Marketing. It’s the only industry other than Hollywood that’s filled with 80% crap. When done right, it creates miracles. When wrong, it ruins bank accounts, businesses and reputations.
We’re living in a world where one tweet can make or break a business – and we’re living in a world where we can interact with almost any person, any business – at anytime, from anywhere. We’ve never had this level of interaction before. So why aren’t we using it more?
We see business after business reap in likes, comments, and shares on Facebook, we see business after business hit millions of followers on Twitter, and we see all those models posting selfies on Instagram, wondering how on earth they have 17,000 followers.
It’s all well and good for those businesses, but what about the small boutique day spas, the trichology centres, the hair salons, nail salons and beauty salons of everyday families? How do you breakthrough the clutter of social media and make REAL money?
How do you attract more clients than you’ve ever had before, and get them spending more money than they would anywhere else?
Do you have to have the most luxurious, most expensive salon? No.
You have to have irresistable offers – you’ve gotta have the marketing that works. Marketing that really works.
These 4 marketing ideas are all tried, all tested, and they’ve all been proven to work regardless of where you are, who you’re serving, and what you’re selling.
MARKETING IDEA #1: Facebook Sharing Competition
This idea has been used by several of our members, and I’ve personally set these up for them. Bodhi J – a boutique, luxury salon here in Perth – accomplished a Facebook giveaway/competition perfectly:
Here, they’re giving away a gift bag filled to the brim with their products, but to be entered in the competition, you must like their page, tag a friend, AND share the post. So not only are their likes going to increase, but anyone who gets tagged in the post by their friends will see Bodhi J, too. This entices MORE people to like – more people to share, and MORE people to pick up the phone and call.
Try this for yourself: come up with something you can giveaway… a service, a product – a mixture of both.
Get an image that will get people’s attention, and write a catchy offer (you can steal Bodhi J’s offer if you want inspiration). When you’ve posted the offer to your Facebook page, you can reach more people by boosting your post.
When you’re on your Facebook page, press “Boost Post” to pay Facebook for more people to see it.
Ideally, you can boost the post to two types of people:
1. People who already know you, and who already like your page 2. People who don’t know you, and don’t like your page
The results of a competition like this will vary from audience to audience, so it’s up to you. I personally prefer going for people who know you, because they’ll tag their friends who don’t know you. Free word of mouth! (well, almost)
To begin your competition, start with people who like your page. You can even try people who like your page and their friends.
Once you’ve picked who you want to boost the post to, hit publish. Within a few hours, the ad should be live.
What They Missed Out On:
A fun little way to build your Facebook page, and something Bodhi J should definitely use with those 1.4k likes is inviting the people who’ve liked your posts to like your page.
You can do this by going to any post on your Facebook page, and clicking the likes on your page:
When you’re in your Facebook page, you can invite people who like your posts to come and like your page.
See the little “Invite” button? You can now invite anyone who interacts with a Facebook post of yours to like your page. A pretty neat and free way to build your Facebook page.
MARKETING IDEA #2: “Rupert the Dog” Lost Clients Letter
How many times have you had a regular client just stop seeing you? How many times have you had a new client appear to her appointment, only to never see them again?
What if you could get them back again? And what if you could get them back on a REGULAR basis? Enter Rupert.
More referred to as a “Raise the Dead” letter – Rupert is used to bring back old clients.
This little puppy will bring you in a few extra thousand dollars by the end of the week if you do this right… the idea is simple: write a letter to your old clientele, from a dog’s perspective, expressing how you – the salon owner – are *very* upset that your client hasn’t come to see you in a while. Add an irresistable offer, enticing your old clientele to pick up the phone and call you – and you’re set.
It works. It’s adorable, effective, and who in their right mind wouldn’t react with an “awwww!”?
The idea is you export a list of names from your database (the software you use to book clients in) who haven’t seen you in, say, 3 months.. 6 months, 12 months… you get the idea. It doesn’t really matter how long – just make sure it’s not *too soon*.
