TARA BUTLER

Project: Increasing Sangha Yoga App User Engagement

My role: Research + Content Strategy

Sangha Yoga makes it easy and affordable for anyone to support their physical and mental wellbeing when and where it works for them by offering a range of live 1:1 and group yoga classes with real-time feedback.

Sangha Yoga had a broad understanding of their target audience but specifically needed a detailed understanding of customer needs, pain points, priorities, competitors, and optimal ways to increase value and usage of the app. 

Through user and market research, I found that Sangha yoga had a great opportunity to tap into the social distancing audience and attract new users. I crafted a strategy to increase traffic to their site, sign-ups + referrals, and social media engagement including recommendations for optimizing branding and developing targeted social campaigns. 


Discover

Covid-19 has had a devastating effect on in-person events and caused the closing of many physical yoga studios. Yogis have been forced to find alternative solutions to getting their workouts in. I wanted to learn what was most important to yogis as they pivot to virtual classes. I started by analyzing the market and performed competitor and sentiment analysis to get a broad view of key competitors in the industry and what messaging resonates with customers. I also analyzed existing customer data, audited the website and existing content, and created a survey that was completed by 20 participants from the following groups:

  • Young professionals in their 20s and 30s who enjoy the studio dynamic and are comfortable with technology and trying new things.
  • Busy moms who can't find time or afford to go to studios and want to be more active.
  • Seniors who don't go to studios but want to be active or are new to yoga.
  • Beginners who want to learn but don’t want to join an in-person class.
  • Studio members who have switched to taking virtual classes online.

With the insights gained from research, I put together a SWOT analysis and developed a few proto-personas to help me identify the best positioning and messaging to communicate value to customers. The main takeaways from research were:

  • More people are looking for ways to move their bodies from their own spaces during social distancing.
  • Market is oversaturated, especially with more out of work yoga and fitness instructors offering low-cost and free online classes
  • People miss the community aspect of a yoga studio and live in-person classes.

Define

I brought the personas and Sangha's value differentiators together in a value matrix and developed How Might We statements to brainstorm creative ways to communicate to the target audience.

How Might We:

  • Increase time spent on site?

Offer rich content that drives back to the site.

  • Increase sign-ups? 

    Entice with incentives throughout the site and on social media to sign-up.

  • Increase referrals?

Deliver rich in-app and social media content and build a social community.

  • Get found faster? 

Optimize website and keywords for SEO to rank on Google.

Ideate

I put together a selection of initiatives that would help Sangha Yoga reach their goals, including website optimization, social media campaigns, and pricing offers.

Optimize- Get found faster by enhancing your website design and copy.

  • Add ‘Sign-up / Request Invite’ button in multiple places on the site to continually drive customers to a call-to-action as they scroll through your website.
  • Add a sign-up for an email list to grow your audience.
  • Add links to social channels to increase social engagement.
  • Add additional sections to website for instructor introductions and class overviews to drive more signups.
  • Update website design and copy to portray a consistent branding and tone to increase adoption and retention.
  • Optimize headline and website copy for SEO to rank on Google and improve visibility.

Attract- Build a social community

  • Launch Sangha Yoga on Instagram and direct to optimized website.
  • Highlight users with Instagram and Facebook posts. Encourage users to tag Sangha Yoga in posts and stories. Share posts where users tag Sangha Yoga.
  • Highlight instructors on website and in Instagram and Facebook posts.
  • Fill Youtube channel with free content. Post one instructors class recording a week for anyone to view. Direct users to Youtube channel via social posts and marketing emails/newsletter.
  • Create social posts for special promotional offers. If in budget, boost them with Instagram and Facebook Ads.

Entice- Bring users in with introductory prices and retain them with special discounted offers.

  • A free trial for all new customers to drive signups. 
  • Special introductory offers for students, teachers, healthcare workers, and those impacted by COVID-19.
  • Refer a friend discount offer. Users refer a friend using a special link to get a free month or months of service.
  • Run Instagram giveaways. Users must follow your page, comment on the post, and tag 3 others to be entered to win a free month or months of service  .
  • Offer family night classes that kids can join along with.

Content- Curate content that resonates.

  • Testimonials for website and social campaigns
  • Instructor and student highlights
  • Weekly videos for Youtube 
  • Daily mindfulness posts for social channels (i.e. tips or quotes)
  • Re-sharing / re-posting relevant content from relevant sources (i.e. articles from Yoga Journal similar)
  • Email newsletter

Validate

To gauge how successful the strategy is once implemented I would monitor the following metrics:

  • Unique visits
  • Time on site
  • Signup rate
  • Referral rate
  • Facebook and Instagram campaign engagement
  • Email list growth rate 
  • Conversion rate for content for new visitors and existing customers

Next Steps:

If I had more time and resources in this project, I would have built prototypes of social campaigns and website designs then conducted A/B testing to determine if the messaging resonates with the target audience. 

Using Format