As a yoga teacher, the dig­i­tal world can be a lit­tle over­whelm­ing if you’re just get­ting start­ed. But with a lit­tle know-how, you can soon start build­ing valu­able rela­tion­ships with your com­mu­ni­ty online.

Hav­ing a lit­tle mar­ket­ing knowl­edge will help you grow your class­es, fill your work­shops, and start mak­ing long-last­ing con­nec­tions with your stu­dents. It’s about being found in the places your stu­dents are hang­ing out online and deliv­er­ing val­ue out­side of the yoga studio.

Dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing cov­ers so many areas and the key is not to try and do all things at once, but instead focus on get­ting start­ed with a few key activ­i­ties. Here are my top 10 dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing tips for yoga teach­ers to help you do just that.

1. Build a Yoga Website

This might seem like a huge job, but it doesn’t have to be. You can get start­ed with a sim­ple one page web­site that just includes your teach­ing sched­ule so that poten­tial stu­dents can find (and book!) your classes.

From there, you can go on to devel­op your web­site over time with infor­ma­tion on how you can help your stu­dents, your yoga jour­ney sto­ry and pages on your offer­ing such as cor­po­rate and pri­vate yoga and events such as retreats and workshops.

You get plus points if your web­site is easy to nav­i­gate, incor­po­rates your brand look and feel, and offers a free­bie (e.g. 30-minute flow, tips for begin­ners, free med­i­ta­tion) that your vis­i­tors will receive in exchange for their email address.

2. Cre­ate a Face­book Busi­ness Page

Lots of yoga teach­ers I know use their per­son­al Face­book page as their yoga busi­ness page. What they don’t realise is that you can only have a lim­it­ed num­ber of friends and you can’t take advan­tage of the fea­tures that are avail­able to busi­ness page owners.

Whilst it’s true that it’s becom­ing hard­er for busi­ness to gain organ­ic reach through their pages, there’s still many rea­sons to keep your page going. Not only do you gain insight on your fans, but you can also run Face­book ads through a busi­ness page, which is super help­ful if you plan to run retreats or cre­ate online prod­ucts such as yoga cours­es in the future.

3. Become (Social­ly) Visual

Sign up to Can­va (free) and start play­ing around with all of the graph­ic design tools, tem­plates, and inspi­ra­tion at your fin­ger­tips to cre­ate visu­al con­tent for your web­site, blog posts, and social media.

Can­va is great for cre­at­ing your own quote images and adding copy to your images to pro­mote your class­es. It’s super easy to use and is some­thing I use on a dai­ly basis. It’s the best way to start devel­op­ing ideas for your yoga brand­ing so don’t be afraid to exper­i­ment and let your cre­ativ­i­ty flow!

4. Cap­ture moments

Get used to snap­ping “moments” through­out the day that can be shared on social media and start build­ing a bank of images to make the process of post­ing easier.

Your post-yoga glow, morn­ing smooth­ie, home prac­tice, walk in the park, class plan­ning, pos­ture progress…whatever it might be, there’s always a sto­ry “moment” you can share. The impor­tant thing is to get into the habit of col­lect­ing con­tent and post­ing regularly.

5. Be Insightful

The beau­ty with dig­i­tal is that every­thing can be tracked, traced, and backed up with data. Start learn­ing more about your stu­dents and audi­ence by get­ting into the data.

Know­ing more about those who are engag­ing with you online will help you tar­get poten­tial stu­dents with the same char­ac­ter­is­tics. Both Face­book and Insta­gram pro­vide robust fol­low­er insights and Google Ana­lyt­ics pro­vides data on your web­site visitors.

6. Stay Connected

Make sure you con­nect every­thing up. Pro­vide links on your web­site to all of your social media accounts using the plat­form icons and share buttons.

A very sim­ple tac­tic is to cross-pro­mote and this is some­thing that most peo­ple for­get! You can post a link on your Face­book page to your Insta­gram pro­file and vice ver­sa. Give peo­ple a rea­son to fol­low you on anoth­er plat­form by run­ning a com­pe­ti­tion there only.

7. Build an Email List

Sign up for a free MailChimp account and do this today! This is the most impor­tant tool in your dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing tool­box. It’s super easy to set up a sub­scriber form on your web­site (or web­page!) to col­lect email address­es and you can even con­nect it to your Face­book page to col­lect email address­es there.

Make sure you have an irre­sistible opt-in offer (free­bie) that you can email to your new email sub­scribers in exchange for their email address…but even if you don’t have that yet, sign up to Mailchimp and set up a sub­scriber form to get started.

8. Offer (Inbox) Value

Always offer val­ue in your email newslet­ters that will sup­ple­ment your student’s yoga practice.

You could break down a dif­fer­ent asana in each newslet­ter, theme your newslet­ter to your week­ly class theme, offer some tips or a link to a guid­ed med­i­ta­tion. Get your sub­scribers excit­ed about receiv­ing your newsletter!

9. Get Blogging

If the idea of this scares you, fear not! You def­i­nite­ly learnt some­thing about yoga, phi­los­o­phy, pos­tures and anato­my dur­ing your yoga teacher train­ing that you can share in words.

Blog­ging has so many ben­e­fits from cre­at­ing con­tent for your web­site packed full of rel­e­vant key­words that search engines will pick up, to dri­ving peo­ple to your web­site from social media to read your posts. You could also sub­mit your work to oth­er yoga web­sites as a way to increase your vis­i­bil­i­ty and gain new traf­fic to your web­site. It’s a win-win.

10. Use Video Content!

You’ll have noticed that video is every­where on social media right now. Face­book in par­tic­u­lar is on a mis­sion to fill their plat­form with video. Use video instead of an image and you’ll be reward­ed with increased organ­ic reach.

If you use Face­book or Insta­gram Live, your fol­low­ers will even receive a noti­fi­ca­tion to tell them you’re cur­rent­ly live in the plat­form. Video is def­i­nite­ly the place to be right now so start exper­i­ment­ing and give it a go!

Remem­ber to try a few of these dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing tips out first and see how you get on before mov­ing on to the next.

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