14 Ways to Improve Yoga Movement’s Social Media Strategy

1. Look Into Their Current Social Media Use

Yoga Movement is currently on two main social media platforms – Facebook and Instagram. So far they’ve amassed a pretty impressive following on these platforms! In addition to this, they have a website of their own that’s worth checking out 🙂

www.yogamovement.com

Students can use the ‘Book A Mat’ function on the website to secure spaces in yoga classes, which is pretty convenient. Their content ranges from updates on their studio class to interviews with guest instructors to general lifestyle tips, so there’s something for everyone even if you aren’t a student with Yoga Movement.

Facebook

Here’s what their Facebook page looks like!

As of 11 November, they have about 35,195 total page likes (which is a lot!) compared to competitors Pure Yoga (7,591 page likes), Yoga Inc. (4,473 page likes) and Real Yoga (18,623 page likes) and they update at least once a week – they’re currently averaging 2.5 posts a week.

However, Yoga Movement barely replies to comments left on their posts by clients so they’re not faring so well with customer engagement over Facebook L Out of 71,560 interactions, they’ve only racked up a total of 12 shares and 50 comments.

Instagram

Their Instagram page is equally pretty!

As of 11 November Yoga Movement has amassed 9,031 followers! That’s a lot compared to Yoga Inc. (2,034 followers) and Real Yoga (1,063 followers) but they’re falling behind Pure Yoga (11,300+ followers).

Yoga Movement seems to update their Instagram slightly more frequently than their Facebook, averaging 3.75 posts a week. Funnily enough, their customer engagement on Instagram is much better – about 2,327 likes and 77 comments accumulated over the last 15 posts, including comments made by Yoga Movement in response to their clients’ comments.

Maybe they just prefer Instagram more? (Same, Yoga Movement. Same.)

2. Evaluate What They Can Do

Here’s a brief summary of what they did well and what they didn’t do so well.

What They Did Well	What They Didn’t Do So Well
Congruence Across Platforms ·      Content being pushed out through all their online platforms is synchronized and essentially the same. ·      There is consistency and credibility in their online presence.	Gaps in Current Strategy ·      Most of their content is text-heavy articles, which could prove to be boring. ·      They aren’t selling their yoga merchandise on any platforms, only at the studio itself. ·      There is no online presence at corporate networking platforms either.
Relevance of Content ·      Yoga Movement is currently promoting their mantra of the ‘yoga lifestyle’ and the content they push reflects this. ·      There is a wide variety of content you can find on their social media, like interviews to updates to lifestyle tips.	Engagement with Customers ·      Their customer engagement on Facebook is just plain dismal, as shown through numbers earlier.
Appeal of Content ·      Visual content appeals largely to the female population, which is incidentally Yoga Movement’s primary target audience.	Quality of Content ·      Yoga Movement pushes out content at least once a week, no matter what. ·      Over time, if they run low on content, forcibly pushing out low-quality posts anyway could harm their online presence.

3. Check Out Their Competitors

Yoga Industry

You could throw a stone in any direction in Singapore and I’m fairly sure it will hit a yoga studio. That’s how saturated the yoga industry in Singapore is. Just in this project alone, we’ve easily identified three.

One crucial thing to note is that Yoga Movement’s competitors are scattered all over Singapore while Yoga Movement’s studios are mainly centered around the Central Business District. They are essentially at a geographical disadvantage to their competitors who have studios in heartland areas.

Emerging Fitness Trends

We all know Singapore’s fitness landscape is super creative and fast-moving. There are a lot of new fitness trends popping up and Singaporeans love novelty things, don’t they? Right now, Yoga Movement is facing threats from new fitness trends like:

Spin-Cycling

It’s basically indoor cycling, but with club lights and music.

(Truth be told, when we first heard of this term “spin-cycle”, we all thought it was a laundry setting on a washing machine…)

“Last week I went to spin-cycle, so this week I’m going to tumble-dry.”

SaberFit

 

It’s a high-intensity fitness workout with LIGHTSABERS. Probably Kylo Ren’s favourite exercise.

Clubbercise

Like a night out at Zouk, but without the alcohol, heels and hangover.

Turn down for huat?

NOW we can get on to building a new Social Media Strategy.

4. Define Target Audience #1

• Current Studio Members
• Female
• 19-35
• Wants to be fit and healthy!

5. Look into what they REALLY want.

Insight #1

From our interviews we also uncovered that this same demographic has an inclination towards finding a familial community with whom they can work on their personal wellness. This can be leveraged to counter the issue of a shrinking consumer base by building a community around these individuals and provide them a support system for personal physical and mental wellness.

