There are many benefits of social media marketing for yoga studios, spiritual entrepreneurs, and meditation teachers. Social Media Marketing can help you to increase brand awareness, boost conversions, and generate leads. But you need to know how to do it properly to ensure a good return on investment (ROI).
Every morning when I scroll through my Facebook feed, I see many social media posts from yoga studios and businesses, some local like De La Sol Yoga, some worldwide like Yoga International and Yoga Journal. There are also spiritual teachers like Teal Swan and Deepak Chopra, and meditation teachers and sites like Eckhart Tolle and Headspace. I love their content.
Content by great yoga and spiritual brands like these light up my Facebook and Instagram feeds. And they give me an impression of the personality of the companies and individuals. By showing me their content on Youtube, Instagram, and Facebook, these companies are creating a deeper relationship with me, their target audience.
Of course, I’m just one of their followers. Big companies have hundreds of thousands, if not millions of followers. And they use social media marketing intelligently.
In this guide I will show you how to use social media for yoga studios, meditation instructors, and spiritual entrepreneurs, so you too can enjoy the benefits of a good social media following. Naturally, this is just one part of your overall online marketing plan.
How To Do Social Media Marketing For Yoga, Meditation, & Spiritual Businesses
Just like you can gain huge brand awareness when you perform successful SEO for your yoga studio, social media marketing can also be a highly valuable part of your marketing strategy.
Social media marketing, or “SMM”, means creating content to promote your brand on social media sites like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Youtube, and TikTok. Successful social media marketing requires that you understand your buyer persona and psychographics so that you can create content your followers will engage with. This will help to increase brand awareness and lead generation, ultimately meaning more customers in your yoga studio or mindfulness lessons.
Here is how to do social media marketing for yoga, mindfulness, and spiritual entrepreneurs.
1: Decide which social media networks you will use
The main social media networks are:
Facebook: Primarily targeted to millennials and Generation X, Facebook has 1.79 billion daily users worldwide. This is an amazing platform for building brand awareness.
Twitter: Most yoga studios don’t consider Twitter as important as other social media platforms, and often for good reason. Twitter is good for B2B and B2C but I’ve yet to find many yoga sites that use it as successfully as they use other platforms.
Instagram: Instagram is a great social media site for yoga studios and teachers. With 1 billion monthly active users and an emphasis on images, and video, there are many benefits of marketing on Instagram for yoga companies.
LinkedIn: LinkedIn is smaller than other social media platforms on this list, with 674 million active users. It is best for B2B rather than B2C but it can be a good platform for making business relations.
Youtube: Youtube is the second biggest search engine in the world, next to Google. It is excellent for brand awareness and for cultivating your brands personality.
Pinterest: Pinterest has around 416 million monthly users. It is a good platform for generating traffic for yoga site but not so good at actually getting people into your lessons.
Email: Email is closely related to social media because both are methods for contacting your followers. Read my guide to email marketing strategies for more on this.
In my experience most yoga studios use a combination of Facebook. Instagram, and Youtube. Naturally, as well as using these platforms to build business you can also use them to increase traffic to your blog [READ: How to create a yoga WordPress blog].
2: Build Brand Awareness
In 2020 there were 3.96 billion social media users worldwide according to Backlinko. That’s approximately half the world’s population. Naturally, that means social media marketing is potentially huge for your yoga studio’s brand awareness. Of course, to build brand awareness you will need people to see your content in their social media feeds.
To build brand awareness you can either do paid post promotions such as Facebook advertising, or you can create content in the hopes that others will share it. The most commonly used method of generating brand awareness is to create posts that link to your website (for instance, on Facebook you can include links in the post, and on Instagram you can direct people to your page profile and direct them to your site from there).
Building brand awareness via social media will require a combination of humour, intelligence, and great photos. You can take pictures of one of your yoga teachers for Facebook and Instagram, and use quotes and memes about yoga to get people sharing.
3. Define Buyer Personas
The entire nature of social media for yoga studios and spiritual entrepreneurs is about having a relationship with your followers. You can’t have a relationship with someone if you don’t know who they are. That is why you need to define your buyer personas.
Hootsuite defines buyer persons as, “a detailed description of someone who represents your target audience. This is not a real customer, but a fictional person who embodies the characteristics of your best potential customers.”