Now, once you’ve sent the first the letter… the key here is to follow up. Follow up with those who didn’t respond, and keep following up. You’ll find more people will call you on the second, third, and fourth letters than the first.
Don’t just send one letter, and hope for the best.
Send multiple, and keep at it.
After all, you don’t quit after doing something once, do you?
MARKETING IDEA #3: Your Salon Window
Yes, I know – “why on Earth would I use my salon window for marketing?”
Good question.
Let’s say this ad was yours:
Placing ads like these in your salon window will increase your walk-in rate ten-fold.
Instead of paying a newspaper a few hundred dollars to run the ad, you could pay a printer $50 to print a large copy of it. Large enough for people who’re walking by your salon across the street can read the headline. Large enough for cars driving by to stop and read it.
Place that large ad in your window – and suddenly, you’re an advertising machine. Imagine if every mattress store had a large ad with the headline “Ten Things You Must Do to Get a Solid Night Sleep”… wouldn’t that make you stop and read it?
What about your salon?
“Ten Mistakes ALL Women Make With Their Hair,” (hairdressers)
“They Laughed at Me When I Went to Get My Lashes Done, But Only Gawked When a Man Asked Me Out to Dinner” (eyelash extensions)
“You Can Weigh 10 Kilograms Less – One Month from Today” (fat cavitation)
“Your One Chance for SMOOTH Legs That Men Can’t Resist” (IPL/beauty)
Have an irresistable offer in your ad, and you’re on your way.
MARKETING IDEA #4: Blank White Envelope Letter Box Drop
Yes. You read that right. Take any ad you’ve written (it could even be the one you’ve stuck in your front window), put it into a *BLANK* white envelope, and deliver them to a few streets around your salon.
“But a blank envelope, Greg?”
Yes, BLANK.
If you got home from work this evening, opened your mailbox and found a blank white envelope with no name, no address, no stamp… wouldn’t that be the *first* thing you’d open?
You bet it would be. That’s the type of attention you need to get with your marketing: it should be the first thing your potential clients open/read/watch. If it doesn’t get their attention, you’re screwed.
This flyer drop – this type of marketing – is incredibly effective to bring in new clients. And bringing in new clients is an absolute must.
All of these ideas can be used in any type of salon, any type of spa – regardless of who you serve, regardless of where you are, and it doesn’t matter if you’re in an English speaking country, or in the middle of Spain speaking only Spanish.
The only way you’ll be able to bring in new clients, and rescue your old clientele, is to do something about it. Marketing your salon doesn’t have to be perfect, and with time (and practice), you’ll get better.
This might just be the most important few paragraphs you read this week, this month, or even this year.
It was sparked by a converstion with a brand new WSM member, who called shortly after the courier knocked on her door to hand over her Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit®
This salon owner was clearly overwhelmed by the task ahead of her. “There’s so much material in the Toolkit, I just can’t get my head around what to do first,” she wailed.
(My immediate thought, left unsaid, was ‘maybe we’re giving Members too much material’. But then, how do you eat an elephant? Same way you eat a hamburger, one bite at a time.)
So I told her to take a deep breath, and took her through the only THREE things she needs to concentrate on. “Once you GET this,” I said, “everything else becomes easy, logical, simple.”
When we take on a new Member salon into our flagship marketing & mentoring program, My Social Salon, we work on three main areas, and here they are:
1) MESSAGE
2) MARKET
3) MEDIA
First, under Message: what do you say to your past, present and future prospects, customers and clients that is magnetic… that cannot be ignored…that must be responded to. In other words, what is your
USP – Unique Selling Proposition
Most salon business people – and this applies even MORE to big, dumb companies who pay advertising agencies a fortune in shareholders money – make the mistake of believing that some cutesy slogan is their USP.
Eg., here are some slogans used by three of America’s biggest advertisers:
1. We’re with you.
2. That was easy
3. The stuff of life.
Do these bring instantly to mind the name of the company? Nope, vague, meaningless drivel, all three of ’em.
Here’s what’s instructive: these slogans could be used by almost any company on the planet, with about as little impact. As Dan Kennedy writes in a recent article “…if anybody and everybody can use your USP, it ain’t one…”
I’d be a rich man indeed if I had a buck for every time a salon owner told me “Our USP is ‘we give our clients great service’….”
Put your USP through this test: is it a GREAT answer to the question, ‘why should I do business with YOUR salon as against any of the others?’
If not, go back to the drawing board. Take some of the truly great USPs as a model, lay them down next to your USP, see how they compare.
Does yours do for your business what Tom Monaghan’s did for Dominos Pizza? “Fresh, Hot Pizza Delivered in 30 Minutes – Guaranteed”…?
Does it answer the question like Federal Express answered with “Absolutely, Positively Overnight.”
Let’s say you’ve crafted a great message with a terrific USP at its core, next problem: your MARKET.
Who do you deliver that great message to – and deliberately, who do you exclude from it – do you do that effectively, efficiently with little or no manual labour, are you smart about this or are you simply throwing mud against the wall?
When asked ‘Who’s your target market?’ most salon owners will say ‘Er, all of the adult female population within a 5 mile radius.’
Terrific. If you want to send a postcard once a year to all adult females within a 5 mile radius of your salon – hardly an intense, focussed campaign – what’s your budget have to be? Um, $50,000. How much have you got? ‘Uh…600 bucks.’
Problem. Somehow, preferably by science, you have to shrink your target market to a small, carefully-selected list of the best prospects so that your marketing efforts are concentrated for maximum effect with minimum expense. Jump up and down in a puddle, not the ocean.
And third, the MEDIA.
Having chosen your target market and crafted the perfect message to that target market, what MEDIA are you going to use to deliver that message to that market?
(If you haven’t twigged to this already, once you’ve figured out your perfect target market, and the message to send to it, the media tends to choose itself).
So there.
That’s it in simple terms. Message, Market, Media.
Get those things right, the rest almost automatically falls into place.
How to sell salon memberships – My Salon Success magazine
“How to sell salon memberships that bring in clients and cash up-front”…latest issue of My Salon Success magazineout now!
Just this morning, one of our Member salons in Noosa, Queensland told me she had already pre-sold $9,000 worth of memberships to her clients – and they don’t even go on sale till July 25.
There’s a whole new issue of My Salon Success magazine, and it’s all about selling memberships.
You can view the magazine on your iPhone, iTouch and iPad. (We are just updating the Android version and it should be out soon – watch this channel.)
If you have ever wondered now to sell memberships in your salon to raise cash and lock your clients into coming back you need to read this Issue.
Click on this linkand you’ll be taken straight to the Magazine. You can subscribe for free and get this and 16 other Issues.
History is a great teacher, mainly because great ideas are always great ideas, no matter when they were dreamed up.
Got a product or service you’ve been selling for years, tearing your hair out trying to think of ways to improve the product? Then it’s time for some lateral thinking, because there’s probably nothing wrong with the product (or service) per se.
It might just be a matter of re-thinking how you sell it.
Couple of examples. Those little orange fizzy pills called Berocca have been sold as a hangover cure for decades. The pill itself hasn’t changed since about 1980.
But the marketing has. Seen an ad like this on TV recently?
All the manufacturer did was re-invent the sales message. Instead of focussing on Berocca’s pitch as a pick-me-up after a big night out, they re-imagined it as a pitch for a big day ahead.
The advertising world is littered with such examples. More than a decade ago, Subway re-invented itself, turning its unhealthy fast-food image upside down into a health-food and weightloss company.
It all came down to ‘The Subway Guy’ Jared Fogle and his single-year weight loss of 245lbs.
[cf]fogle[/cf]
Nearly 70 years ago, ad genius David Olgilvie did the same with the Hathaway shirt company. Hathaway was a largely invisible shirt manufacturer founded way back in 1837.
