You need repeat yoga student customers.
You need to articulate the one primary benefit you want to deliver to attract yoga students – and keep them coming back. You want and need repeat customers.
Pick only one benefit (or very few benefits) and deliver that benefit exceptionally well. When picking your benefit, you need to distinguish benefits and features. Don’t pick a feature. Pick a benefit. Let me explain the difference with an example.
Features of a yoga studio: Iyengar yoga style, zen meditation, convenient location, reading room, mats provided.
Features make up your brand and deliver you benefit.
Benefits of a yoga studio, on the other hand, are what your yoga students gain?
- Stress relief
- Establishing balance in life
- Improved concentration / mental health
- Pleasurable place for improving wellbeing
- Community
- Fitness regimen
- Improved flexibility for cross-training
- Enlightenment / spiritual learning
- Improved breathing
- Rehabilitation from injury
- Improved range of movement
- Lose weight
This is not a complete list.
Your reason for owning a yoga studio will help clarify the benefit you wish to deliver to your yoga students. For example, if you love teaching yoga, that’s a role you want to perform. However, that gets you part way to determining your benefit. To go further, ask yourself: what is it about yoga that I want to teach or educate? Or, why should people learn and do yoga? Yoga’s worthy benefits to you may be different than another teacher. Maybe yoga to you is a great for establishing balance in people’s lives. Or, maybe to you yoga is a great fitness regimen. As a yoga teacher, when you determine what’s great about yoga for you, you can easily determine the benefit you want to deliver to your yoga students.
Suppose your primary reason for owning a yoga studio is you want to create a pleasurable place for improving wellbeing. Maybe you’re really into holistic health which includes doing yoga. You believe a variety of yoga styles is beneficial for wellbeing. You want to create a place where people learn about and engage in a community where wellbeing and holistic health is important. This is a very different benefit than teaching yoga for a specific benefit. A pleasurable place for wellbeing could include a reading library, massage, retail products, etc.
What if you want to run a yoga studio to make money? I suspect making money is secondary for most yoga studio owners. However, maybe you see running a yoga studio as a timely business with growing demand. In this case, you won’t choose your benefit based on any real interest you have, but instead on what benefit will bring in the most profits. Owning a yoga studio can no doubt be profitable, but like running any business, I believe that if you’re in it only for the money, you’ll have a hard time making money. Why? Because every decision you make will be centered on the bottom line. This is bad because you aren’t basing your decisions on delivering a benefit to your clients. Your clients become secondary. When this happens, you’ll start losing clients.
That said, profit is necessary to run a yoga studio and you must consider the bottom line when making decisions. However, your primary consideration when making any decision is what will deliver the benefit(s) your yoga students seek?
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