When you’re defining your buyer personas you need to consider how old your followers are, what gender, what level of income, hobbies, interests, beliefs (especially for spiritual entrepreneurs), and psychographics.
In the Journal of Marketing Research, William D Wells defines psychographics as a “qualitative methodology used to describe traits of humans on psychological attributes.” This includes beliefs, attitudes, opinions, interests, and lifestyles.
Once you’ve defined your buyer persona and psychographics you will know how to create social media content that generates engagements.
4: Have a personality and be human
The number one rule for succeeding in social media marketing for yoga studios is to have a personality. Visitors go to social media platforms specifically to interact with other people. They do not want to feel like they are being sold to. Your yoga studio’s social media marketing must have personality and you must make it feel like you are having a proper human relationship with your followers. Advertising on social media should be subtle.
5: Boost conversions and generate leads for yoga lessons
One of the best ways to generate leads and boost conversions is to create content that people engage with and then lead them to your yoga studio website so that they can book an online yoga lesson with you.
Some ways to do this include:
- Create content that makes visitors intrigued enough to want to view your company’s profile page, and then direct them from there to a page of your site where you book lessons.
- Include links in your social media posts
- Do live videos, perhaps by giving free short yoga lessons, and then use the videos to advertise a full lesson.
- Use paid social media campaigns
- Use the Facebook button on your Yoga studio’s Facebook page to direct people to your booking form.
6. Competitive Analysis
Once you actually get started on the social media marketing for your yoga studio you might be surprised by how many choices there are to make. It is a very creative thing. And when you’re new, you’re almost throwing darts in the dark. That’s why it can pay dividends to conduct competitive analysis.
Take a look at successful yoga studios, meditation instructors, and spiritual entrepreneurs and see how they have done their social media marketing. What strategies and tactics have they used? How can you make use of that information?
This does not mean that you should copy your competitors. Rather, you should use competitive analysis to get a good idea of what works, and then make your posts unique by showing individuality based on your unique selling point (USP).
7. Create engaging content
Arguably the most challenging thing about social media marketing for yoga and spiritual teachers is trying to standout among the crowd. Take a look at your own social media feeds and you will see that they are swamped by all manner of other companies, many of whom will be your competitors.
When it comes to standing our online, you need to create compelling, engaging, and unique content that visitors take notice of. This content should also reflect the overall style and personality of your brand.
Video is very much the name of the game today, and one of the best ways to create engaging content for social media is to take videos of your yoga lessons, meditation sessions, and other activities. Videos tend to enjoy long viewing times, which makes them move up in Facebook’s algorithm. Plus, having eyeballs on your brand for an extended period of time naturally makes viewers think about your brand and consider using your services.
When it comes to marketing for yoga on Instagram you will certainly want to create high quality images that communicate your style and brand.
If you run a yoga blog you can also share your latest news stories and articles on social media to drive traffic to your site.
8. Schedule your posts
Another challenge of social media for yoga teachers and meditation teachers is finding the time to actually create your content. Of course, if you work with a professional like myself this will be taken care of for you. If not, you can use a social media management system to help you write your content, prepare pictures and videos, and stay consistent.
You will also want to consider how often you should post to social media sites. The number one rule is that quality is more important than quantity. If you create lots of low quality posts that don’t generate engagements the social media platform will rank your content lowly, meaning less brand awareness.
One way to create high quality social posts is to use graphic design platform such as Canva.
9. Track metrics to improve social media marketing efforts
One of the most important ways of improving social media marketing is to track your metrics and gradually improve your content.
Social media metrics are data that inform you about how your audience is interacting with your content.
The main social media metrics are:
- Engagement: number of people who engage with your posts
- Reach: Number of people your posts reach
- Followers: Number of people who have clicked the “Follow” button to follow you.
- Impressions: Number of times your posts or profile is seen.
- Video views: Number of vies for each video on Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, Youtube, and other social media platforms that allow videos.
- Tags: Who tagged you in their posts.
- Shares: How many times your post was shared
- Mentions: number of times audience members have mentioned your brand in their posts
- You should keep track of all these social media metrics and use the data to gradually improve social media marketing.
You can track this data using:
Facebook Analytics (this is currently being deprecated).
By following these tips you can be successful in your social media marketing for yoga studios, meditation teachers, and spiritual entrepreneurs.
For best results, book a professional consultation with me today.
