Yoga was invented thousands of years ago in the forests and temples of India, while digital marketing is a recent technology. How the hell could these two be related? I never thought that until that day.

It was 5 o’clock in the morning and I had literally not slept the night before. Bear with me as I give you a bit of history. She was working for a client project to develop their SEO (search engine optimization) and social media strategy. They are a sporting goods retailer and recently introduced an innovative range of shoes that they want to bring to market. They were completely B2B to date and had no B2C presence before, starting now from the drawing board. His management had set aggressive goals for his online sales, but he imposed many restrictions to avoid conflicts with his network of B2B partners. I had a really hard time convincing them on multiple fronts and we were back and forth for some time.

Our Yoga guru arrived in the room and we began the warm-up. He was half asleep, but I didn’t want to miss my Yoga class. We did the ‘Surya Namaskar’ followed by the ‘Donkeys’ of the day. I was dead tired and then my favorite Donkey came: the ‘Shavasna’. If you know Yoga, you’ll know that ‘Shavasna’ literally means Corpse Pose, in which you lie on your back with your eyes closed and breathe deeply. The body is completely released and the mind is completely relaxed. It was during ‘Shavasna’ that I suddenly started to get a great feeling as if everything was unraveling from within, as if I was receiving answers to all my questions. I’m not a saint but that was my moment of ‘nirvana’. It’s hard to describe it all in words, but I’m trying to summarize some of the key points that came to mind at the time:

1. Focus on the core: The only way to get the most out of yoga is to forget about everything around you and focus on one thing: your breathing. This is the same with Digital Marketing. The only way to get the most out of a digital marketing initiative (be it SEO, SEM, SMO, SMM, etc.) is to forget everything else first and focus on “Content”. While you are developing content, you should not be distracted by any other activity or restriction. Is “Fascinated” which is the heart and core of the entire initiative and must be relevant to the audience. The biggest mistake many of us tend to make is to do all the strategies first and then start working on the content. In such scenarios, we later realize that the content is not in line with our strategy and ask our team to modify the content instead of changing the strategy. This is the perfect recipe for failure and then we complain that nothing worked at all.

2. long term vision: Yoga never promises quick, short-term gains. Someone who wants to develop ripped abs in three months doesn’t need to attend a Yoga class. Yoga is always practiced with the vision of living a long and healthy life, in the same way that the ancient ‘yogis’ or saints of India lived for hundreds of years in strong physical and mental conditions. Many techies had overused digital marketing, belatedly, as a means of getting quick results without worrying about the long-term vision. Any Google update and those people were going crazy to get their rankings back.

3. Inner force: Yoga is all about building inner strength – a balance between mind and body. Yoga does not focus much on building or beautifying the external muscles. Their goal is very simple: keep you fit and strong from within. It may not sound strange to my marketing friends (I have a marketing background myself) that building external perception without developing internal strength doesn’t last long. I’ve seen organizations that did great at marketing but couldn’t manage their cash flows and then had disastrous results.

Four. Continuity: You do Yoga for a couple of months diligently to the extent that you can become a Yoga trainer yourself. Then due to some reasons you stop doing Yoga regularly. What happens? Over time the benefits you obtained from doing Yoga are subsidized and after a few months you are back in the same situation you were in before. This is the same with any digital marketing initiative, be it SEO, SEM, SMO, or SMM. For example, you may have done a lot with search engine optimization and placed at the top of the SERP (search engine results page). But if you leave the regular activities for SEO, you may lose that ranking very soon.

Abbreviations used:

SEO – Search Engine Optimization

SEM – Search Engine Marketing

PPC – Pay Per Click

SERP – Search Engine Results Page

SMO – Social Media Optimization

SMM – Social Media Marketing

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