How Voodou Learnt to Love the Web: Winning Internet Marketing

This chain of five Liverpool salons and barber shops truly has the internet at the heart of its marketing activities. Rob Webb, Voodou’s MD, explains…

Why has the internet become such a focus?

ñThe simple answer is results. We have always invested in catchy marketing, but a local radio or press advert was a big investment and we couldn’t easily measure the effect insalon. Our internet campaigns changed all that. We know within hours how many people are reading, clicking and interacting with any advert or voucher campaign.î      

Voodou’s Online Success

´ The Voodou website has 11,000 unique visitors each month. This is mainly due to search engine optimisation (SEO). For almost any search phrase they strive to always be number one in the list. Try ïhair salon Liverpool’, for example.

´ Voodou’s Facebook page was launched 18 months ago and now has almost 9,000 fans. One campaign on Facebook produced 2,500 new fans in just three weeks.

´ Facebook adverts are used to directly target clients by age, location and gender. A New Client promotion in January provided an email voucher via a website link. 244 vouchers were used in-salon that month. The total cost was just £415, producing income of £5,789.

´ Capturing client email addresses is another big focus. Over the past three years Voodou has collected a database of over 30,000 emails, which they now contact regularly with newsletters and salon offers.

What’s next for Voodou when it comes to web marketing?

ñWe are planning another website makeover to improve the graphics, but also to use Facebook Connect so that all comments, competition entries and voucher downloads on the Voodou site are posted back to the clients’ Facebook wall _ that’s powerful viral marketing. We are also really excited about i-salon’s online booking from Facebook _ a great tool for our 9,000 fans.î

More information on Voodou internet campaigns can be found at www.salonguru.net