Your Corner of The Internet You Can Truly Control
Your salon website design is crucial to your business success, seriously!
It’s becoming even more so now as the volume of customers who turn to the internet to find beauty treatments in your location is exponentially growing.
Whether you’re a salon, spa or aesthetic clinic, it’s really important to have your website as front and centre of your business, as that’s where people find you first when they search online. And it’s why you should make a great first impression.
Your Website Is An Asset
But this is often where a lot of beauty business owners go wrong, they don’t approach their website as an investor would.
They fail to see a website as a business asset which a salon owner can capitalise on and which will appreciate in value the longer you have it, and, as with any asset, the more care and attention you give it, the greater it’s value, and one which will repay you multiple times over.
If you look at a salon website in the same way as you do your property or equipment, you might start to think about it differently, but sadly, most beauty businesses consider a website as a necessary evil which they have to have because everyone else does.
How Do New Clients Find You?
But if you look at it from a customers point of view, when they are searching around the web looking for places to get their beauty treatments, what are they looking for?
First they are going to browse to the sites which are easy to find and the most prominent in the search results. So optimising your site for Google and other search engines is important.
Then after they find a site, you have approximately 3 seconds to grab their attention before they bounce off to some other site never to return again, this is especially important if you are a relatively unknown brand.
To grab their attention, you’re going to have to put yourself in their shoes and think about what they want from your website…
It’s All About Them, Not You
To do this, you also have to be really clear about who you are as a brand, and what differentiates you from the competition. The key point here is to talk to them, so think about content from their point of view – what’s in it for them?
Here’s the uncomfortable truth, so many salons just talk about themselves on their website without thinking about the client, which is who the website should be focussed towards. But in reality, the customer does not care about you, all they want to know about is how the salon is going to help them achieve what they want and help fix their problems.
Taking that into consideration, your starting point for any new website should be to think about your customer and do everything in your power to look at it from their perspective and ask, what is it that they want from your clinic and the treatments you provide.
If you can do that well, you will be speaking directly to them, you’ll be inside their head and they will be thinking you really understand their problems – the best thing about this is that you don’t have to resort to giving away that huge discount which is plastered on the home page and which looses you money each time someone uses it.
If you can get to a point where they start trusting you from the message you place online, they are not looking for the cheapest, they are more interested in someone who is interested in helping them.
New Clients Are Always Searching For New Treatments
It is estimated that approximately 3% of buyers are in the market at any one time, so there are always people searching for new salons or beauty treatments. Maybe they have had a bad experience with their previous salon or the clinic they used closed down, or perhaps the person has just moved into the area and looking to book a treatment to give you a try? In all of those scenarios, they will be looking for a glimmer of trust, some reassurance that your salon understands them and can provide them with the solutions to their problems.
Often that can be done simply by adding some testimonials from real customers, or awards your salon has won in the past or even an article about one of the treatments you offer and how it helped one of your customers with an issue, or even a case study or two or perhaps a youtube video.
Give Them What They Want
What a new prospect craves the most is for that reassurance that you and your staff care enough to help her and can do a great job in the process. It’s up to you to send that message to them every opportunity you get.
Now, this all sounds great and easy to do on paper, but it’s takes courage and commitment and leadership to decide on this course of action. This is because hardly anyone else does this and it feels as if you are going against the grain. Your new website will be a different, it will have an alternative message to your competitors, and it will not be what everyone else is doing, so could be a little scary for some salon owners.
But even if you are brave and take the decision to take this action, there is no guarantee that it will work, why?
Your Website Is Your Best Salesperson
I’ve seen it over and over, once the site is up and running, the novelty wears off, it stops getting love and attention the site needs from the owner. The initial buzz of excitement is extinguished by the light of another shiny object which you’ve been told is the next sales generator and the site is totally forgotten about, no content uploaded, no updates made = no leads or engagement from potential customers.
As mentioned earlier, you need to think long term, think like an investor, think about adding content which offers value and solves peoples problems, and the reward is enormous, but it doesn’t happen overnight.
Many salon websites litter the internet looking as if they’ve been designed in 2009, forgotten about, abandoned and just clogging up the search engines, that’s if you bother to look past page one, which of course, no one does, including those people who might be searching for a new beauty salon, that might include yours.
But it doesn’t have to be like that, considering your site as an asset does mean that you have to give it some TLC, but the amazing thing is, that by doing so it will reward you many times over. The simple fact is that you don’t get something for nothing, and if you don’t invest in your cornerstone online asset, your little corner of the internet that you can truly own and control, you’re not going to believe there is any value in that incredible asset you have.
Don’t Be Like All The Others
So, don’t be like other salon owners who only remember about their website when the domain is up for renewal.
Salon Marketing Experts have been doing this for over 20 years, and along the way, we’ve helped so many salons achieve enormous growth through changing their approach to their website as a digital asset. The funny thing is that it always turns out to be a salons biggest sales channel, which means they don’t have to worry about getting new clients, they always have a full appointment book and have to put people on their waiting list, this in itself creates scarcity and starts a buzz in your community… all through their website. Repaying their investment several times over.
Believe me when I say there is a massive opportunity out there waiting for any salon who makes that commitment.
