Nearly 10 years ago, I cleared some space in my dorm room, rolled out a dusty mat, and clicked on a link to begin the first video of what has now become a very popular online 30-day yoga journey. In the time since, I’ve cultivated a daily yoga practice that has transcended the mat and flowed into nearly every aspect of my life, allowing me to slow down, pause, and check in with myself multiple times a day.
But that didn’t happen overnight. Much like finally landing a crow pose, I had to work hard and learn how to replace the chaotic energy around me with a calming one to better observe my thought patterns and emotions.
But anyone who has worked at a marketing agency knows just how difficult this can be. In fact, it’s the constant movement, new opportunities, and fast-paced environment that makes agency life anything but calming. Balancing clients and work makes every day new and exciting, but it can also be a lot to manage. This is where my yoga practice comes into play.
The more you progress in your yoga journey, the more you learn that it isn’t all about pretzel poses and headstands; it’s about forming and maintaining a constant mind-body connection. And if we think about B2B marketing the same way we think about yoga, we can see that connecting your mind (brand identity) with your body (deliverables) will allow you to flow with more ease.
Find Balance in Your Marketing Flow
The only way to grow your yoga practice is by tuning into your mind-body connection. Checking in and asking yourself how you feel while attempting a pose or moving through a flow is critical to maintaining safety and overall physical health while also ensuring you are reaping the full benefits of yoga.
If something feels off, you make an adjustment. If you’re in pain, you gently guide yourself out of the pose. If you know you can stretch further or hold a more advanced balance, you go for it.
This also happens in marketing. When a campaign works, we lean into it. When we’ve tried everything and it doesn’t land, we move onto something else.
For B2B marketing, think of the mind as brand identity. This includes your messaging, values, visuals, tone of voice, and the unique qualities that set your brand apart from others. Brand identity also informs your marketing strategy—who you’re targeting, which channels you should use, and identifying the best approach to achieve your goals. Deliverables make up the body—the content, campaigns, strategies, reports, and additional assets you share across your website, social media sites, and on other platforms.
When connecting to your mind in yoga, the goal isn’t necessarily to shut off your thoughts and meditate. Instead, it means recognizing when you’re aligned and identifying where you can make adjustments to achieve that connection.
In marketing, alignment happens when your content matches your brand’s voice, messaging, and values. You also see this in reports that show a favorable trajectory for your campaign goals or when your strategies show off your brand’s personality in ways that make sense, helping you stand out from the competition to reach new audiences and continue developing brand loyalty.
Establish Consistency
Even on my best days, aligning my mind and body hasn’t been easy. Yoga taught me that despite landing some poses with ease, others required a bit more work. I’m not sure when it happened, but after a few years of regular yoga practice, I was finally able to put both feet flat on the ground in my downward dog pose. This didn’t make a huge difference in my actual practice, but it was one tiny detail that showed me the value in stepping on the mat day after day and year after year.
The same can be said for marketing, where consistency is key to reaching your audience, breaking through the noise, and reaching your goals. Focus on the following three areas to see long-term results.
Content
A few months into working from home, I turned to yoga to add movement to my stagnant days. I would shut my work laptop, change clothes, and turn on my TV to start a new yoga video. This habit not only helped me create a divide between the work day and my personal time, it also became the foundation for my daily yoga routine.
In marketing, creating habits is also necessary if you want your campaigns to succeed. Take your content output, for example. This includes blogs, social posts, interviews, articles, videos, and other assets. Content is successful when it follows a regular publishing cadence across several platforms because you have a greater chance of impacting the buyer journey.
And the more meaningful the content you publish, the greater potential you have to reach customers and inspire organic interactions with your brand. By increasing the amount of information and resources available to them, your brand builds the trust, credibility, and awareness necessary to help customers make a purchase.
Skill Development
With so many changes happening across the digital marketing space, businesses must constantly educate their teams on the latest best practices. This includes monitoring changes to SEO, adding AI-powered tools to your marcomms stack, and keeping track of emerging social media trends.
These practices will not only help marketers churn out fresh content that appeals to their target audiences, it will help them adapt to bigger changes in the future. When I want to advance my yoga practice, I don’t start by trying a new or challenging pose. Instead, I look at the ways I can build off of my existing skills, finding new ways to tune in and grow. Organizations can take a similar approach by seeking courses, events, and other opportunities to support their digital marketing teams.
Data Analytics
Every yoga practice is different because each person measures their journey differently. For some, simply rolling out their mats and clearing their minds through gentle stretches and guided meditation for a few minutes a day is enough. For others, a heated studio with energetic movement is more their speed. The qualitative evaluation relies more on feelings over direct results, whereas logging a specific amount of time, burning a certain number of calories, or checking off a list of poses you’ve achieved supports a quantitative approach to the practice.
As marketing teams evaluate their campaigns, looking at both quantitative and qualitative metrics will determine the success of one campaign and develop goals for the next. Leverage AI-powered tools to build customer profiles, track the success rates of your campaigns, and deliver tailored messages to the right audiences at the right time. Track your KPIs and monitor data analytics to compare sales before, after, and during campaigns. Audit your assets, social media accounts, website, and SEO rankings to ensure you’re consistent. Request feedback from your audience to find out more about the customer journey.
Achieving stable, long-term success in marketing can take several months or even years, so it’s important to regularly reflect on your journey to see just how far you’ve come.
Take a Deep Breath
The biggest motivator behind my adoption of a daily yoga practice? Stress management. When deadlines mount and client expectations rise, I rely on basic yoga principles to help me evaluate the situation and emerge with a better mindset.
I had no idea when I first started practicing yoga that it would be a reliable source of serotonin to get me through finals, grad school applications, job interviews, and busy work schedules.
Here are a few tips I’ve transferred from the mat to my marketing playbook:
Breathe. It sounds too simple to work, but taking a few deep breaths really helps to quiet the noise happening inside your head and around the office. Tune in to ground your energy and create a fresh perspective.
Take a beat. Are you stuck on a tricky piece of copy or wondering how to liven up a newsletter? Pausing to evaluate a situation, formulate a response, or give your mind some space from a project might seem counterproductive, but it actually helps you gain clarity and deliver better results.
Make adjustments. After just one injury, you’ll know that pushing your body beyond its current limits will only hurt you in the long run. The same is true in marketing. Recognize your comfort zones and gently build from there. When something works, keep going. When it doesn’t, pivot and try a different approach.
Know your motivators. The most sustainable habits are formed when you establish meaningful connections to them. Ensure your teams understand your company’s vision, values, and purpose to ensure the right motivators are guiding them forward.
Celebrate every victory. 30 days of yoga? Check. Crow pose? Check. Increasing your search engine ranking? Check! Whether it’s achieving a small goal or successfully closing a campaign, recognize your team’s hard work every step of the way to maintain momentum and inspire creativity.
Lean into your community. Practicing yoga online might seem isolating, but it actually means I can connect with other yogis on a global scale, sharing advice, encouragement, and support at all hours of the day. Build trust with your audience and your marketing team to frequently deliver successful results, establish loyalty, and cultivate better relationships.
Just like yoga, marketing is all about growth. We grow our practice to better ourselves. We also grow our audiences, followers, and site visits to grow our brands. As we begin a new year, let’s find ways to work these grounding yoga principles into our marketing strategies.
By allowing the benefits of these practices to seep into the roots of our brand, we’ll achieve better development, consumer and business relationships, and professional growth.
