Whether you are a new teacher, new to social media or looking for continued growth and success in this now hugely popular yoga market, bridging the gap between the sublimation of the Self and the era of selfies can be daunting.
When I started teaching Yoga twenty years ago, our biggest tool was the business card. Those with the budget for it had a website. Those with distribution skills printed up loads of flyers and left them in local businesses.
While we still need these tools, we live in a digital age and cannot deny that it is a huge help to our business to know how to navigate them. Just to coast on the old mediums is not going to cut it if you want to get your personal brand out there. Yes, you have to put yourself out into cyberspace! But who are you?
WHO AM I? This is a classical and central meditation designed to uncover our true and essential Self, beyond the bones of the body, thoughts of the mind, emotions of the heart. The image you want to portray, whether as a cohesive studio of professionals or as a self-employed practitioner, is unique, and often needs to be uncovered. So what is your brand voice?
Your brand is based on the experience you want your clientele to have when they do business with you. It is based on facts such as your credentials, teaching style, personal philosophy, and teaching niche.
For example, are you the athlete turned yogi, the ex-dancer, or the person with a back injury who found yoga was the ticket to transformation? Do you love teaching children? Do you like to headstand everywhere you go or do you prefer to have your image captured when you are meditating by the lake? Are you a physiotherapist as well as yoga teacher?
As any yoga teacher knows, when teaching a complicated posture it is best to break things down into basic steps. So here are four tips on how to find and project your brand voice as a teacher or studio on social media.
1. Be authentic. Keep in mind that yoga principles such as Satya (truthfulness) apply. If you are marketing yourself as a vegan and only vegan, and your beau puts up a photo on Instagram of you biting down on a bacon cheese burger, you are projecting a false image. Be yourself, be credible, show your personality, or that of your teachers, and your professionalism.
2. Define your brand voice. Your brand voice is expressed through your values, personality, and any vocabulary and media you use to tell your story. On social media platforms, like Twitter, for example, your brand voice can shine out in a hashtag, such as #liveyouryoga or #anatomygeek. The voice becomes part of your story, and invites conversations with you, a point we will examine in a later blog post.
3. Establish a good foundation. As you would in asana, you need a stable platform to convey your brand voice from. A website and presence on popular social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instgram are important.
4. Create great visual presentation. On social media platforms thise involves the use of eye-catching, story-telling cover photos and logos. Fill out all the details on your profiles with your brand voice in mind, and pay attention to the details. Use of colors, fonts, and other graphics is a way for you to visually describe to others what your brand is about.
The content you share on social media, and how you engage with your audience are important. In my next two blog posts I will expand on how thest topics. Meanwhile, set yourself up for continued success by uncovering your brand voice.
“The intuitive language is an internal one that defies cognitive reasoning. It’s also silent, sudden and self-confident. Your instincts just know. When you ignore them, however, they can become increasingly louder. They’re like toes being stepped on. They don’t like it and they make you scream out in agony. Still, we tend to promote self-doubt and push them away; trust isn’t immediate.
