Yoga Marketing Tip

The Piggyback Marketing Strategy Every Yoga Teacher Should Know

 

Here’s a yoga marketing tip from the Yoga Teacher Business Kit.

Imagine for a moment that yoga marketing is a game.

It’s fun.

It’s invigorating.

It’s exciting.

That’s the feeling you need when putting on your ‘yoga marketing hat’.

Each time you do a bit of marketing, you are one step closer to attracting a student to your yoga retreat, or to your yoga class.  And that’s one more life you can make a difference to.  However, without the vital step of marketing, that person won’t ever know about you and he or she will miss out on a possible life-changing experience.

Piggyback Yoga Marketing

The main idea of ‘piggyback yoga marketing’ is to partner with businesses that have customers that are ideal prospects for your yoga retreat or yoga classes.  How would you like to promote your yoga retreat or yoga class to hundreds of prospects without the pain of spending a single penny of your hard-earned moolah?

Impossible?

Nope!

Not when you use the ‘piggyback yoga marketing tactic‘.

How The Piggyback Tactic Works

This tactic is about forming a profitable partnership with a complementary, non-competing business by teaming up to form a win-win relationship.

Piggyback Yoga Marketing Example 1
Local Organic Shop

Let’s say you’re hosting a yoga retreat in the UK.  You know your prospects shop at the local organic shop once a week.  So you call up the manager and offer to handout their flyers in your yoga classes if they’ll put your flyers by their cash registers.

Piggyback Yoga Marketing Example 2
Local Hotel 

Let’s say you’re hosting a luxury yoga retreat.  You could team up with a local hotel that has a spa and offer to host your yoga retreat with them if they help “promote it”.   You could ask them to send an email to their customers.  You could ask them to hand out your yoga brochures or A5 yoga flyers to customers who visit the spa. You could ask them to put up your flyers in the spa.  You could use this genius yoga marketing tactic.

Piggyback Yoga Marketing Example 3
Football Clubs

Let’s say you’ve organised a yoga retreat for football players and called it: Bend it like Beckham Yoga Retreat (you’ll get a lot of free PR in the press with a name like that).  All you’d need to do is contact football clubs to ask if you could host your ‘Bend it like Beckham Yoga Retreat’ at their club.  Within no time you’ll come across a football club that thinks your retreat sounds perfect for their players.   You won’t have to do any marketing at all because the paying students will be the football players at the club.

Piggyback Yoga Marketing Example 4
Local Accountants

Let’s say you’ve organised a yoga retreat that focuses on reducing stress.  You could team up with an accountant and ask them to include your ‘yoga retreat brochure or flyer’ when they send their billing statements.  And maybe you could give their customers a special 5% discount?

Piggyback Yoga Marketing Example 5
Local Businesses

You could partner up with a bunch of local businesses (hair dressers, organic cafes, accountants, etc) to offer their customers a chance to enter a competition to win a spot at your yoga retreat.   Caution!  You’d need to crunch the numbers to see if giving away a spot will still keep you nicely in the profit margin (or you could give a 10% discount).

Piggyback Partnering Steps

Step 1
Identify A Business

Focus your energies on finding piggyback partners who have customers that would be interested in your yoga classes, workshops or retreats.  Think of one local business right now that you could approach.

Step 2
Brainstorm Promotional Ideas

If you read the examples above, you’ll probably already have a few ideas (e.g. yoga retreat brochure included in billing statements).

Step 3
Craft and send a FAB email

It’s time to approach the business.  Sit down and craft an email that is Friendly, Appealing and Brilliant.  It’s time to be FAB!

F for Friendly | Make sure your email isn’t too corporate and stiff.  Remember, you are a yoga teacher with blood coursing through your veins.  So, be real.  Add a bit of humour.

A for Appealing | Make sure your email is appealing to the business.  What’s in it for the business?  Why should the business be your piggyback partner?

B for Brilliant | Make sure your email is radiant by making it ‘shine above’ the other boring, dark and depressing emails the business owner/manager gets on a daily basis.   A simple way of doing this is by offering the owner/manager something for FREE.  For example, you could invite them to one of your yoga classes for free.  You could offer them a free one to one session.   It doesn’t matter if they don’t accept the offer.  They’ll be delighted that your email came bearing something of value.

Step 4
Set Up The Meeting

When you meet the business owner be fully aware that you’re offering them something of value.  Don’t go in with a begging bowl.  Instead go into the meeting with head held high and secure in the knowledge that you can help the business with your piggyback marketing idea.

Step 5
The Meeting

Before you go into the meeting, make sure you have thought through what you are asking them to do.  If you’re dealing with a large business, I recommend putting together a proposal that details the idea.  Make sure you focus on what they can expect to get out of it.

Step 6
Repeat Steps 1 to 5

It this marketing tactic works, do it again with another business…and again with another business…and again with another business…and again with another business…