Digital Marketing tips for hair & beauty salons

With the world changing in the wake of Covid-19, it has never been more important for salons to have a good digital marketing strategy in place. This article gives more detail on digital marketing tips for hair & beauty salons.

The world was going digital in any case and your digital marketing strategy would have never been more important than now if we weren’t in the midst of a global pandemic. Covid-19 has accelerated this even faster as consumers buying habits have moved more and more towards buying, researching and pretty much doing as much as they can online. It is therefore imperative that hair and beauty salons think carefully about their digital marketing strategy, which is why we have created a guide of our top digital marketing tips for hair & beauty salons.

Organic SEO

SEO can feel like a daunting task and one we try to avoid. Although paid advertising using Google Ads is much more prevalent now than it was, any work you can do to improve your organic SEO rankings is still extremely important for any hair or beauty salon. This is especially true in the current climate of the global Covid-19 pandemic as more and more customers shop online, and even once the pandemic has ended, more and more people will be looking for services online, meaning if you do not have a strong SEO presence you will be missing out on website traffic and potential customers.

So how can you improve your salon website’s SEO? There are a wide range of techniques, but here are some basic essentials which will help:

• Select keywords to target
• Make sure there is a page on your website for each keyword
• Within each page try to include the keyword:
  • In the page URL
  • In the Page Title
  • In the H1 tag
  • Multiple times (naturally) within the body of the content

There is a lot more to SEO, but getting the basics right by doing this is very important, and what we are trying to do with the steps above, is tell a search engine what your website is about and when it may be relevant for your salon’s website to appear in a Google search.

Content marketing

Content marketing is somewhat linked to SEO in that a good content marketing strategy is an excellent digital marketing strategy for hair & beauty salons. It should mean more pages on your website are centered on individual keywords which helps improve SEO rankings. But more than that, content can also be shared over your social and email marketing channels, or for any press releases you do.

Here are some examples of content marketing topics you can talk about:

• Trends – As trends change in the hair & beauty industry, talk about them and show to your customers that you keep up to date with the latest fashion.
• Salon news – Personality is really key to showcase on a salon website and having regular updates with what is happening in your salon, introducing new staff and perhaps more in-depth profiles of your team helps your customers see the personality of your team. You could also talk about new equipment or awards that you win – anything that showcases your salon as the vibrant, forward thinking place you want!
• Tutorials – How to and video tutorials are great for credibility and offering value to your customer base, whilst many users find video content more engaging than written content.
• Reviews/video testimonials – Showcasing your work with case studies and then asking your customers to give video testimonials can really help underpin your credibility and demonstrate to potential customers the quality of your salon’s work.

Not only does content marketing helps drive search engine rankings, it is an excellent way of showcasing your credibility to your customer base, making it an extremely versatile digital marketing strategy for your salon that can help in multiple different ways.

Google & Facebook Ads

Google and Facebook Ads are very important digital marketing strategies for many hair & beauty salons as you can drive highly targeted traffic to specific pages on your website, and results are much more measurable than other aspects of marketing.

There is a lot to a Google Ads or Facebook Ads campaign, but here are some tips to make sure you are maximising your budget:

• Ensure you have conversion tracking in place so you can track results.
• Create multiple ads (and multiple visuals with Facebook Ads) then test, measure and continuously update them with the goal of always making your campaign more efficient.
• Be as targeted as possible – set-up multiple campaigns and make sure you are using all the tools with your Ads Manager accounts to target the right demographics for each campaign.
• Use retargeting to entice those who have visited your website before back.

These are just a few basic tips and a full campaign for your salon would be much more in-depth – but it is certainly worth investing in these campaigns if you haven’t already as they can be very effective digital marketing strategies for hair & beauty salons.

Customer reviews

Customer reviews should be part of any hair & beauty salon’s digital marketing strategy. We would recommend a strategy to encourage reviews – perhaps in an automated follow-up email to your clients after their visit (which your salon software provider will be able to help you with), via email newsletters or on any advertising material you give to your existing clients. Here are some ideas for where reviews can be posted:

• Website – Prospective customers will be looking for credible reviews from happy customers when making an appointment via your website, so make this easily accessible.
• Google My Business – Encouraging reviews via your Google My Business page will help sell your salon to a customer before they even click on your website!
• Facebook – Social media is becoming an ever more powerful tool for salons and Facebook reviews add that much needed credibility to your salon’s social accounts.
• In your salon – Ok so this isn’t strictly a ‘digital marketing tip for hair & beauty salons’ but we are going to sneak it in anyway… posting reviews up in your salon when you get them is great for existing and new customers to see as well as the morale of your staff!

A top tip is to always respond to reviews – it shows you are grateful to your customers who leave good reviews, but by responding to bad reviews (and they can happen), you demonstrate that you care and if you can show how you have taken steps to put this right, customers are often impressed!

We hope this was a useful article about digital marketing tips for hair & beauty salons, if you need any more information this, or other salon marketing tips and ideas then we would love to hear from you.