Brenda Umana, Founder of OM Marketing, Yoga + Meditation Educator
Brenda Umana is empowering communities through authentic communication and mindful education. With a Master of Public Health from Columbia University.
Podcast
Overview
Brenda Umana is empowering communities through authentic communication and mindful education. With a Master of Public Health from Columbia University, a business degree from UC Santa Cruz, and a decade of teaching yoga and meditation, she has combined her passions and skills as a mindful marketer. Skillful in big-picture strategy, heart-centered messaging, and attention to detail. She partners with mid-sized conscious businesses, and health startups on content marketing strategies to grow their businesses through intention and purpose.
00:33- Tell me about OMM and what was your motivation to start it.
- OM, marketing is a marketing consultancy, mostly working with heart-centered businesses that are looking to make a big impact or are making a big impact in the world.
- We offer Strategic Services that lets them differentiate themselves in the market.
- How I got into this was a bit organic, I perhaps wasn’t going out thinking I was going to do this. And I think my unique combination of skills is how this happened, or how this venture ended up happening.
- At the time, when I was kind of starting off on this, it wasn’t really a thing to have mindfulness be in partnership with a business or in partnership with communication, the way that we communicate online. And even though it wasn’t that long ago, it just wasn’t exactly a thing.
- I was very, perhaps adamant about keeping my skills and keeping my business background, my mindfulness background, and my health background kind of combined into one.
- And just kind of like in a snowball effect, people started organically reaching out. And that’s how marketing started.
02:17- What are the challenges in building a digital brand?
- I would say one of the main challenges is our ability to be steadfast with our marketing or our digital presence.
- We get, perhaps, shiny objects around the internet, dissuading our attention from our purpose or what we’re meant to be doing.
- So from a digital standpoint, we may try one thing, and that didn’t work. So then we’re going to try something else.
- And then our attention just keeps going that way, and we don’t have a clear vision and a steadfast route to keep going down.
03:17- How to determine which is the right social media platform?
- I would say it depends, obviously, on every business, but I make sure that we’re asking ourselves as business owners, or as marketers, the right questions.
- The first question is knowing who your audience is, Who are you trying to offer your services or your product?
- And number two, what is your modality or your product?
- A lot of the heart-centered businesses that I work with, offer things like yoga or Reiki or coaching, you know, those types of services, so knowing your modality or your product is important.
- Third is knowing how your modality or your product translates into digital space.
06:59- How do you work with people to help increase lead generation?
- Lead generation generally means people coming into your business, as opposed to people reaching out to businesses.
- To bring in those leads, are what’s known as a lead magnet. A lead magnet lives on most likely your website. And it’s a very specific exchange that you do with people that are interested in your market or in your service.
- The last thing you want to do for your business is to create a boring or not helpful exchange. So you want to know exactly what your audience needs.
- You create something very thoughtful, that showcases your modality. And then that’s one way to bring in more leads, how you follow up with them and convert them into a client is a different story.
09:27- Tell me what got you started with yoga
- I got into yoga close to 13 years ago. I was working as an accountant and a corporate setting in San Francisco, California. And they offered corporate yoga on-site.
- And after that, now I can reflect and see that something else was calling me. But I essentially quit my job without really knowing what else was next, because I didn’t feel that that was my path.
- Yoga to me is a lifestyle. And it’s a way to live life. And it is a moment, or lots of moments, actually, because it’s all of our lives, but lots of moments to be able to sit in our own true, true purpose, a true essence.
12:45- Tell me what is meditation.
- The lineage of yoga is what informs my definition of meditation.
- And meditation is essentially the observation of our mind and being present with ourselves to be able to distinguish between who and what is thinking or who or what sense of I, or what sense of me or other is thinking.
- And oftentimes in our modern life, we think we can’t meditate, because we have too many thoughts.
- All those things that we think that we can’t, but that is the process of meditation is to observe ourselves, and that happens through our thoughts in our mind.
14:51- How does meditation help us?
- Health and research and everything are showing us that meditation is helping us with stress, sleep, with relationships, and work.
- It helps us in some ways answer those big questions that we may have about life that happens over time as we practice and quiet down.
- It’ll start to reveal things within yourself that will just lead you into new directions of yourself, your life, and your work or business or whatever it is.
15:47- What are the three key milestones in your life or your career?
- Number one was quitting my job. Even though I didn’t know what was next. I just got that intuitive moment that this is not my path. And my path is something else.
- Number two was after that key milestone, I still wasn’t sure what to do, so I went to school to get a Master’s of Public Health.
- And that was a key milestone because it made me realize that everything is health, what we touch up the streets, we walk on our health, and how close my grocery store is to health.
17:28- What does success mean to you?
- Success to me is steadfastness. It’s having the ability to continue to kind of go really slow up the hill of life and career.
- And number two, I would say, is fulfillment. Success to me is fulfilling what feels right and fulfilling to me.
- And sometimes that fulfillment doesn’t always mean the highest amount of money or other things that we might societally think are successful. So it really does mean to move on a path of fulfillment. And fulfillment means to me different things at different parts of my life.
19:06- Three lessons you want our viewers and listeners to take away?
- We need to be steadfast in our purpose and our path. And we might be swayed a little bit, but it’s really important to keep trucking.
- The second is remembering that when it comes to mindful marketing, and that’s part of what I offer, right, is that marketing is all about testing.
- I often refer to it as a spiral. So we’re constantly in a spiral of life but in marketing, it’s you try one thing, you see if it works. And then if it doesn’t, or if it does you learn from it and do it again.
- So remember that everything is, is a moment to learn.
- And three, I would say, to maybe try yoga or meditation.
- It’s more than what we may see as asana sitting down to meditate. There’s a really big depth to these practices, that they can take you in any direction that your body, mind, or spirit desires.
RESOURCES:
You can connect with Brenda Umana – LinkedIn
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Profile
Brenda Umana is empowering communities through authentic communication and mindful education. With a Master of Public Health from Columbia University, a business degree from UC Santa Cruz, and a decade of teaching yoga and meditation, she has combined her passions and skills as a mindful marketer. Skillful in big-picture strategy, heart-centered messaging, and attention to detail. She partners with mid-sized conscious businesses, and health startups on content marketing strategies to grow their businesses through intention and purpose.
