Yoga came to the United States in the late 1800s, brought by Swami Vivekananda, and introduced at that year’s Parliament of Religions meeting in Chicago. Ever since, the popularity of yoga in the US has been rapidly on the rise in part due to intense marketing. With such demonstrable success, it’s time to take yoga’s marketing lessons and use them to take your online marketing strategy to the next level.
Practice Consistency
Yoga practice involves moving through a series of poses and those poses don’t change – you can stretch them a little further or lock a pose into place, but they are always fundamentally the same. The same should be true about your marketing practice – choose a message and keep it consistent. Without consistent messaging, your customers don’t know what you stand for.
Find Your Limits
Whenever you take a yoga class, any good teacher will tell you that you should push your poses as far as you feel comfortable, but not so hard that it hurts. The goal is to find your body’s limits, but not to go beyond them. Online marketing is also dependent on creative limit pushing.
A great marketing concept will push towards something new and exciting in order to grab customer attention, but it won’t push so hard as to be unfamiliar or hard for customers to access. Eventually those boundaries may expand, but you need to push them gently, not jump immediately off a cliff.
Keep It Simple
There are a lot of varieties of yoga, but at its core yoga focuses on patience, calm, and breath. You can engage in a complete practice without breaking a sweat or straining your body. These simple practices are great for the everyday or for the occasional calming moment. Either way, you can seek out the simple breathing patterns of yoga to your body’s benefit.
Your web presence should keep things just as simple as a yogic breathing practice. When you make shopping or customer engagement difficult, you’re less likely to hear from the people who matter most. You want your web presence to be intuitive because that’s how it will attract the most active users.
Balance Is Key
Yoga includes a lot of poses where you’re either inverted or standing on one leg and if your balance isn’t good, you’ll struggle with these. That’s not a reason to give up, though. Yoga is a practice and it takes time to learn new poses and be able to execute them correctly. You may need to develop another muscle set more or attain greater flexibility before you can master poses you struggle with.
Balance matters in digital marketing as well. You don’t want to sell yourself heavily in only one arena – focusing on your blog exclusively and ignoring social media, or trying to make all of your connections via 140 character tweets rather than digging deep in a post. Because people use these markets unevenly, reaching the greatest number of people and achieving a wide array of conversions requires spreading yourself out evenly. Keep it balanced and develop marketing areas you’ve been ignoring.
Be Patient
Marketing can feel like a very high paced world, but by holding these yogic lessons close, you can pay attention to what really matters in developing a strong marketing strategy. Push your limits, find balance, and breathe – when you know who you really are and can articulate that clearly, you’ll be on the road to marketing success.
Originally posted on February 6, 2016 @ 10:46 am