Three Ways to Grow Your Yoga Community
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Southtown Yoga San Antonio.
Three ways you can Grow your Yoga Community. (Story Viewpoint: While focusing on yoga communities this specific article could be applied to any “crowded” and “social media friendly” industry.)
How can I stand out in the yoga industry when there are dozens doing something similar?
That’s sometimes an easy conclusion to close the door for opportunities to grow. After all, we are inundated with what seems like a crowded space of people doing amazing things in the yoga world every single day.
How could I possibly do it any better or gain any traction compared to what others already do?
The easy conclusion is to just say that marketing isn’t for me; after all I am a yoga teacher or studio owner and it’s something I don’t need to partake in. I’ll just focus on letting the community create itself.
As a fellow yogi though (and also a digital content creator) I would encourage you to look deeper because not all perceptions are actual realities. I believe this is one of them.
Have you ever seen a business you love put storytelling, their customers, and goodness at the forefront of what they share with the public? Yes I’m sure you have! Everyone who grows into a large audience starts with one raving fan, then two, and so on. There are no overnight successes. Hustle and positive energy have a lot to do with it but so does employing strategic tactics that work in the marketing world.
I am a former marketer by trade in addition to being a writer and co creator of an outdoor adventure community. I have supported several dozen businesses with their marketing month in and month out over many years.
Here are my three ideas that are easy and fun ways to grow your yoga community!
Don’t talk about yourself. One thing people want to see is how a business (whether you are a teacher or a studio you are a yoga biz in some way) solves problems and delivers happiness. It’s in our human nature to see what’s in it for us and how our pain points can be reduced and happiness levels can be increased. One way to do this is to simply not talk about yourself at all. Instead just interview your best and most vocal customers and let them share their stories of their experience with you. Let them tell how you solve their problems and give them more happiness. There’s a variety of ways in which you can do this but a short paragraph of text or a 30 second video interview will do the trick. Instead of making it about you let others share how their involvement with you is a positive in their yoga practice.
2. Make it an experience. We all know we should probably be spending some money on Facebook and Instagram on advertising, asking people to “join our email list”, and that we better have a really nice and engaging website and blog. But what about those intimate face to face experiences? That’s what we crave about yoga (or CrossFit, running clubs, Toastmasters, Book Clubs and any passionate subculture of people) and makes us coming back again and again to a group class on the mat. It’s the human interaction and the community.
I absolutely love creating an experience (from a breath workshop to a river clean-up to a group hike you name it) and then sharing it with those that I believe would be interested in attending the experience.
As someone in the yoga world and a yoga experience curator I believe creating yoga experiences (think a two hour collab class with another teacher at a park, a reiki, meditation, and power flow class followed by tea and coffee, etc.) are great ways to stand out and truly tap into the passion and wants of the industry.
We crave and love experiences. By sharing and creating experiences you will get to have a fun and authentic way to tap into your own creative powers. Plus you get to collaborate with others and share something magical with the yoga world.
3. Create different content. I have been in the yoga world for well over a decade now and I work with both studios, brands, and individuals in the space. It was probably my favorite industry to get to be a part of in my marketing business. One thing I have noticed is there’s a lot of people doing a lot of the same things. YouTube tutorial videos and handstands on Instagram are immensely popular.
But do you know what else is really popular in the content marketing world right now?
Podcasts are huge. Pinterest is growing and growing. Hello TikTok and YouTube Shorts. The demographic of older yogis aligns exactly with Facebook. There’s a great book called The Blue Ocean Strategy and it basically says to stop swimming in the red ocean that is filled with blood because everyone is competing. Go swim in the gorgeous and pristine blue ocean by doing something different in your industry. Go against the grain and test something out. When yoga is so visual why and how could doing an audio podcast make sense? That’s for a different article but a wonderful mentor of mine has always said to me “Be Curious and Never Assume.” Opt to create and test out a different theme and vision of content and see what can happen.
Why curate and market your yoga biz? Or another passionate subculture biz?
Well for one marketing to nurture a community is how you grow any business. But marketing doesn’t have to make you go viral for it to be successful. Instead listen to my mentor and never assume what something is, even something like marketing. Marketing can be passionate, purposeful, authentic, loving, kind, and engaging. It’s all how you choose to do it.
Three easy and fun ways you can try to market your yoga biz right now are by letting others share stories of how you solve problems and deliver happiness, attempt to create more face to face experiences in your yoga biz, and finally by swimming to a blue ocean and attempting to create different content than everyone else is currently doing in the yoga world.
I know there’s a lot of competition in the yoga world. But there’s a lot of ways in which you can differentiate yourself and market your yoga biz in a fun way and grow it to help more people get the transformative power of yoga in their lives. I think that’s worth a shot!
Related Posts HERE on our Resources Page under “Yoga/HIIT/Meditation.”
To Your Health,
Mike