1 April 2021
Contents
1. Ideas for marketing your salon
2. Spa marketing ideas
3. Barbershop marketing plan
4. Marketing my beauty salon
5. Marketing a salon group
6. Hair salon website tips for 2021
7. Digital marketing tips for hair and beauty salons
8. Hair salon marketing plan
9. Using SalonIQ’s referral system
10. Salon marketing plan blueprint
11. Salon email marketing ideas
12. Types of loyalty card
Marketing your salon is all about finding ways of reaching out to people you think would enjoy your service and through various forms of media, attempt to turn them into client.
Creating a polished and professional image online and offline takes time. Marketing your salon effectively will require effort and patience before it pays off. Marketing strategies to gain more clients such as setting up a professional website, social media accounts and posting regularly will take time for you to see the effects, but in the long term will help your business thrive.
This comprehensive guide to marketing will take you through what you need to know about salon marketing including, many separate types of salon such as beauty and male grooming.
Ideas for marketing your salon
Regularly posting on just two or three social media platforms is a great way to market your salon. Here are a few tips to increase traffic:
– Post engaging images, to ensure this make sure you use good lighting for your photos
– Link your posts to your website
– Add contact details to each post
– Always have a call to action, letting your readers know what to do next
Creating a new website or refreshing your existing salon website is a great way to interest potential customers. A crisp and up to date online presence that can be accessed by a range of devices means that clients can access your site on the go. With online booking options on your site it makes booking appointments and checking what treatments you have available a lot more convenient for clients. Keep updating your website periodically with news, seasonal updates and blog posts to make sure it stays fresh.
Research suggests that up to 95% of customers regularly check online reviews before choosing a salon or product. Asking your clients to leave a review of your salon on a platform such as Google reviews, Feefo or trust pilot can bring in a lot more customer traffic.
Keep in mind that reviews can be poor, so make sure you monitor the reviews and respond with either a thank you note or an offer to solve any issues they had, this can turn a detractor into a promotor.
Having regular seasonal events for holidays such as Valentine’s day or Christmas is a clever way to boost sales. Promoting gift cards and hair care packages online can bring in your clients for a touch up before the special day.
Reaching out to local social influencer, or even just to your regular clients and asking them to promote you through social media can bring a lot of rewards. Offering a free haircut so you can film the process of transforming their hair and posting the video on your website as well as pictures of the new style is a practical demonstration of your abilities.
Having Facebook or google ads to promote your salon is an excellent way to reach out to completely new clients that may not know about you yet. It is a wonderful way to spread the word.
Sending your clients an SMS message to ask for a review of your salon or thank them for their patronage is arguably the quickest form of marketing. Almost all of your customers will have access to a phone or tablet and will be reached by your message.
Word of mouth is a powerful tool for any beauty business, when looking for a new salon the first place many people go is their friends and relatives. Referral schemes using tools like loyalty cards are another wonderful way to bring new clients in the door.
When marketing a spa there are a broad range of tools you can use. Here are a few techniques for you to use to market your spa and gain new clients.
More and more customers find spa products and experiences using a search engine online. Backing up your website with a Google My Business profile means that you will also appear in google map listings as well as google searches. This increases your visibility in hyper local google searches when prospective clients search the local area for spa services. Bringing in a lot more local traffic to your spa.
Working in a partnership with other businesses in the local area is a great way to market your spa; encouraging local businesses to sell your products, giving out your brochures at hair salons and liaising with local health experts are all great ways to improve your visibility. To help you achieve this, joining a networking group like BNI is a great way to meet local business ambassadors and gain local contacts.
Using a loyalty scheme is a great way to keep your clients coming back to your spa. By offering deals and freebies for repeat customers you help ensure they keep on returning to your spa year after year.
Ensure you are consistent in how you present your spa. Creating a distinctive and recognisable style across your signage, documentation and on line presence looks professional and helps build your brand.
Marketing a barbershop for men is subtly different to marketing a salon that caters primarily for women. The interior design and branding of a barbershop should be more masculine than a salon to appeal to your target clients.
Think about what type of clients you want to entice into your barbershop. Do you want to cater to young men or is your prospective audience more mature? What services are you going to offer? Your marketing approach should be tailored to your target audience.
Any marketing you do should consider which forms of social media your potential customers are likely to be using. Younger clients may use Instagram, but if you are targeting more mature men as your primary clients, Facebook, Google Ads or even LinkedIn may be a better way to start. If you are looking to target pensioners as clients, local newspaper ads or directories may be most effective!
Think about your target audience and what they would find welcoming. Many barbershops have a more traditional feel, with leather and neutral colour tones like sage green or navy blue. The iconic red, white and blue design of a barber’s pole has been in place since the renaissance era in Amsterdam. Your marketing should reflect the interior of your salon as well as your logo.
