Cast your mind back to last New Year.
Did you make any salon business resolutions?
Roll forward 6 months… how are you doing?
Time to reboot your salon marketing activity perhaps?
Summer may not be the traditional season to pause for reflection, yet for the hair and beauty industry it’s a brilliant time for a marketing kick-start.
Why?
You’re half-way through the business year so can judge what’s working, and what isn’t. And there’s still plenty of time to get your salon back on track and ready for a lucrative Christmas.
Get off to a flying salon start
That said, it doesn’t matter too much when you decide to re-launch your marketing activity. The point is to get started. There’s no need to wait for January to come around – do it now.
If you wrote a Marketing Plan in the cold dark days of January, then dust it down and let’s get started.
Still hesitating over where to begin? Too big a mountain to climb?
Try breaking the kick-start process into manageable baby steps. Here are 5 proven steps to reboot your salon marketing activity:
#1. Make salon marketing your priority
If you’re looking to jump-start your marketing activity then I’m guessing you’ve been neglecting it rather over the last few months. So step one of the jump-start process is ‘You’.
Stand back and take a long hard look at yourself.
Are you the main earner in your salon? Running the busiest column, with no time to promote your business, whilst your senior stylists and therapists stand around with time on their hands?
Recognise yourself?
In which case here’s your first task – delegate some client work and make the time to market your salon.
Simple to say. Not so simple to do.
Marketing is vital if you want to attract new clients and increase salon profitability – it makes real business sense to give it the importance it deserves. Yet often the biggest challenge to growing a business is the owner’s fear of releasing tasks that should be handed to others.
Kick-start Activity One:
Start by blocking out one afternoon each week between now and the end of November to focus on promoting your salon or spa.
Resolve to stick with this, no matter how persuasive your clients are. Or how great the distractions are.
#2. Rev up your salon or spa experience
Even the biggest salon marketing budget won’t offset a poor customer experience. Attracting new clients over the threshold is vital, but what happens when they arrive for that crucial first visit?
Are you wowing them?
Or just giving them a ‘perfectly okay’ experience?
Most hair and beauty businesses go through tough patches – illness, employee losses, personal hiccups, cash flow crisis – and it’s easy (and understandable) to take your eye off the customer experience ball.
Kick-start Activity Two:
In need of inspiration? There are heaps of ideas on creating ‘wow’ salon experiences and better customer care in my blog. Start with these tips on making your client feel super-special, then try these ideas from successful salons.
#3. Rejuvenate your salon website
Your salon website needs constant TLC. If you’ve neglected it so far this year it’s not too late to give it a refresh.
A well-designed mobile friendly website, which is regularly updated, sends out the right marketing messages about your salon. If yours is looking lack-lustre than try this idea:
Kick-start Activity Three:
It can be difficult to be objective about your own salon website design and content so ask your partner or a good friend to spend half an hour looking at it and giving you impartial feedback.
To help, here’s a quick DIY checklist to see if your salon website is littered with simple fixable mistakes.
#4. Jump-start your salon social media
Just because you can do salon social media yourself is no excuse for it looking unprofessional – a messy scrapbook of salon gossip, poor spelling and fuzzy photos.
Kick-start Activity Four:
- Spend 1 hour today updating your Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+ and Instagram profiles and refresh the imagery.
- More than one person posting on your salon social? Spend 20 minutes writing some simple guidelines on how your salon posts should look and sound. Introduce some consistency in branding and tone of voice/message.
- If you’re a salon social virgin there’s plenty of advice on getting started and using social media in my blog. Don’t feel you need to be on every social media network. Choose one you are comfortable with and become a master of this rather than a Jack-of-all-trades.
- Select one social media channel today and sign your salon up. Take the plunge. My personal choice for hair and beauty salons would be either Facebook or Twitter. But if you prefer images to words then Pinterest or Instagram may be a better option than Twitter.
#5. Pep up your salon marketing materials
Your salon brand is everything you do.
With today’s focus on online salon marketing it’s too easy to forget the value of printed promotional materials to a hair or beauty salon.
A vibrant Facebook page, cracking website and utterly gorgeous salon won’t compensate for a badly designed, poorly written leaflet printed on cheap shiny paper.
Kick-start Activity Five:
Spread all your current marketing materials on a table and take a long, hard look at them.
- Are all the logos, fonts, colours and photography consistent or are some of them out of date?
- Does the imagery match that used on your website and social media?
- Is your salon Facebook address included?
- Are there plenty of calls to action?
Don’t get overwhelmed by the task. You don’t have to tackle them all at once and strain your time and cash flow resources. Instead, pick the worst marketing offenders and get them right before working your way slowly thorough the rest.
Kick-start your salon marketing
Remember: “If nothing changes, nothing changes”.
If you want to grow your hair or beauty business this year there’s still time to resurrect and reboot those New Year resolutions. You just need to take action.