Four marketing tips for successful salons

16 Apr 2014

Written by Alice Smithson

Marketing has always been an important part of salon management. Salon managers in the past might have taken out adverts in the local newspaper or put leaflets through doors, but these days there are other, more effective marketing strategies that you can carry out to get more clients through your salon’s doors.

One way to make your salon stand out from the crowd is to employ progressive digital marketing strategies that make potential clients take notice of your salon. Marketing can be used to directly sell products or services to clients, or simply to increase brand awareness. If your business uses salon software to manage appointments and process bills, it’s worth finding out how it can help you with your marketing activities, too.

#1: Know your target audience

If you’re building a new marketing strategy from the ground up, it’s probably best to think about your target market. Depending on the branding of your salon (and the treatments you offer), you might have a specific type of client you want to attract. Pick out some key words describing your ideal client: trendy, adventurous, stay-at-home mum, professional, families, etc.

This forms the basis of your marketing strategy. To ensure your brand remains consistent, you need to ensure that the tone of any print marketing or digital marketing you use for your salon is appropriate to the market you have in mind. If you portray your salon as luxurious, you’ll probably need to use more formal language than if your brand is more relaxed and fun.

#2: Consider every platform

With your target market in mind, think about the various marketing platforms that you could implement your strategy across. These platforms include: newspapers, radio, TV, social media, text marketing, email marketing, websites and online advertising. Unless you’re running a huge salon or a chain of salons, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to invest time and money in all of these platform, sochoose those that you feel can have the greatest impact and which will engage your target market most effectively. Having some form of social media presence is practically an essential in this day and age, and Twitter and Facebook are the most popular and well-used. There are many apps that allow you to link the two platforms, thus ensuring you only have to post to one of them to keep them both up to date.

#3: Utilise text and email marketing

You probably have some contact details for your current clients on record. That means it’s easy for you to contact them either by phone or email, but how do you do so in an unobtrusive manner? Text marketing and email marketing are great ways of reminding customers about appointments, notifying them of free appointment slots and offering deals and discounts to get them back in your salon. All good alon software packages will  contain modules that allow you to message certain groups (or all) of your clients at once in this manner.

This form of marketing is much more direct than social media and advertising, but be careful not to overdo it and spam your clients _ this will only give your salon a bad name and put clients off returning. You should also consider the cost of these bolt-on services when choosing a salon software package. Some suppliers will charge you for sending emails, although not all of them do. Also, check the cost of text messages. Ideally, these should be below 8p per message, with cheaper rates available if you purchase bundles up-front.

#4: Photos, videos and shareable content

In addition to sharing text content, ask your clients if they’d be happy for you to share before and after photos when they visit your salon. This essentially gives you free marketing content. You can post these photos on Twitter or Facebook and show off your stylists’ handiwork! Not only is it likely that your client will retweet or share the post too, but potential clients will be impressed by the work you’re able to do _ and might just book an appointment with you as a result! Also, you can make use of ïmicrovideos’ via apps such as Instagram and Vine, which allow you to create short video clips showing your stylists at work without giving away all your styling secrets. Obviously this marketing approach will be better suited to a salon that aims to be friendly and informal rather than those employing a more formal marketing approach.

Marketing can help your salon stand out from the competition _ and salon software can make your marketing strategy far more effective! Not only does it allow you to carry out email and text marketing with ease, it also gives you a significant amount of client data that you can use to base your marketing strategy on. Interested in finding out more? Take a look at what the UK’s leading salon software solution, i-salon software, can offer you. Book your demo today.