Personas and Your Yoga Studio Marketing Strategy

Proper targeting is the key to a successful yoga studio marketing strategy. If you’re running ads without proper targeting, your chances of driving qualified leads to your website are very low. Also, if you’re running targeted ads but the messaging isn’t meshing with your ideal audience, it’s unlikely you’ll see the return on investment you’re looking for.

How do you ensure your marketing efforts are targeted, connect with your ideal audience and ultimately lead to new prospective students walking through your door? The first step is to develop a solid persona that help drive your entire yoga studio marketing strategy.

What’s a Persona?

Every marketing strategy should start with the creation of a persona. A persona is a written description of your studio’s ideal student or students. A persona includes demographic information such as age, gender and location, as well as other things such as income, interests, values and challenges.

Your persona should answer questions like:

• How old is your ideal student?
• Is your ideal student a man, woman or both genders?
• Where do they work?
• What do they do for fun?
• What neighborhood do they live in?
• What are their goals for doing yoga?
• What could be preventing them from joining your studio?
• How much money are they willing to spend on yoga?

Tips on Creating Your Persona

The best way to start drafting your persona is to interview your current students. Start by asking them simple questions on why they chose your studio. Remember, it’s important to be as specific as possible when asking questions, as this will help you develop a detailed persona that will drive your marketing efforts. When asking questions, you might hear responses such as cost or teachers, but push to dig deeper to discover the true driving factor.

• Cost: why is this so important?
• Quality of teaching: what specifically do you like about the teachers?
• Availability: why do the class times work for you?
• Location: how far would you be willing to drive to get here?
• Meets needs: which specific needs?

Advancing Your Targeting

Answering the questions above will help you create a strong persona, but you might be missing key information that will help you better target your ads and marketing efforts. It’s important to discover where you need to market your studio in order to actually reach your ideal student. Again, interview your current students to discover where you should focus your marketing efforts.

• Social media: what social media sites are you active on? Do you ever browse images on Instagram using certain hashtags or keywords?
• Online content: are there specific websites you tend to visit on a frequent basis?
• Search engines: have you ever used a search engine to find local businesses, such as this studio?
• Bulletin boards: do you ever catch yourself looking at fliers displayed at local coffee shops, cafes or boutiques? Which types of fliers tend to catch your attention?

You will likely have more than one persona if you offer a wide range of yoga classes. A studio that offers sculpt, beginner’s classes, hot yoga, restorative yoga and general flow classes should create different personas to reach the target students that would attend each type of class. To help you better organize your campaigns, be sure to give a unique name to each of these personas (ex: Sculpt Samantha or Hot Yoga Holly).

Once you’ve developed your unique personas, you can tailor your marketing campaigns with unique messaging to properly reach your ideal students.

Looking for additional yoga studio marketing tips? Get your copy of our 10-Step Yoga Marketing Guide. We provide easy to follow tips on how to develop a well-rounded marketing strategy for your yoga studio.