Once you have a specific target audience and clear branding for your barbershop to follow, decide on which forms of marketing you think will be most effective at reaching potential clients. A good way to start is choosing only two or three different marketing channels to begin with, once you are comfortable with them, gradually expand your use of marketing tools. Monitor each marketing approach and learn which of the tools you are using are most effective for you.
The beauty market is constantly in flux and your beauty salon should evolve with it. Marketing your beauty salon effectively should bring in more customers and help your beauty salon grow. Of course the best marketing you can possibly do is making sure you provide your customers the best service possible, but just a few changes to your marketing plan can make a big difference.
What can you do immediately?
Your storefront and interior, as well as the word of mouth are an excellent starting point for any marketing strategy. Making sure your beauty salon looks inviting and beautiful for your customers when they walk in the door or look through the window on the highstreets is essential to bringing in traffic. Giving your customers the best possible experience and letting the word spread is one of the most effective ways to market your salon.
Ask for your customer’s email addresses and phone numbers and create a database you can use to communicate with your clients. Having a set plan for your digital marketing is a great way to ensure that you update your website and social media channels regularly. Creating a website for your salon (if you haven’t got one already) with an online booking function makes rebooking after an appointment more convenient for customers. Beauty is a very visual market so your choice of imagery will be very important for any digital marketing you do. Opening social media accounts for your salon on channels like Instagram is a great way to demonstrate your abilities with photos of the salon and hair-cuts you have done.
Little questionnaires on an email to your customers, or even a little paper questionnaire in your beauty salon is an excellent way to receive actionable feedback about your customer experience. Asking what your customers want to see on your social media and emails from your salon shows the clients you care about their opinions and will help you find out which parts of your marketing plan have been working and which have produced few results.
A questionnaire asking new customers where they first heard about your salon is a really good way to see which parts of your marketing scheme have been most effective so far.
As if marketing for just one salon isn’t complicated enough, marketing a group of salons involving multiple websites can quickly begin to feel overwhelming.
When marketing a group of salons there are a wide variety of tools you can use such as Facebook, Instagram, Emails, SMS, YouTube and so on. Chose one or two to start with and then begin to branch out once you have a good understanding of these platforms.
Marketing a group of salons means you have a wider geographical audience and may have a larger budget for putting together an advertising campaign.
Making sure all your salons imagery remains consistent means that you will have a consistent brand, that will be instantly recognisable in each of your salons.
Making sure you stay on top of your marketing strategy and remain up to date is also important, arranging posts a week ahead of time can help keep things running smoothly.
Your website is an extremely valuable tool, allowing interested clients to find you and interact with your business online. Here are some tips to building a professional website for your salon.
Online booking is a powerful way to make life easier for you and your clients. It allows clients to book their appointments immediately from their phones or laptops. Making sure booking online on your salon website is a seamless and pain free task for clients will go a long way to winning them over.
Your team is at the heart of your salon experience, introducing them on your website with a photo short paragraph about their personalities, will give your website a more personal touch.
E-commerce is when you use your website to sell products online. Selling your clients various salon items through your website during lockdown and making your salon payments online can boost your sales and makes life a lot easier for the customer and for you.
Letting people know on your website when you are open and shut can help keep customers happy and prevent wasted trips.
Content
With social media influencers and YouTube channels gaining thousands of views every day, why not try your hand at it yourself? Uploading short clips on hair care with styling tips will give prospective clients a look at your expertise before walking into the salon.
Keeping your social media platforms up to date is an important way of reaching out to clients. Sending out little reminders of seasonal offers and products offered in store on your social media accounts will keep your clients in the loop. Many hairdressers now ask their clients if they can post before and after pictures of client’s hair on their social media channels such as Instagram to show of what they can do.
Boosting your website using written content in the form of a blog is not only a great way to gain SEO benefits, but is a wonderful way to share your expertise with you clients. Writing an article on the latest fashionable hair trends of the year for example allows you to connect with clients and give tips for their own hair care choices.
With more internet traffic than ever, improving your digital marketing strategy is essential to winning new clients and keeping your current clients coming back.
Creating organic SEO to increase your websites visibility on google using written content and maximising your use of keywords is a great way to make sure you are accessible online.
Content marketing is a key element of achieving good organic SEO. Using keywords which your customers are likely to search for when writing blog pieces or creating other content for your website increases your websites google ranking slowly but steadily. Creating blog posts and sending out updates on new treatments or staff at your salon will underpin your credibility and help drive up your search engine ranking.
Google and Facebook ads are a great digital marketing technique that can be used to drive up traffic to specific locations on your website. To ensure your ads are as effective as possible make sure you have conversion tracking set up so you can see which ads created the best results. Creating multiple ads and then testing how effective they are allowing you to tailor your ads to be as targeted and effective as possible.
