An important aspect of running a successful business is an effective marketing strategy. It’s a common question salon owners have, how do I market my salon, especially when it’s such a competitive market. Here are some ways you can improve your marketing efforts and make your salon more visible to your target market and grow your business.
You may be wondering how you can make your salon more visible in your target market. Perhaps you’re feeling overwhelmed by the competition or you’re not sure how to reach your target audience. Here are some ideas for better marketing strategies that can help you stand out from the crowd.
The most common challenges a salon owner faces when it comes to marketing their salon in a crowded market are many, some are listed below:
- Not knowing where to start. It can be difficult to come up with new and innovative ideas, especially if you’re feeling overwhelmed or stressed out.
- Not having a clear plan or budget in place. Without those, it can be difficult to measure the success of your marketing efforts. And finally, another common challenge is
- Lack of execution. Even if you have a great marketing strategy, it won’t do you any good if you don’t take action and implement it.
Research Salon Marketing Ideas
One of the most important aspects of effective marketing is understanding your target market. This means doing some research on who your ideal customers are and what they want from you.
This is a step your competitors are likely to miss out on, but by understanding your target market, and asking the basic questions about how do I market my salon, you can create a marketing strategy that is more likely to resonate with your target market. You can also identify specific ways to reach them and better understand their needs and validate your marketing ideas.
Research Your Target Market For Your Salon?
What do they want? How can you reach them? What are their needs?
By understanding who you are going to target, you can develop a unique selling proposition that resonates with those people
In order to set yourself apart from the competition, it’s important to develop a unique selling proposition (USP). This is something that makes your salon unique and different from everyone else
What Are The Needs Of Your Market?
Selling is just a value exchange, so you have to really work out your target market and what they want.
It starts with asking yourself simple questions so you can brainstorm ideas, questions such as; Is your salon in a particular location for example or are your clients a particular type of person or do you like to deal with certain types of individuals more than others?
How do I market my salon better means understanding your audience too and honing in on a subset of people instead of everyone, that way, you can better understand the customers who are more likely to spend the most and work out what their wants and needs are.
Knowing that is like peering inside your customer’s heads and understanding what they are thinking, this is so powerful, so it’s worth going deeper and asking further questions about what makes them tick and how are you going to fill that need? understanding this will make it easier for you to make your salon more visible to your target market and what will attract that cohort to your offer?
One of the best ways to make your salon more visible in your target market is to identify your unique selling proposition and develop a marketing strategy that aligns with it so taking the time to try and understand your target audience really can pay dividends.
How Do You Reach Your Target Market?
Once you’ve identified your target market and developed a USP, it’s time to start thinking about how you will reach them. This includes figuring out what channels you will use to communicate with them and what type of content you will produce.
Normally you would start with all the usual such as social media accounts and website and an email address which will establish the base of the brand, but how are you going to use them to reach your target market?
If you’re a new salon, often one of the best ways is to start is offline with flyers or word of mouth within your current network. Even if it’s just to get the ball rolling and get your name out there it’s an effective and cheap method.
If you have a more established brand, you could still send flyers out and create a buzz through word of mouth, but you could just as easily do an email blast to your list if you have been collecting customers’ email addresses. Alternatively, how do I market my salon, can be answered by trying something like paid ads with Facebook, Instagram or Google ads.
A quick word of warning here is that if you don’t know how to run them, there is a learning curve, to begin with, but once you have it dialled in, those campaigns can often run themselves.
Types Of Customers & What To Promote.
If you have an established customer base, and you just need more, this is where segmentation can work wonders.
There are many different ways to segment your customer base, but one of the most effective is by dividing them into different types of buyers. This can be done by looking at their buying process, how much they spend on services or products, or what motivates them to buy.
Don’t be afraid to ask your most loyal customers questions too which will help you understand customer needs so you can further segment your customer base.
Once you have done that, you can then look at the different types of customers you have and divide them into separate buckets, and then ask What are their needs?
By understanding the different needs of your customers, you can develop specific marketing strategies to appeal to them to get more similar types of people to use your services.
Aligning With Your Budget
An important aspect of any marketing strategy is ensuring that it aligns with your budget. This means that you need to be realistic about what you can afford to spend and what you can achieve with that amount of money.
It’s important to break down your marketing goals into achievable tasks that you can execute over a period of time so you don’t get overwhelmed and can track your progress.
This also means that you need to be realistic about how much money you can make from each customer and factor that into your budget.
Another thing to consider is having a budget ceiling, especially when it comes to paid ads such as google ads for example. Having a hard limit means that you won’t overshoot your budgeted spending and risk the campaign becoming less profitable or even more costly.
