you keep things professional yet friendly and fun.
It is also a good idea to be sharing other peoples and pages Facebook posts here as well, cross-sharing like this can help to draw attention as well as build community.
Primarily, Facebook is for posting updates and directing people to your site.
Instagram is a bit of its own creature: the image filters it provides can make practically any photo look professional (the rest is in your snap-shot technique — possibly another article to be written), however it can only be updated from a mobile device, so this is one of the unusual times when I recommend bringing your cell phone into class, or have an assistant take pictures for you (of course make sure to get students permission and/or have a release form worked into your waivers and registration papers).
A photo on Instagram only has about a 48 hour life span, that’s not to say that it dies or expires, but that the way Instagram is built has much of the content in chronological order, so this is something that I recommend posting to daily, preferably around the same time, though that’s not so important.
More recently, Instagram (who is owned by Facebook) allows you to register as a business account and share these photos directly to your Facebook page. That is in fact pretty spiffy because it means that this is one less thing that you need to manually handle.
So for Instagram, I recommend getting photos of classes, events, meetings, products (for those that carry retail products), and so on.
YouTube
YouTube is definitely not something to forget! it has a myriad of uses from being able to hold conferences (through Google Hangouts, which is now integrated), host live streams, create daily video news and class updates, or even host your yoga classes right there on line, and all for free! On top of all that, if you get popular (1000+ subscribers) your views and interactions on there can be monetized; passive income anybody?
One of the things that I’ve been a part of with this was where a particular guru used to have students, who paid to attend evening classes, get access to live streamed morning meditation that were exclusive to those students. The guru had those particular students on an exclusive list in MailChimp, so when he woke up a 4am (yep, I fondly recall), he would start the live stream and use MailChimp to send those exclusive students the link to sit in on the live stream! It was a sweet bonus for existing students, who would tell their friends about this, and this became a way for new students to be referred to the guru’s classes (he also had a student referral program for further incentive)!
So that’s one opportunity with YouTube. I personally use it to make weekly or bi-weekly video updates for my students, covering anything from our recent relocation of our studio, to a 25% off merchandise discount that had ended last Friday. If I have nothing for news, I’ll go over a recap of the last class, or describe the lesson plan for the upcoming class. The opportunities are endless, and of course this gets shared to Facebook and distributed through MailChimp. On a final note for YouTube, unless it’s a full lecture (which is very desired by your more intense students), update videos should be no longer than two minutes, and should always end with a Call to Action (CTA).
Conclusion?
Well, bad news there — there is no conclusion!
Marketing theories keeps changing, the tools to do so keep changing, and the customers keep changing — the only constant is change. As such, I will always recommend following certain blogs and news outlets relevant to your industry. I’ve shared them before, but for martial arts and yoga instructors, teachers, or whatever your title may be, I recommend following the writings found on ZenPlanner, MindBody, and other related outlets to get current trends and marketing strategies brought right to your email.
I could ramble on more, but this is likely enough for now.
If you are looking for a consultant, web developer, or marketing for your product, please don’t hesitate to contact me HERE!