Customer reviews are a key digital marketing tool for any salon. Having positive reviews on your website, Facebook and even in your salon brochure will reassure new customers. Always thank any clients that leave a review to let customers know you are thankful for their participation.
A marketing plan for a salon is a way of making sure you have concrete goals and consistent schedules for your campaign to ensure your salon marketing stays on track.
How do you start a hair salon marketing plan?
Look at your sales and marketing figures from last year. How many new clients did you gain? What where your most effective marketing tools? What was your revenue each month and for the whole year?
By looking in depth at what you achieved in the last year you can focus on increasing your gains in the next year by creating achievable and reachable goals for your salon to aim for.
Here are some points to think about
Analysis of these questions will help you to create a plan for the next year which capitalises on your most effective marketing tools to produce the results you want.
Executing your hair salon marketing plan
Make sure to create posts a month in advance of when they will be needed to give you time to edit them and make sure your marketing plan stays organised. Choose quality over quantity, a few long term marketing campaigns that are very effective are far better than lots of short term bursts of online content.
Gaining new clients and keeping the clients you already have coming back can be a difficult task. As a salon owner there are many different things to manage, from finances to arranging your shopfront. Adding marketing to your ever-growing list of jobs can be hard, the trick is to encourage your clients to do your marketing for you.
SalonIQ’s referral system is automatic and allows you to focus on delivery and a great service as our system brings clients through your door.
What is SalonIQ’s referral system?
Our referral system is a brilliant new way of marketing your salon. The system creates an SMS message you can send to your clients with instructions to forward the message (and a unique code) to people your clients think will enjoy your salon.
With this automated system you can see which client has referred a new customer and send a thank you message. Incentives such as a 20% off the next cut for each referral can make this marketing technique even more effective.
Once you have established your salon, using this salon marketing blueprint can help you expand your business.
There are three major ways for any business to grow:
n order for each of your salons’ stylists to build up a base of loyal clients that come back each time they need a new haircut, it is important for you to market them effectively. SalonIQ’s referral system is an excellent way to increase word of mouth marketing by encouraging clients to bring their friends and family to your salon.
Encouraging your stylists to promote the products in your salon and to talk about what they would recommend each client use for home treatment of their hair such as shampoo, conditioner or even hair oils is a great way to encourage your clients to spend more while in your salon.
The best way to encourage your clients to come into your salon is to bring up booking their next appointment before they check out. Give a professional opinion on when their new hair cut should need another visit to the salon to refresh. Bringing back existing clients more often takes a lot less time than finding completely new customers!
Salon email marketing ideasEmail marketing is an excellent way to keep loyal customers informed about what your salon is doing. Reminders about seasonal offers and new products in the salon will keep customers in the loop and let them know you care.
What can you use email marketing for?
How best to use email marketing for your business?
Tailor the emails you send to fit the client, what would each client want to hear about and which are more likely to be ignored?
A salon should aim to be a friendly space. Make sure your salon’s unique personality comes through in your emails.
Selecting a template with your signature colour shade and logo for your email is a great way to build brand awareness. Each time the customer sees the email template or even the colour scheme it will be recognised as your personal branding.
Don’t just send out different promotions or sales to your customers, relentless efforts to make a sale can be off putting. Sending out team news or links to new posts on your website will help your customers feel invested in your business.
Offering sales and discounts via Loyalty cards for customers that keep coming back to your salon is a great way to reward existing customers while referral schemes using your loyalty cards bring in new customers.
There are three main types of loyalty card:
Cardboard punch cards are probably the most widely used form of loyalty card. They are quick and easy to use; they are very popular on the highstreets as they require little to no explanation. However, they are easy to lose and many customers will lose the card before they receive the reward.
A points based loyalty card can be implemented digitally, each treatment that the customer buys equals a certain amount of points which can be used to get a free treatment once the client has accumulated enough points.
Much like a bronze, silver and gold marketing scheme this form of loyalty card is aspirational. With customers who spend more when visiting your salon receiving a higher tier loyalty card than occasional visitors. This form of loyalty card will often require more time from salons to manage effectively, but can achieve great results.
Choosing between a digital or paper loyalty card depends on how much time you are willing to put into the project. Paper punch loyalty cards are easy to set up and don’t require much time to keep going. Digital loyalty cards are more complex and as such can take more effort to set up, but delivers superior results.
Keep in mind that digital loyalty cards can also be used to keep your return clients updated about sales and packages you are promoting throughout the year.
When tracking loyalty points digitally, SalonIQ technology makes sure you know the points showing on the clients record card are accurate with the time and dated stamped on.
If you want any more advice on your salon marketing strategy, or feel like you could benefit from our salon software then get in touch with our friendly and helpful team who will be delighted to advise!
Call a member of our team today on 01892 280 123
