How to market your Yoga class?
During these hard times, we understand how hard is it to market yourself and earn revenue. We, a team of urban.studio, are coming forward to help by publishing this free blog to help coaches, instructors, and teachers.
Make the maximum use of the carefully crafted points below. Happy Coaching 🙂
1. Know your audience before you create your course
This step is important because it helps ensure that you are offering a course that people actually want to take. If you have an audience (from a blog, podcast, email list, social media, etc.), send them a survey to ask them what topics they are interested in learning about. Create a course based on what they want, not based on what you want to create.
Including your audience in your course creation process is also a great way to build anticipation for your course before you release it, plus you validate the demand for your course topic before you invest any resources to create it.
2. Define your brand
Whether you’re a yoga teacher competing in a crowded urban market, or an art teacher seeking creative toddlers, you can carve out a niche. How you position your classes to potential students is called your brand promise. It’s the single defining benefit that sets you apart from the others in your field.
Research some of the existing online courses related to your topic so that you have a good idea of what is included in those courses and how they are presented. The goal here is to determine how you will differentiate your course from your competition. What areas of your topic will you cover that your competition missed? What value can you add to your course that is not included in the others?
Identify your unique value proposition (aka a /differentiator/) and include it in your emails and marketing messages. Plus, when people ask “how is your course different from XYZ?”, it helps to have a good answer.
3. Make your social media profile engaging
Using your audience research, you can improve the engagement on your social media channels most frequented by your students. For instance, if you’re hosting a professional development class, you might want to double down on LinkedIn. If you host a photography workshop or a cooking class for foodies, Instagram should be your priority. What is important here is that you know on what platform (social media channel) your audience is and how to keep them engaged or hooked.
Regardless of who your target demographic is, they’re probably on Facebook. It’s a best practice to make a Facebook Event for each of your classes to maximize your chance of showing up in followers’ (and their friends’) news feeds. This can have a drastic impact on your sales, especially if you let people register for your classes right on your Facebook Event Page. Here are a few more tips to best promote your classes on social media :
- Customize the content you share on each platform. For instance, people tend to view Instagram on mobile phones, where excessive reading and scrolling is tedious. On that platform, keep your content to eye-catching photos, brief videos, and short, witty captions. LinkedIn, on the other hand, is a great forum for sharing long posts or articles.
- Keep your posts short and sweet. Facebook may let you post a 63,206-character status update, but according to the marketing gurus at HubSpot, 40 characters is actually the ideal length.
- Don’t miss the valuable marketing space of your profile page. Your Instagram bio should contain a link to a special offer or registration page — not just your homepage. Facebook and LinkedIn banner images are another valuable piece of real estate for your promotions.
4. Improve your course sales page
Write a description of your course that is very compelling and clearly articulates the benefits of taking your online course. Speak to the result your target audience wants to create, and how that will benefit them. Also, make sure you include specific keywords throughout your description to help your course rank in the search results for those keywords.
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5. Professional Engagement
Nowadays online classes are a medium for people to learn, practice, or engage with the outside world. Clients look to gain something out of the time spent by them. This particular time of the day holds great importance due to multiple reasons: they have spent the time to choose your class, they have paid you upfront for the class and this class is a part of the client’s important schedule of the day.
Along with this clients also seek professional engagement in return. Try to ease out processes like booking classes, payments, adding the class to the client’s calendar, clear communication, and regular updates about the classes.
6. Create a compelling course title based on keyword research Imagine for a moment that you are searching for some information about your topic. What search terms are you going to use to find the information you’re looking for? If you wanted to learn how to design logos in Adobe Photoshop, for example, you would likely enter the keywords “how to design logos using Photoshop”, or some similar variation of that phrase.
Use a tool such as Google’s Keyword Planner or BuzzSumo to identify the most popular keywords related to your course topic, and include those keywords in your course title. This will help to position your course as exactly what a potential student is looking for as they search for your topic online.
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7. Partner with other online instructors
Find other online instructors who serve your target audience and have courses that are complementary to your own. Consider becoming an affiliate for them (and vice versa), or bundling your course together with theirs to create a special “package deal” to offer to new students.
8 Comment in Facebook Groups
Join a few Facebook groups related to your topic. You can search for groups about your course topic from the main search bar on Facebook. For this strategy to work, focus on adding value to the groups that you join. Share helpful tips, answer questions, and participate in discussions. Most Facebook Groups prohibit self-promotion, so make sure you read the group guidelines before you share any direct links to your website, blog, or course with the group. The goal here is to build relationships with your target audience.
9. Up the game with email marketing
91% of people check their email every day, but only 26% of people who get event-related emails open them. If you want to be in that elite quarter, you have to step up your email marketing game. Perhaps you already send newsletters to your entire audience. To add to that, consider creating campaigns targeted to specific subsets of that audience. For instance, you could offer to return students a discount or first dibs on a spot in a class. You could offer brand new students a promo deal. Or you could create lists for people who have expressed interest in certain types of classes. Email marketing services like MailChimp allow you to create multiple contact lists for just this purpose.
10. Answer relevant questions on Quora
Search for discussions related to your course topic on Quora. Add value to the discussion by sharing your insights. Don’t try to hard-sell your course in your posts, but definitely include a link to your website or course in your Quora bio.
What is stopping you from running successful online classes? Schedule a call with marketing experts and ask your doubts.
