We’ve put on our marketing caps for our upcoming Yoga Teacher Training. Come along for the ride and use whatever ones you want to put out feelers to see if you can have a successful training this fall.
10 Ways to Promote your Yoga Teacher Training
1. Collaborate: Work with other trainers to promote to fill the training and share the teaching responsibilities: We’ve got 3 lead trainers in our upcoming program so that means 3 people promoting and also 3 new perspectives. We have one person who wants to retake the training to recharge their practice with the range of trainers.
2. Give them a Taste of the Training: interact with people in a live event in-person or online or share concepts from the training in your reels or social media. Start the conversation. Let them know what to expect in the training. You’ll be able to answer their questions on the spot which will also give you ideas for future promotions.
3. Emphasize the Benefits: There’s a saying in advertising: Sell the sizzle, not the steak. Selling the steak is about promoting the features like saying it is a 4 oz t-bone that is cooked medium rare. Selling the sizzle is seeing the outcome of the steak, it’s mouth-watering sizzle in the pan, the huge smile of satisfaction with the first bite. A YTT is 200 hours offered on certain days of the week, but that’s not going to sell it. That’s focusing on what YOU are interested in.
Tell them what they will get from a YTT:
- lifelong friends who also love yoga * Sangat
- how doing more yoga and meditation will make them feel * Sadhana
- how confident they feel about the poses * Swedhyaya – self-study
- how they will have new opportunities to do something they love as a yoga teacher * Santosha – Contentment
Whenever a student tells you how they feel after yoga class, that’s the sizzle! Take those words and include them in your marketing.
4. Don’t Neglect Your Best Tool – Your Newsletter: I have to remind myself again and again that my email newsletter takes priority over social media. It’s tempting to spend time creating images for social media, and you can do that, but start by using those images in your newsletter. If something falls by the wayside, I don’t want it to be my email list because that is where most people click to sign up. Don’t neglect your newsletter!
5. Engage with Surveys and Interactive Posts: You’ve got to get people to step forward so create a survey, ask questions about why people love yoga on social media, what they wish they knew about yoga, what they would say to someone thinking of taking their first yoga class. Host a live info session, ask people these questions in your live classes. Get people talking so you can find out what they think and want.
6. Have You Really Told Them? If you use them, you want to post on YouTube, FB, IG, TikTok, and don’t forget your Yoga Alliance RYS profile! Keep in mind that not all your followers will see each post. You can’t post once for everyone to get the message. Repeat the message in many ways. Ramp up your posting frequency when you’ve got an event coming up. Go to your profile and look at it objectively. Become your audience and ask yourself, “Is it absolutely clear that there is a training coming up? Will people be able to find more details?” If not, make it clear.
7. Make it Easy to Share: Yes, people can share on social media, but also make it easy to share in real life. Make a PDF of a poster
8. Find the Urgency? Motivate People to Make the Commitment with early registration savings by a certain date, or a special offer for those who sign up early. If you don’t want to discount, you could give them a private consultation or gift with early registration. Find a way to create some urgency other than your start date.
On a side note: Don’t get caught in a trap of comparing your training to all the cheap trainings being offered online now. There will always be the Dollar Store and there will always be Tiffany’s. Both sell earrings. So don’t try to match the lowest price. Find the students who want to connect with you for a first-class training.
9. Know who’s Precious: When one person shows interest don’t think: Only one person showed interest :
Think: One person showed interest!
Connect with them. Write their name down and cater to them because they are the foundation of the training. Learn what you can about what they want and how they signed up so you can do more of that.
10. Save Your Work: Start a file at the beginning to put everything you need to promote your training. If you organize yourself, it will be much easier the second time around.
Promoting your yoga teacher training takes effort but can also be fun as you find out who is in your training.
A lot of people never get around to launching a training because there are so many moving parts. The Yoga Trainer Fast Track can lighten your workload with promotional material and the big piece, the training manual and delivery already organized and ready for you to teach.
Trainer Bonus
As an added bonus, anyone in the Yoga Trainer Fast Track program will get the added bonus of being able to view the replays of our 200 Hour Yoga Teacher Training.
You’ll see how the training is delivered live online to:
- help boost your confidence delivering the training,
- make it easier for you if you are an experiential learner,
- save you time,
- give you a feel for how student’s respond to the training you’ll be delivering!
Some trainers using the Yoga Trainer Fast Track start promoting their own training while they prepare to teach it. You can do that too to get your training off the ground in a timeline that works for you.
If you want to get more information about running your own Yoga Teacher Training, check out The Experienced Yoga Teachers Guide to Becoming a Trainer.