If you’re wondering how to get more yoga students to your classes or studio, you’ve come to the right place!
We’ll run through 6 top tips for how to get more students to your yoga class, boosting your numbers and improving everybody’s practice while you’re at it!
Table Of Contents:
- #1 – Set Up A Referral Scheme
- #2 – Offer A Free Trial
- #3 – Make The Most Of Your Social Media Presence
- Deliver Engaging Content
- Invest In Social Media Ads
- Host A Giveaway
- #4 – Promote Seasonal Offers
- #5 – Optimise Your Website For Search Engines
- Linking To Other Pages
- Producing High-Quality Blog Posts
- Prioritise Mobile Browsing
- Improve Your Google My Business Listing
- #6 – Embrace Email Marketing
- Before You Go!
#1 – Set Up A Referral Scheme
One of the best ways to get new students to your yoga classes is through recommendations from your existing ones – and a referral scheme is the perfect way to encourage this.
A referral scheme is where you offer your existing students a discount if they bring a friend or family member along to a class. This way, you can reward your existing loyal customers and incentivise them to promote your services for you.
The fact is that people are much more likely to try something if it’s recommended by those they know and whose opinions they trust. And, according to some studies, it can also lead to better client retention, with a higher number of students staying loyal when they join through a referral scheme.
You should also consider including an incentive for the friend or family member as part of the referral scheme. If they receive a discount on their next few classes, they will find the offer more attractive and will be even more likely to take the recommendation!
#2 – Offer A Free Trial
One of the hardest parts of attracting new yoga students is simply getting people through the door in the first place. And what better way to encourage people to take that initial step than by offering them something for free?
Free trials are a great way for people to try your classes out without feeling like they’re committing to anything. From there, you can start to build rapport and show off your teaching skills to convince them to sign up for further classes or invest in a class pass.
Warm Hearts Yoga is a great example of this approach:
As you can see, not only do they offer a free first class, but they’ve also made it explicit that the free trial is for everyone, not just beginners. This is a great way to attract seasoned yogis who might be interested in trying out a new class.
And if you’re starting an online yoga business, why not offer a free trial for your virtual classes and online training options? Take a look at The Yoga Class’s offering, for example:
As you can see, they’re offering online support from teachers as well as unlimited access for a limited time.
This way people will be able to try out as many different classes as they want and get an impression of the service you offer and how much they could get out of a paid membership.
#3 – Make The Most Of Your Social Media Presence
Social media provides a huge platform that you ought to be utilising if you want to reach as many potential students as possible. In fact, statistics show that over half of the UK’s population uses Instagram, which gives you an idea of how lucrative it can be for your marketing strategies.
There are three main ways you can attract new students using your social media accounts — let’s look at each of them in turn.
Deliver Engaging Content
If you want to get more yoga students, one of the best places to start is providing the kind of content your yoga target market wants to see.
You should aim for a balance between content that actively encourages people to sign up to class and posts that build your brand identity by ensuring your particular style is instantly recognisable.
This will help you to stick in people’s minds and increase your chances of engagement, which boosts your profile and will get you more leads for class members.
When it comes to targeting your social media content, you should think about your audience’s:
- Age
- Preferred style
- Exercise habits
- Approach to yoga
Then you can target directly to them and create content that reaches your ideal class members, encouraging them to try your classes!
Some of the top things you should consider with your social media content is:
- Boosting your discoverability by being aware of how the Instagram algorithm works. First and foremost, your social media content will make it easier for people to discover your classes which will help boost your numbers!
- Creating content that humanises your brand. Your content should also humanise your brand by introducing people to you as an instructor. This means foregrounding who you are and your approach to teaching in your posts.
- Promoting your brand as a trustworthy resource. You can promote your brand as a trustworthy resource by privileging educational and instructional content. You want to give people an idea of what they can expect from your classes as well as asserting yourself as a yogi expert.
A great example of someone who delivers varied and well-targeted social media content is Helen Downey:
She has a great mix of content that asserts her expertise and foregrounds her personality, making her classes and brand seem more approachable, encouraging engagement:
She also posts plenty of reels, which is an important factor given that the Instagram algorithm favours video content.
This is the kind of content you should be creating if you want to know how to get more students to your yoga class and boost your brand!
Invest In Social Media Ads
Social media ads allow you to increase your reach while still targeting specific demographics, which makes them a great way to attract new yoga students.
Your ads on both Facebook and Instagram can specifically target demographics based on:
- Location
- Age
- Interests such as pages they’ve liked and other topics.
- Behaviours such as including or excluding people based on their previous purchasing behaviour or intent, travel, activities or device usage.
- Demographics so that you target people based on education, employment or other lifestyle factors.
Here’s an example of one of our own Instagram ads so you know what they could look like:
Facebook ads, meanwhile, will look like this:
As you can see, advertising a particular event or a workshop can be extremely effective. That’s because the added time pressure will encourage people to sign up quicker.
Host A Giveaway
Finally, promoting a giveaway on your social media accounts is a great way to boost your following and attract new customers.
This involves offering a discount or some other prize to people who enter a competition. To enter, people will usually have to:
- Share a dedicated post
- Follow your page
- Comment on the post and tag a friend
Not only does this reward your existing customers and increase brand loyalty, it’s also free promotion from your existing followers to potential new ones.
Tirana Yoga is a great example of this:
As you can see they’re asking people to:
- Follow the Instagram account
- Tag 2 friends who would be interested in the competition too
- Comment separately with what deal you want
Obviously when you’re starting out you don’t need to offer something this big that will cost you more money than you could potentially make.
However, it’s a great idea to offer something that friends can share to give them motivation to tag other people and help get you more followers and engagement.
