Content Design: Your Yoga
The challenge
To develop a consistent voice for Your Yoga that would reflect the ethos of the studio across various platforms, raise brand awareness, and boost conversion rates.
Methods Applied
Stakeholder Interviews
Microcopy
Web/Social Media/E-mail Analytics
A/B Testing
Tools Used
Camera
GoogleDocs
Facebook Ads Manager
Google AdWords
MadMimi
Refining the Voice
Founded by a philosophy grad student and a cultural critic, Your Yoga’s voice is articulate yet accessible: NYC-style rigor modulated for a Minnesota Nice audience. The copy is an extension—and at times an amplification—of the voice students would encounter in the studio: friendly, familiar, and poised for meaningful connection.
In a space that often traffics in sentiment, “inspiration,” and tradition, Your Yoga speaks in a clear and original voice that exhorts students to be themselves more fully.
In the words of one student: “You take yoga seriously, but you don’t take yourselves too seriously.”
From MicroCopy to Manuals
As chief content strategist, I created and edited content that ranged from pithy microcopy and social media posts to 100+ page training manuals. While each platform employed the Your Yoga voice, the register shifted depending on the context and audience:
Social Media
Your Yoga used Facebook and Instagram regularly to keep students engaged on a regular basis.
The posts that performed the best were consistently those that highlighted Your Yoga’s unique personality, sense of humor, community, and intelligent approach to movement.
We made a conscious decision to show the diversity of the community and to focus on people over poses.
While fancy yoga poses tend to garner a lot of clicks and engagements, we used such shots sparingly, often in the service of advertisements.
Online content
Because of Your Yoga’s thoughtful voice, the blog was one of its most popular platforms. Here students had an opportunity to dive deep into themes that teachers would raise in classes or articulate in workshops.
The blog helped establish a broader context for our work, connecting Your Yoga’s offering to yoga history, philosophy, kinesiology, anatomy, and the contemporary cultural conversation.
Moreover, we leveraged the blog to highlight different big-ticket studio offerings, such as our teacher training program.
We monitored our website analytics and social media response to gauge the success of our posts.
From reader engagement we learned that blog posts that were 500 words or less, composed in fairly short paragraphs, performed best. Readers also responded to posts in which yogic idea were anchored in real-life experience: our more personal (and even edgier) posts received more positive engagement than cerebral write-ups on yoga philosophy.
Manuals
The training manuals for Your Yoga’s 200-hour Teacher Training program and for the Trauma-Sensitive Yoga Training were by far the densest, richest documents. While the text was certainly not humorless, we took our responsibility to educate seriously.
While we didn’t have the benefit of user analytics to assess the success of our content, we relied on feedback from both students and teachers to revise, edit, and improve the manuals.
Over the course of multiple teacher trainings, we identified where students would benefit from more textual reinforcement of the concepts they covered in class.
We also experimented with different ways to presenting complicated topics, such as anatomy and alignment, each of which have myriad paradigms.
While our last iteration included six different frameworks for looking at a pose, our next version was going to offer just the simplest frameworks (Basic Shape and Key Actions). The other four were going to be folded into our Advanced Alignment curriculum.