We were lucky to catch up with Laura Early recently and have shared our conversation below.

Laura , looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. What do you think it takes to be successful?

Hard work, consistency and clear direction.

The biggest of the three being clear direction. Without a clear direction you will never become successful. It doesn’t necessarily need to be crystal clear, however, you need to have a big picture project in mind or goal to work toward in order to get there.

A lot of people attribute success to luck, and that is just not the case. Things tend to fall in to place and maybe on the outside it looks like luck, but on the inside we know it is because of countless hours of dedication and drive to reach the outcome that you desire.

At the age of 43 I have owned and operated 4 businesses, 2 of which are still fully operating. My background is in Marketing & PR and am currently operating a full scale agency that focuses on brand strategy, social media marketing and event production. Back in the very early days of starting my first marketing agency I had a business partner that did not believe in the full potential of what we could do and how we could achieve it, now I look back and I realize I am ready to embark on the 9th year of a full scale fitness event that was one of its kind when it was created 11 years ago. The event focuses on boutique fitness and brining together the community to move and share their energy with one another. (I could provide more full details on this – not sure what the following questions will be and if this will be answered by those)

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

As I mentioned my background is in marketing and PR. I got my first stab at it when I was at the young age of 27 and become the owner of a direct mail publication. At this time it was a coupon magazine that printed 400,000 copies 4x a year! HA – those days are far gone with the increases in paper costs and postage. In order to pivot my partner at the time and I decided to move the magazine from the suburbs of Pittsburgh and create a lifestyle publication within the city limits of Pittsburgh. The publication was successful and after 5 years of working together I needed more and was ready for something different. Next up, my first full scale marketing agency. It was an easy lift because of all of the relationships that I had built while doing sales and managing publications and clients for the previous 9 years of my life. The first step was to acquire clients and of course I immediately went to my rolodex of advertisers from the magazines. That provided to be successful and now here another 9 years later several of those founding clients (who also had purchased ads in my magazines) are still current clients to date! To me that says a lot, it shows that I work hard for them, I am consistent and am always focused on the needs of their brands and how they continue to grow. It is not just about how they can grow within my marketing agency, but how they can grow as a brand so that they will need more of my services and have the funds available to do so.

My agency is still fully functioning and I work with a variety of luxury brands, national clients and local mom and pops.

Fast forward to covid – what the hell did any of us do? Well my mom and I booked a house in Nashville for the month for a change of scenery and stumbled across an infrared sauna studio. We went the entire month while we where visiting and as a joke I said, hey we should open one of these. After doing our homework and market research we came to the conclusion that this is actual a valid business model and that our market, Pittsburgh was in dead. So boom, 2022 we opened Pittsburgh’s first and only dedicated infrared sauna studio. Rather than purchase this as a franchise we did this on our own. With both my marketing background (and my mom’s – she is my partner at the studio) it was a no brainer that we could brand this opportunity and take it to market with success. Fast forward to today, we are getting ready to celebrate 2 years and we are also opening our 2nd location, WOW – its been a ride and its all due to waking up every day, working hard, being consistent and being kind.

What I am most proud of is developing long lasting relationships in Pittsburgh that have continued to prove fruitful in both my marketing agency and my infrared sauna studio. New clients come to the studio daily and new clients come on board at the agency annually and I am beyond grateful for their support.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

Social Media for the infrared sauna studio – AURA Sauna Studio – is our #1 lead source for new clientele.

How we built our social media audience was with a simple start and consistent and relevant posts. Of course we all start at zero – the playing field is level. It is how you create and curate your content that will engage new followers and create a sense of desire to be a part of the experience.

Prior to opening the studio we hired a professional photographer to photograph the space and we utilized those initial still images as our posts. Using single image posts and carousels of images in our feed. It was important and remains to be still important to post in stories every day. You do not need 20-100 stories, simply ones that are relevant and are literally telling the story of your day.

From there I started to invite in local fitness instructors for complimentary sauna sessions. Knowing that they all like to grow their audience and document their wellness journey we in returned received free content posts and story posts on their pages, further growing our audience. We continued to take this approach with local influencers, by providing them complimentary packages in return for content. This is what grew the buzz and created the FOMO that their friends had. Nearly everyone that walked in to our doors for the first 15 months was due to seeing their friend post on instagram.

From there we have continued to curate our content with the addition of a mix of professionally photographed images and video reels, to content that we produce in house.

Our rate of growth was hitting 2k by our first anniversary and we are on track to hit 3k for our 2nd year anniversary. To us it is not the number of followers we have, but the relevancy of those followers. What we have found is that although we are not HUGE in following we have faithful and loyal followers who engage with our brand, share their experiences on their pages and come back time and time again.

Another important key to a successful account is community engagement. We are sure to always like, comment and re-share posts that are relevant to our business and that support other like minded groups in our wellness community.

We’d love to hear about how you keep in touch with clients.

Social media is a great way for us to keep in touch with our current clients and potential clients – it provides us with an organic way to continue to communicate daily about the studio. We take an approach that is creative, inspiring and relevant.

In addition, we build monthly email marketing campaigns and a series of ongoing drip campaigns.

Our monthly email is always focused around what is happening at the studio – every month we work to collab with another health and wellness group or create a pop up that create excitement around using the saunas and helps to grow not only our business and brand, but another brand as well. We have done things from yoga, meditation, cold plunge, drip IV’s, shopping experiences, etc. Not only are we supporting each other, we are sharing our email lists and social media reach furthering our reach for all parties involved.

Contact Info:

• Website: aurasaunastudio.com
• Instagram: @earlymediacollective @aurasaunastudio

Image Credits
I have full rights to the use of these images. They are all from various photographers – if I have the chance to proof an article and final image selection i could include credit.