#4 – Promote Seasonal Offers
Another way to attract new yoga class members and reward existing ones is to offer a seasonal deal or discount.
Capitalising on seasonal offers makes it easier for new class members to try out your services as well as giving existing customers a chance to invest more and attend more of your classes.
Some examples of seasonal offers you could create include:
- ‘New year, new me’ offer to encourage people when they’re making new year’s resolutions
- Offer in time for summer solstice
- Christmas offer for a certain number of classes
Generally speaking, taking advantage of particular times of year when people are looking to make a change or give a gift to somebody is a great method for how to get more yoga students.
This way you’ll be catering to a wide range of people, and you’ll also be aware of when people are more likely to sign up for your classes or invest in a membership to your studio.
#5 – Optimise Your Website For Search Engines
Search engine optimisation (SEO) should be at the heart of your strategy for attracting new yoga students.
SEO helps ensure your website ranks as high as possible for relevant search terms. As a result, you’ll boost your visibility and attract a steady stream of traffic to your site.
There are range of different strategies you can use to boost your website’s search rankings, including:
- Linking to other pages on your site
- Including relevant, well-written blog posts that prioritise keywords
- Focusing on how your site will look on mobile
- Improving your Google My Business listing
We will very briefly run through these to give you an idea of how you can optimise your site and learn how to get more yoga students using SEO.
Linking To Other Pages
This means exactly what you’d think – on each page you should make sure that you include relevant and helpful links to other parts of your site. This helps users to find the pages they need and direct them to other places so that they can book your classes and find out more about your services.
This also helps Google navigate your site using an algorithm called PageRank. This determines the importance of particular pages. If you’ve got several internal links that all lead to your class schedule and your booking page, this will tell Google it’s an important page and make it more likely to rank highly.
Producing High-Quality Blog Posts
Dedicated blog posts are a great way to ensure your site ranks highly for a range of relevant search terms. To ensure your blog posts will be featured near the top of the search results, you’ll need to:
- Use relevant keywords. This is where you build blog topics around what’s most commonly searched for on Google by your target demographic. To find out which keywords to focus on, you can use tools like Google Trends or Ahrefs’s Keyword Generator.
- Display expertise in a particular niche subject. Showcasing your industry expertise and being a reliable source of information by publishing verifiable information is a great way to ensure you’ll rank well on Google.
- Consistency and regularity of content. If you’re constantly producing high quality blog articles, you will be able to target a wide range of keywords and build the overall trustworthiness and authority of your site.
This can seem intimidating at first, but you don’t need to write lots of blog posts to draw people to your site. In fact, according to SEO expert Brian Dean at Backlinko, it’s far more important you have fresh and up to date information than a high volume of content.
Yoga Hub, the top ranking studio in Liverpool, is a great example of how to get more yoga students using a blog:
Being able to answer potential class members’ questions increases the reliability of your brand as well as keeping people on your site for longer.
You can find out more about how to get yoga clients using a blog with the tips in our article ‘How to Get More Clients from a Fitness Blog: Step-by-Step’.
Prioritise Mobile Browsing
Considering most people will be looking for things on their phone browser or from links via social media apps, it’s important to focus on how your site looks on mobile. After all, this is how your site will most often be viewed.
In fact, according to research.com, over half of the traffic to websites comes from mobile devices!
However, because the screen is smaller on a phone, the formatting will be different depending on things like:
- Paragraph size
- How regularly images break up the text
- The size of your pop ups
All of these things should be things you test out and stay on top of with your website and make sure it’s easy to navigate on mobile devices.
Thankfully, there should be settings on whatever platform you use for your site to view what it will look like on mobile before you make any changes. You can also use Google’s ‘mobile friendly test’ to see how easy it is to navigate on mobile and ensure you regularly make any changes needed.
Improve Your Google My Business Listing
Perfecting your Google My Business listing will help improve your ranking on Google, putting you in what’s called the ‘Local 3 Pack’.
This is the first three business results that show up at the top of the search engine results page when people Google a business near them:
This circled area is the local 3 pack for “yoga class Liverpool”. As you can see there’s certain details that all the results offer, as well as their exact location on maps.
A fully updated and accurate Google My Business listing is great for attracting more yoga students because it will tell prospective class members:
- The name of your business
- Where to find you
- The kind of service you offer
- Your contact details
- Reviews of your classes or studio
- Your website or social media pages
And just like with your blog posts, you can use keywords in your Google My Business profile to increase your discoverability on Google.
The Yoga Space in Leeds is a great example of a studio optimising its description to get into the local 3 pack on Google:
#6 – Embrace Email Marketing
Last but not least, if you want to get more yoga students through digital strategies, you should also spend some time developing an email marketing campaign.
Working in tandem with other digital marketing channels, a fitness email marketing strategy is that gives you a direct line to people interested in your yoga classes. After all, if people have opted in to receive email updates and information then they’re interested in yoga and want to know more about what you offer.
Email is also an extremely popular medium among younger people. According to Hubspot 73% of millennials prefer to be contacted by businesses via email.
There’s a few different platforms you can use for email marketing, depending on your budget, including:
One of the best things you can do as part of your email marketing is decide on some yoga newsletter ideas which can include details of:
- Your class timetable
- Singling a particular class out and giving information about a style
- Details of any retreats or up and coming events you’re hosting
- Singling any particular students out for their success and development in class
All of this helps to personalise and humanise your brand so that people are much more likely to sign up for your classes and keep recommending you to their friends and family!
Before You Go!
Hopefully now you know how to get more yoga students with a mixture of creative marketing ideas and investments you should make.
And don’t forget that boosting your expertise and offering new styles is a great way to attract new students and increase attendance!
If you want to boost your knowledge and expand your services, take a look at our Level 4 Yoga Teacher Diploma or download our free course prospectus.