Four Stages in the Buying Process and Three Strategies to Help Yoga Teachers Find New Clients Online

Being able to reach new clients online is extremely enticing for yoga teachers but reaching out successfully is easier said than done.

Despite the fact that you’ll be gaining access to over 300 million yoga practitioners and students around the world when you teach yoga, be it online or in-person, you’ll be facing some stiff competition from other teachers, studios and corporations.

You’ll need to cut through the noise and stand out from the competition, without being spammy or scammy.

What Are the Four Stages in the Buying Process for a Yoga Offering?

When new clients are looking for you online, they pass through four stages:

We recommend following the AIDA model, an acronym - it stands for attention, interest, desire and action. It is a model used in marketing that describes the steps a customer goes through in the process of purchasing a product. The AIDA model has been in use since the late 19th century.

AWARENESS

Like it or not, people are gaining most of their awareness through social media. Beyond awareness they’re getting influenced by what they see on Facebook and Instagram.

We all love word-of-mouth marketing and customers acquired through this channel. Facebook groups, Whatsapp communities, Telegram groups, and Instagram shares in stories, have a crucial role to play in spreading the word.

Hence, it is important to note that most people will discover you on either Facebook or Instagram or their community networks and then come looking for your website or landing page if they’re interested in your offerings.

INTEREST

Now, acknowledge the fact that this has taken them a lot of time and effort! It's time to show some respect for their time. Your prospective clients have spent countless minutes scrolling through an endless feed on their phone, visiting your profile page to see the history of your work and activity, and finally made up their mind to click the link in your bio to visit your site or landing page.

Don’t bother them any further by providing 5000 words of an About page, or My Services pages. They’re here because they’re interested in your offerings. They’ve learnt most of the things they need to know about you from your social media presence or from the friend who referred them to you.

DESIRE

Interest reveals desire. According to Aristotle, all human actions have one or more of these seven causes: Chance, Nature, Compulsion, Habit, Reason, Passion and Desire.

So you want to leverage this moment in your prospective student’s life when his interest is maximum and has become the driving force for his desire to get access to your yoga class, workshop or course offering.

By building a seamless journey for your followers to become your students you’re making the decision-making very easy for them.

ACTION

Things actually happen when desires transform into actions. Once they’re on your site or landing page, give them an easy way to find your offerings, laid out in a non-confusing manner and fast to navigate.

With loud and clear call-to-action buttons make it easy for them to book your classes and offer easy checkouts with seamless built-in payment options.

In the end, the most effective way to do it, is to actually do it. And so, all Namaste.fit landing pages and site journeys have been designed with inspiration from the AIDA model. Building your yoga website and selling your offerings with Namaste.fit is a cakewalk! These are perfect tools to keep your marketing engine in motion and stay focused on what you should be doing - reach more people, teach more yoga.

[Expert note: The AIDA model is just one of a class of models known as hierarchy of effects models or hierarchical models, all of which imply that consumers move through a series of steps or stages when they make purchase decisions.]

Next, let’s look at

Three Tactics to Help You Find New Clients for Your Yoga

Business Online

1. Niche basics

Finding your niche means narrowing down your options. Sounds like an antithesis to what we’ve said so far? Let us assure you, it is not.

What does it mean to declare your niche? Your niche is the intersection of who you want to help, and what you do. It’s not just about naming a demographic; after all, it’s not very useful for a student to know that you teach online yoga classes to a specific age bracket.

What is useful to know, however, is how you plan to transform or help get results for that particular demographic. Declaring your niche is a long-term, ongoing process, but is well worth taking the time to explore. It is ok to begin as a generalist and stay there until you’ve figured out your niche. But the goal at the back of your mind is to keep doing what you do in quest of your niche.

2. Strategic collaborations

With strategic collaborations and partnerships, you connect with other yoga business owners and nonprofits that serve clients that are similar to yours, but provide a different or complimentary service. This can include inviting an ayurvedic nutritionist to your podcast, yourself guest appearing on a wellness-related YouTube channel, or contributing an interesting article to a health magazine.

With such affiliations, you will have the opportunity to reach a new and targeted audience which is more likely to be interested in your offerings.

You want to put together a plan based on your capacity and interest. Start slow, but make a start. One guest post a month, one podcast interview in the following month and appearing in a Youtube channel in the third month, is not a big ask, right? As you become a pro at this, you will start enjoying the process and become more capable of increasing your availability.

3. Unique client acquisition channels

All future growth hinges on one thing - customer acquisition. Acquiring new students for your upcoming yoga workshop or modality class or a new ondemand course can be incredibly challenging.

In the words of Peter Drucker, the only purpose of a business is to make and keep a customer. Sounds simple, right?

Ditch the usual methods for once and look around to find some unique untapped channels which no one is leveraging to reach their customers.

• Mailchimp alone sends a billion emails every day

• Over two million blog posts are published each day

How do you stand out in this increasingly crowded marketplace?

How about trying those traditional methods, once again? When was the last time you designed a flyer for your yoga class and dropped it door-to-door in your neighborhood? With work from home becoming overwhelming for many, ever tried writing to the HR of your local IT company to offer a corporate wellness program? So many seniors and children are confined to their homes and find it difficult to stay active. How about offering some bespoke program to senior homes and schools in your city?

We are so focused on the task on hand that it's easy to miss aberrant details. These obvious opportunities lie around us and the ideas and courage to execute them lie within us. You gotta break the pattern and just keep looking for these unique methods to acquire new clients. At Namaste.fit, we’ve built features which can support your unique client acquisition methods and help you make and keep your members.

In the end, there is one thing which both in-person and online yoga practices share is, in both cases, your clients are people who are looking for a teacher who can connect them with their purpose. You just need to make yourself findable.

At Namaste.fit, we’re excited to help you reach out and begin building connections with future students online and grow your studio membership. Allow us the opportunity to help you grow.

Namaste!