Marketing ideas to avoid

Every great salon owner has had many marketing fails. Trial and error is a necessity in finding out what marketing works in getting more people through your door, more often, spending more. Here’s five really simple salon marketing mistakes to avoid and save yourself a lot of money and even more importantly, a lot of time. 1. Daily Deals The guarantee of hopping phones and a busy salon with little or no effort is almost too good to be true. Daily deals may get bums on seats and keep your staff busy, but it’s a complete false economy. Daily deal sites are essentially a virtual salon. For example if a potential client receives an email offering them a facial with 65% off , you may think it’s a once off chance to get them through the door and then the next time, they’ll buy it at full price right? Wrong. That same client will receive another offer for a facial a number of weeks later for a different salon. The daily deal site actually owns the clients in reality and are just using the facilities of other salons around them. Plus, you make virtually no money and can alienate loyal clients by giving strangers discounts instead of rewarding regulars after years of custom. The Solution: an amazing experience coupled with a great loyalty program will drive referrals and increase retention rates. That’s what grows a salon year-after-year. 2. Discounting on Facebook Status update: 50% off this, half-price that for a limited time only. Many salons have gotten deep into the discounting game on Facebook and their business page has become a mini-deal site in itself. There’s a few problems with this: - People won’t engage with your content if it’s salesy. Facebook will then show your content to less and less people if you’re not getting likes and shares. Soon you’ll notice your account feels empty as your content will be seen by about 2-3% of the people who like your page - You’re cutting your margins and devaluing your service and diluting your brand. A page that constantly promotes discounts creates the impression that it’s a struggling salon. The Solution: just provide amazing content that makes you look like an expert – everyone wants to feel they’re spending their money with the best. 3. Adding your salon to a listing site This is a little trickier. There’s lots of sites out there listing salons. You search by area and then click through on your chosen salon with some even allowing you to make a booking. There’s pros and cons to these sites and they need to be handled with care. This is simply because when someone sees the listing site in your salon and searches on the site, they will also see your competitors. If they are already in your salon, don’t give them the opportunity to find out who else is close-by. The Reality: the listing site works for clients who have never heard of you. If you promote it in your salon though, you are simply increasing the chances of other salons being found. The Solution: it’s fine if you want to be listed but promote your own business, not the listing site. 4. Advertising in local press newspaper advert salon You probably get a call every week from your local newspaper asking you to advertise. While local press is great for gossip, local news and a great way to promote your business via PR, don’t fork out cash for column inches. Firstly you are targeting a very broad audience. Secondly and most importantly, some studies show that you are 10 times less likely to read an advertisement than an actual article. Why pay more for the less effective method. Ring the paper with a great story about your business – an anniversary; an award; a visit from a celeb; an event or anything exciting that you hold close to your heart. The Solution: contact your local paper with a news story. Alternatively you can set up a marketing campaign directkly from your salon software. 5. Using a Coffee-type loyalty scheme for your exclusive services Many salons use coffee-type loyalty programs. Buy four facials and get the fifth one free. While you are rewarding clients, you are simply discounting a service that the client is willing to pay full price for anyway. This isn’t the way to do it as it decreases average spend. The Reality: when you run a loyalty scheme such as this, you are discounting services that the client is willing to full-price for anyway. The solution: run a loyalty program that’s based on points i.e. when you build up points you are rewarded with a product or service that you’ve never had before. This rewards and upsells. Platinum has a fully automated loyalty scheme, the loyalty points are saved in the customer's profile and can be converted at a time of your choosing and converted to the amount of your choosing.