Developing A Strategy
To the uninitiated, this can be a daunting task, but by following these simple tips, you can make sure that your salon is more visible in your target market and start to see results.
It doesn’t have to be complicated either, start with what you have and work from there. Rome wasn’t built in a day, so don’t expect your salon marketing strategy to be either. Just start small and implement one step at a time and over time you will see progress.
A simple and inexpensive way to start is to create a social media profile and start sharing content that is relevant to your target market, such as a competition, introducing a friend discount or having an event where you have a supplier do a demonstration where you can send out invitations to your segmented lists of people.
Figuring Out What You Can Afford
You should never embark on a campaign without costing it out first so you can budget what you need to spend to reach your target market.
After you have identified who you’re going after and what method you’re going to use, it’s worth investing the time to do a little research about how much it will be to implement, this way you are able to monitor if your campaign can become profitable.
Breaking Down Your Goals
Everything we’ve talked about so far has been about small tactics you can use to market your business to attract more customers, but that shouldn’t be confused with the overall strategy.
It’s important to distinguish between the two because as you become better at your salon marketing you can use more tactics to achieve your objectives, but it’s important that you don’t confuse the two.
That being said, it’s vital that you set objectives for both your tactics and overarching strategy in order to measure your success over the period of the campaign and month, quarter or year.
A classic marketing technique commonly used is the acronym SMART
Your objectives may be to increase the number of new customers by 10%, get more people to visit your salon more often or even increase the average ticket size.
Whatever they are, make sure they are SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound.
Tracking Your Progress
Once you have your objectives set, and you have implemented your campaign it’s important to track your progress so you can see how well you’re doing and make any necessary changes.
This means setting up a system where you can track how many leads you get, how many turn into customers and what the average ticket size is.
You can also track how often people are visiting your website or social media pages.
Using this information, you can tweak your campaign to make it more effective.
This is much easier to do if the campaign is online as it’s easier to track than things like flyers or phone calls but having a base to work from is still important. So if you are planning it as we are advising, it’s good to monitor and list volumes as much as possible prior to the campaign going live.
Being Realistic About Customer Spending
One of the things that you need to factor into your marketing budget is how much people are likely to spend when they visit your salon.
This doesn’t mean that you can’t aim high and hope for the best, but it’s important to have a realistic idea of what people are likely to spend so you don’t set your expectations too high.
As a salon that probably has many different treatments, you’ll have different pricing. It’s for this reason that you probably should always target your more profitable services for promotional activities as otherwise, you run the risk of making little to no profit which defeats the purpose.
Measuring Your Success
One of the best ways to ensure that your marketing efforts are successful is to create a plan for how you will measure their success. This will help you track your progress and make any necessary changes. It will also help you set realistic expectations for what you can achieve.
Measuring Your Marketing Efforts
This can be difficult, but there are a number of ways to do it.
Some of the most common ways to measure the success of your marketing efforts are:
- Tracking the number of leads you generate
- Tracking how many of those leads turn into customers
- Tracking the average ticket size
- Tracking how often people visit
This can be done in a program such as google analytics in the goal settings section with the value of each sale, though if you don’t have an appointment system connected it can be difficult.
The manual way of doing this is to have some form of manual trigger that new customers have to complete to order, this could be as simple as quoting a code when they phone, or for a receptionist to ask a couple of simple questions which identifies them as new clients who are responding to your promotion.
Setting realistic expectations
When running a marketing campaign, one of the most important things is to set realistic expectations for what you can achieve. This means that you need to take into account things such as how much people are likely to spend when they visit your salon.
While it’s important to have high hopes, it’s also important to be realistic so that you don’t get disappointed if you don’t reach your targets.
Using data to improve your marketing efforts
Once you have started to measure the success of your marketing efforts, it’s important to use that data to improve your marketing efforts. This means tweaking your campaign so that it is more effective.
This is where you can really become world-class in running profitable campaigns and stride ahead of competitors. This is what stands us apart when we do our own salon marketing campaigns.
A good way to do this is to look at what is working and what isn’t and make changes accordingly. You can also look at what services are more profitable and focus your marketing efforts on those.
Running a successful marketing campaign for your salon can be difficult, but it’s important to have realistic expectations and track your progress so you can make the necessary changes. Using data to improve your marketing efforts is essential, as is setting achievable goals. With a bit of hard work and creativity, you can stand out in a competitive market and increase sales for your salon.
If you haven’t done this before it can be a little daunting, but after running a few you’ll get the feel for it.
The key thing though is that by becoming proficient at running these campaigns will help you grow your business and dominate your local marketing to a point where you have little to no competition.