6. Establish our FIRST Objective!

Retain current consumer base by engaging our current clients in a yoga lifestyle that not only helps them to find a community, but also to work on their personal wellness!

7. Define our NEXT Target Audience

• Corporate Clients working in high stress environments
• Lack outlets to relieve stress

8. Find out what THEY want

Insight #2

We learnt that yoga classes are usually promoted by word-of-mouth through existing clients or individual private customers, leading to slow uptake of corporate yoga. This means that there is a lack of promotion of corporate yoga courses and social media can fill the void!

9. Establish Objective #2!!

By identifying the gap in social media marketing as well as the positioning of corporate yoga, we determined that our objective for this target audience would be to expand the consumer base through facilitating the building of company culture and cohesion.

10. Create our overall Message Strategy

With these in mind, we wanted to create a carefully curated message that embodies both of these objectives from the different target audiences and insights we have gathered. As such, our message is – “To create a community around YM that can find empowerment within itself to conquer life’s obstacles”.

TAGLINES

                 “Don’t just love yoga, live yoga”                 “Stronger Yogether”                                                                (Target Audience #1)                                (Target Audience #2)

Now we define how we’re going to execute this

Our execution will be broken down into 3 parts, namely a dedicated mobile application, Video through the use of Snapchat, as well as LinkedIn.

11. Execution PART ONE – Mobile Application

These application functions of content-based articles, find-a-buddy feature, and class-based forums all serve to provide and to incubate a community with practitioners as well as instructors, of which we have affirmed in our insights.

12. Execution PART TWO – Video (Snapchat)

Scheduled Snapchat takeovers by residential instructors! Snaps taken by them could include what they’re eating, drinking, how they’re exercising, what time they sleep – to show YM’s Snapchat followers on how to lead a Yoga Lifestyle! Moreover, discount codes will be showcased in the snaps, so followers who managed to screenshot the discount codes will enjoy the following discounts! More importantly, this provides a call to action and a way for YM to engage with her followers through Snapchat.

Similarly, interactive articles by YM will be on the discovery page of Snapchat through paid advertisement, and this will include news angles that will be relatable to people, pushing for another call to action to screenshot and send to their friends whom they think can relate to the articles.

13. FINAL Execution – LinkedIn

We talked about customer retention, but what about expanding the customer base? Here’s what’s going to happen: We’re targeting our second target audience through LinkedIn.

We’re going to start with sponsored ads, they look like this:

Then we’ll have display ads, for this, we’re using LinkedIn’s Lead Generation technology to check out people interested in yoga and we’ll direct our Display Ad at them!

We’ll also maintain a LinkedIn group for past and current customers to share experiences and tips that potential customers can check out. So we can keep people engaged even outside class.

14. We’ve got to keep making it better

To keep this campaign running in the long-term, we’re going to need consistent evaluation and optimization.

We’ll want to see if our app is successful, so we’ll definitely be tracking the download rate. (Duh)

Next we’ll try changing up the placement of buttons to see if that will get people interacting more. Like if placing the Forum button on top of the menu bar increases amount of forum engagement.

If people start losing interest in engaging on our app, we can then introduce an upvote feature, kind of like Reddit. We’re hoping this will motivate people to start more interesting threads.

More importantly, we’ll analyse the popularity of the content through the activity in the comments section of the articles. Future content will then follow the topics and styles of these popular posts, for example if listicles are popular we’ll go with that, if tips and tricks get a lot of activity we’ll post more on that. We’ll do the same for Snapchat, feature the popular instructors more often, the one that really gets people talking.

Overall, snapchat will be assessed in terms its number of followers and also the number of views and screenshots.

For the discover page, success will be analysed based off the number of screenshots (because that’s how people can share stuff). We’ll then optimize future content to what engages people the most.

Our LinkedIn Sponsored ads will be assessed based off the click-through rate to our landing page. Our of three types of ads we’re rolling out, we’ll cut out the least popular and focus on the ones with the most potential.

Because we want to ultimately drive sales, we’re going to examine the conversion process, from the LinkedIn ads to the landing page. We will then see where people usually dropoff during the conversion journey. If the CTR to the landing page is low, we’ll have to revise the ads, if it’s while they’re looking at the product on the landing page, we might have to consider revising the product. ):

But it’s fine! That’s in the long-run, right now, our strategy is looking pretty good 😉

Done by: Sarah Ong, Ng Wan Ning, and Neville Chia