9 Strategies to Market Your Yoga Studio to Millennials

Millennials, also known as Gen-Y, are digitally savvy people. Being born in the era of technological reform, they are technically advanced and care a lot about their mental and physical health.

Since you’re in the health and fitness space, you can make the best out of it. But marketing to millennials can get a bit hard since it's difficult to understand their drives and wants.

Here are 9 strategies to help you market your yoga studio to millennials:

Optimise Your Website

A website represents your business on the internet and is one of the most important digital marketing channels you can use to attract your audience.

Millennials want information without much effort, so make your website optimised for millennials. Make sure your website provides all the information first hand that your customer might be looking for. For example:

• What you are, and what you do
• List  the benefits that your customers will get
• What different value you provide as compared to other yoga studios
• A link to all social media channels and blogs.

Provide Valuable Content

As stated earlier, millennials want to be informed and they don’t like content which talks otherwise. If the data or the value is not provided, there is a good chance that you might lose your clients and prospects. All you have to do to ensure that to retain your customers is provide valuable content to them. Be it via mail, social media or any other platform where you connect to your audience.

Here is what you can do:

• Create and upload yoga tutorials on YouTube and Instagram
• Write blogs providing insights or lesser known facts about yoga
• Provide valuable tips and tricks via newsletters

For example:

You can talk on concepts like freedom and focus, something which millennials live for and send newsletters to them on these topics. This will help you keep in touch with your prospects and customers.

You can even share yoga tutorials on YouTube or Patreon where people can subscribe and have access to the videos at the comfort of their home.

Organize Challenges

Social media is becoming one of the most important aspects of digital marketing. It helps you to connect with the customers, increase your brand awareness, and boost your leads and sales.

Some examples of online challenges are:

• Organize monthly challenges by posting their yoga poses on Instagram, and incentivise them by giving them a shout-out or 'Yogi of the Month' title.
• Reach out to Yoga fans or influencers on Instagram who could be interested, and ask them to come live on your page to judge the participants.
• Host 21 Day Yoga Challenge where you challenge the members to record the transformation brought in these 21 days, to encourage them.

Host Workshops

By conducting workshops you can increase the awareness for your studio as well as attract new clients. Workshops can be very beneficial, as you can host them for non-members of your studio and attract traffic.

You can invite Yoga enthusiasts on your platform for conducting the workshops in different time frames as does YogaWorks.

As millennials are digitally savvy, online workshops may work best for you. You can even invite them to host these workshops online through webinars. This will help you reach a larger audience.

Use Referrals

Let's look at some facts!

These days, 64% of marketing executives believe word of mouth is the most effective form of marketing.  A majority 90% of people read reviews before deciding whether or not to visit a business, and 72% will only push through with a purchase after reading positive reviews.

• Incentivise your customers to bring their friends along by giving them rewards such a free personal training sessions or free merchandise
• Offer their friend a big discount on a new membership
• Offer your customer a discount or reward points on every referral that becomes a member

Offer Free Consultancy

By offering a free consultation, you ensure your potential customers you are an expert and that you know what you are doing.

This way they also get to know about your services and the environment of your yoga studio. You can introduce them to your staff and offer insights that will help them join your studio.

Ask your clients basic questions such as:

• “Describe your current physical health”
• “How much time can you spare for yoga in a day?”
• “What are your expectations from yoga?”

Also, answer all the questions your potential customers may have. This will help them to decide easily since they’ll know all the facts.

Support a Cause

Apart from being conscious about their physical health, millennials, nowadays, are very much concerned about their mental health as well as others'.

Millennials are very active on social media, and are the new voice of the world. Hence, they won’t step back from supporting a good cause.

• Build a Fitness App with curated workout routines to meditation sessions, and add a fundraiser where members can donate some proceeds to a social cause
• Be updated with the recent trends and movements and contribute your best to encourage your audience
• Take active participation in social causes like Save The Amazon or BlackLivesMatter

Send Weekly Newsletters

Send weekly newsletters to your customers by building a mailing list. Email list building means getting more people subscribe to your email. It allows you to connect with your customers on a personal front.

• If you’re sending newsletters out on a continuous basis, add the social icons at the end.
• For a more direct approach in promoting your social media accounts in your newsletter, add a fan section where you showcase a photo from the community.
• Send them articles related to healthy eating and benefits of various yoga weekly, so your audience will have something to look forward to.

Be Active on Social Media

It goes without saying that you need to be active on social media as is your target audience, i.e., the millennials. On an average, millennials spend about 3 hrs each day on Social Media, and to increase your brand awareness you need to too.

Various Social Media platforms can be used to attract new clients and also to promote your studio.

• Facebook, with the highest number of users, is the best platform to market yourself. Make the best of it by building a community through Facebook Groups.
• Instagram is another super popular platform among millennials and you can use it to host challenges, workshops, giveaways and other events to gain traction.
• Pinterest is emerging as one of the best visual search engines. You can create branded pins and boards and post valuable content there. You can also use Pinterest to promote your blog and services that you provide.

Conclusion

Millennials are the curious, authentic and tech-savvy gen who want everything to be informative and fast. No beating about the bush. Make sure you provide everything your target audience wants. Use one of these or combination of these strategies to market to millennials without any hassle.

Credits - Nikita Gupta