If you want to expand any business, you’ve got to keep on top of marketing, especially in the salon industry. So what kind of marketing strategy can you put in place to help you grow your current business?
Making an Effort to Move Forward
When you’ve been running a busy salon for some time and are used to the day-to-day activities, there may be a tendency to become stuck in a rut. After all, the salon may look “busy,” and you are making enough to pay the bills, but could you be doing that much better? Perhaps it’s time for you to create a brand-new salon marketing plan that will help you to attract new customers, boost your retention rates, and increase your profits. Don’t forget that if you are not actively trying to grow your business, there is a tendency that you may be slipping back and especially when compared to your competitors.
Assessing Current Performance
Before you start to think about improvements, you need to assess your current performance. Be ruthless in this assessment as you figure out what worked for you in the last year and what didn’t. Hopefully, you will have a method in place to help you track and analyse your key metrics. If you don’t, you need to do this to determine if your new marketing plan will be effective.
Look at the average number of appointments you make each month and the total revenue. How many new clients did you gain over the last year, and critically, how many did you lose? Focus on other performance metrics, such as the number of followers on each social media platform and the volume of visitors to your website.
You will probably have some marketing strategies in place already. Try to correlate the effectiveness of each strategy against the current state of your business. This will help you to determine whether you need to retain or ditch those strategies as part of your new marketing plan.
Establishing Goals
The next step is to set some realistic goals, both in the short term and long term. Certainly, be realistic, but don’t hold yourself back either. Your longer-term goals may call for your business to be the most successful beauty salon in your neighbourhood or to be particularly famous for one form of treatment. Whatever it is, set these goals and then reverse-engineer your marketing plan to help you achieve them.
Setting Budgets
As you come up with new marketing initiatives, establish how much it’ll cost you to implement them. You may well need to increase your marketing spend, but whatever you do, be consistent. When you’re sure that a particular strategy is right, commit to it and set aside the money within your cash flow projections.
Reassessing Your Marketing Platforms
Now that the decisions have been made, you may need to rejig your marketing platforms to align with the new goals. These platforms will include your primary website and also your social media accounts, so commit the time and effort to this work. It may be time to give your website a complete revamp. Perhaps you can change the colour scheme or layout and add new content and fresh pictures of your work. Introduce a separate page to include more details about each staff member with up-to-date photographs. Crucially, ensure that you are gathering testimonials from happy customers and placing those in a prominent position on your new website layout.
Revamp your social media as well with new pictures and testimonials. As part of your new marketing plan, you may want to post far more regularly than you have before. You may also want to maintain a more visible presence by replying to comments, asking for feedback, running surveys, and interacting more with clients and prospects.
Focusing on Retail
Many salon owners do not focus enough on retail opportunities. Instead, they simply provide a high-quality service rather than recommending and selling individual products. There can be large profit margins in any retail operation, so you may want to make this a key focus of your new marketing initiative.
For example, you may find that one particular hair product is a favourite among your customers, and they always want your staff to use it during an appointment. If so, bring in a stock of these products and put them on display. Draw attention by offering special discounts to start the ball rolling. Work with the distributors to come up with additional marketing hooks to make retail work for you.
Retaining Your Current Customers
Marketing is not all about social media or Facebook ads, as you should also focus on customer loyalty and retention. After all, it’s far easier to make money from a recurring customer than trying to find a new client from scratch.
Treat all your current customers the right way, and you’ll foster a good relationship, leading to word-of-mouth advertising. You may want to create a new loyalty program where customers get a certain number of points for each dollar they spend. When they reach a certain threshold, they can trade in those points for a gift of some kind. Perhaps VIP members get some additional incentives and exclusive discounts that help to buy their loyalty.
Ensuring Seamless Operation
Make it as easy as possible for your customers to work with you. You may want to introduce some online scheduling tools so they don’t need to phone you to make any appointments. Perhaps you should accept contactless payments or talk with your payment gateway provider to see how you can add new options.
Introducing Your Salon Marketing Solutions
So, as you can see, there are many potential salon marketing campaign ideas to consider, and you can certainly keep yourself busy as you plan. In the meantime, remember to focus on the key pillars of your business and ensure that you are as protected as possible. This may also be a good time to assess your insurance needs and ask an expert for some advice. With this in mind, reach out to Salonsure today for further guidance.
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