Instead of creating yoga demand, feed existing demand. Yoga demographics resources found here.
For starters, your market to find yoga students is in your community or surrounding communities (unless you teacher train or sell products). This means you must focus your publicity within the geography where your students are located.
Obviously your entire community isn’t your market because not everyone is looking to do yoga. You need to focus your publicity efforts and resources to as much of your market as possible. If you teach to a niche group of people, then you may have an easier time getting your message to that group.
If you are looking generally for your clients, think about your prospective clients’ demographics. You can learn yoga’s demographics the following ways:
- Check Yoga Journal Releases 2008 “Yoga in America Market Study”
- If you want much more demographic data – request a media kit from yoga publications such as Yoga Journal and Yoga +, Ascent, and any other publications you can think of. Media kits sets out the publications’ subscriber demographic information in decent detail. Caution: if you even remotely suspect that you’ll advertise with a publication in the future, then obtain a media kit through a 3rd party. Why? Because once you’ve contacted a publication, you’ll have a more difficult time getting great discounts through a media buyer.
- You can buy yoga magazines and look at the advertisements – you can reasonably assume that those advertisers believe their customers do yoga. This means that the products and services advertised are purchased and used by your very market.
- If you have the resources, there are plenty of marketing research companies who could do additional research for you in the locale where you will open your studio.
- Once you know some demographic information about people who do yoga – you can determine to some degree their behavior and narrow down opportunities to reach them. For example, people who do yoga are generally health-conscious. This means some of them frequent health food stores and organic grocery stores. Knowing this, you have an outlet where you can reach your market. Perhaps you can put an ad in the retailer’s newsletter. Or you could offer free classes flyer for distribution in the store.
Another example is that according to the Yoga in America Market Study, 71.4% are college educated. If you live in a college town – then you have a physical location where you can get your message. Another way to use this information is that you know your market is fairly literate – which means you can effectively get your message to your market with the written word (i.e. content-based Web sites, blogs, etc.).
The point is you need to find out where your market is and then how you can reach them as directly and focused as possible. The more you cater your message, the better response you’ll get.
Related posts: