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Yoga is a huge industry and Codedesign has extensive experience with Yoga partners. Working for Omstars (an online yoga streaming platform) and Gecko Yoga Mats (a super cool cork yoga mats ecommerce).
Online marketing is crucial for businesses today to connect with their audience. Digital marketing penetrates every industry of business, and yoga studios are no exception.
This balance that our western yoga has achieved (no pun intended) between preserving an ancient practice and keeping up with a changing, online world is what has enabled it to hold such a well-established space in recent years.
And, this space is only growing. In 2016 it was reported that 37 Million Americans practice yoga, representing a 85% increase from the 20 Million reported yogis of 2012. 
So, if you want to get more yogis in your classes, grow your school, and spread yoga to the masses, you’re going to have to strap up with a mobile first digital strategy.
Like a yoga flow, a digital marketing work flow involves tying together a series of online marketing techniques that build upon each other to create a comprehensive strategy that achieve your goals. For all intents and purposes, we will call these techniques your digital asanas.
Yoga is a
Read on to learn the six digital marketing asanas you should be practicing to grow your yoga studio:
Asana I: Local SEO
Local SEO is actually quite different than your general search engine optimization campaign, because local SEO is location specific. And ranking your website for a geo-specific business, like a yoga studio, involves much more than choosing the right keywords. To get found for searchers looking for a yoga studio in your area, you should be taking full advantages of Local SEO techniques.
The steps include:
- Create an official listing of your studio on Google My Business
- Include your Name, Address, Phone number on each page of your website
- Increase your local reviews across Google, Yelp, and local directories
- Build authentic links and citations by including your studio’s name, address and phone number across other relevant websites and local directories
Asana II: Organic Social Media
Yogis aren’t just practicing their downward dogs, but they are Tweeting, Instagramming, and Hashtagging it. Social media is the modern way that businesses connect with their audience. Don’t miss out on the conversation.
The process for building a strong organic social media strategy includes:
- Determining which social media platforms are most relevant to maintain a presence for your studio
- Defining a content inventory that communicates your message and establishes a strong brand image
- Build a social community and create a diologue with your followers by following best practices and incorporating user-generated content
- Streamline your social media content across all platforms by using automation software like Hootsuite or Buffer
- Track your posts to understand what time of content is higher performing and resonates most with your target audience
Asana III: Paid Social Media Strategy
Social media channels have evolved from simple social networks to sophisticated advertising platforms available to anyone. These platforms are easily accessible and highly cost effective. Particularly, advertising on Facebook and Instagram are a great way for extending your reach and gaining new audiences.
Crafting an effective paid social media strategy involves:
- Creating audiences that are representative of your target
- Establishing your content by either sponsoring posts or creating an advert from scratch
- Using A/B tests to determine which variables of an ad lead to a higher performance
- Tracking your ads’ reach, CTR, and CPC
Asana IV: Content Strategy
Content is the force that fuels every aspect of your inbound marketing strategy. Without content, an SEO, Social Media, or Email strategy would be incomplete. You need strong content to power your digital marketing asanas and receive the maximum benefit. Creating a healthy blog can be time consuming, but it’s always worth it.
Just like yoga, the key is consistency, hard work, and patience.
Here’s how you start:
- Deciding what to write based on your target persona’s interests and motivations
- Performing keyword research to know which terms to include in your posts to maximize your search engine optimization
- Build a content calendar for at least one month in advance
- Write your content based on blogging best practices
- Promote your content across social media channels, groups, and marketing emails
Asana V: Email Marketing
Email marketing is highly beneficial to yoga studios because it creates a direct communication pathway to your students. Emails can serve as touch points for many different purposes- either to offer a promotion, share details of an upcoming event, or just deliver a regular newsletter to keep your studio at top of mind.
The process is as follows:
- Build your email database through class sign ups, lead capture pop ups on your website, or newsletter subscriptions
- Segment your list based on your yogi’s history of engagement with your brand
- Develop a newsletter template that can be used on a weekly, biweekly, or monthly basis
- Include in your newsletter a brief preview of your content and a link to your website where the blog post can be found
- Use automation software like Mailchimp to schedule your newsletters or campaigns and track their performance
Asana VI. Analytics and Reporting
Reporting is to digital marketing as Savasana is to yoga. At the end of your flow, if you don’t take the time to reflect on your practice, you will be missing out on the majority of the benefits.
Throughout your digital marketing campaigns, you should always be tracking your analytics. Google Analytics and Facebook Insights make it easy for you to understand how many users are visiting your site or page, where they are coming from, and what kind of behaviors they are doing when they are there.
Once you understand which channels are driving traffic to your website (i.e. social, email, referral, etc.) you can measure the effect of your digital marketing efforts, and adjust your strategy accordingly.
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