But with the famous ‘Man in the Hathaway Shirt’ campaign featuring Baron George Wrangnell in an eye-patch (even though he had 20/20 vision) Ogilvie’s campaign instantly turned the company into the biggest shirt manufacturer in the United States.
The product itself didn’t change at all. If you study this ad – and the text that goes with it – you’ll notice that Ogilvie used a well-proven device; he told the story of the Hathaway shirt in extreme detail. How it was made using material sourced from England, India and Paris. How the tails were longer, so they didn’t pop out of your trousers. How the buttons are all mother-of-pearl. Here’s the exact wording of the copy under that image:
In other words, unlike competitors who didn’t believe their customers were interested in the process, he made the invisible visible.
Still looking for the ‘next big thing’ to sell in your salon? Maybe you’re barking up the wrong tree. Maybe, just maybe, you can tell the story in a different way – and so ‘re-invent’ the product without changing a thing.
You don’t need to be a marketing genius to have a successful salon. You just need the right tools.
Leo DiCaprio as Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street
Leonardo DiCaprio is in line for an Oscar for his performance in Martin Scorsese’s new film The Wolf of Wall Street. DiCaprio plays the real-life Jordan Belfort, a morally-bankrupt, cocaine-sniffing New York stock swindler who made ripping people off an art-form, and went to jail for it.
I’ve read his self-serving autobiography. It’s repugnant trash.
He still owes $100 million to his victims, a minor oversight Belfort and his admirers tend to underplay as he tours the world making millions more by telling anybody who’ll listen (and pay) how he ‘saw the light’ in prison and became a reformed, hand-on-heart motivational speaker, actually lecturing already-good (but gullible) people on how to lead a better, more fulfilling life.
Good grief. The man is a manipulator, no more deserving of admiration than Ponzi-scheme fraudster Bernie Madoff. The only difference is that Bernie’s still in jail, presumably watching Belfort’s activities with envy.
The catalyst for this line of thought is a recent Facebook post by master copywriter Pete Godfrey on the difference between persuasion and manipulation. At its heart, the difference is intent.
Most marketing in the hair and beauty industry is so bland, uninteresting, completely lacking in passion (for whatever service or product is being pitched) it seems as if the intent is to put readers to sleep. Yet, over some of the advertising strategies and ideas we provide Member salons in our My Social Salon program, I’ve been accused of making it look manipulative.
As Pete writes,
“If what you are selling is crap, and you know you are ripping people off, then your sales message is manipulation, right? If you honestly believe in your product, and it actually IS a good product, and you know damn well it will improve your customer’s life, then you owe it to yourself and to your customer to pull out every persuasion tip you can muster to get the sale.
Because it would almost be a crime if your customer didn’t buy!”
A recent example; in a coaching session with a Member last week, she was bemoaning the poor results of a promotion for her ‘enzyme skin peel’ treatments. I asked her how she described the treatments in her promotion. She said “enzyme skin peels.” Yawn. But how do you describe it to a client when you’re face-to-face?
“Oh, I get excited, I can’t help it, I tell them it’s like a tiny PacMan, chewing away at all those dead skin cells and leaving her skin absolutely glowing and flexible, moist and fresh. It really does feel ten years younger!”
I didn’t say anything for a few moments. Then, “Do you see the difference?” After a pause, she said
“Um…I guess I have a lot to learn about selling something.”
According to Pete Godfrey,
“That’s the kind of mindset I get myself into every time I write copy. It’s like I’m writing a letter to a loved one, maybe my brother and he’s dying from some strange weird disease, and what’s happened is I’ve come across the cure, but no one has heard of it, the doctors say it’s a phoney, and everybody is in my brother’s ear telling him not to try this new wonder-drug; but… it’s my job to convince him to try it. This is the kind of pull-out-all-the-stops attitude YOU must have as well when writing copy that sells. Get passionate. Get excited. Then it’s not manipulation, just damn good persuasion.”
He’s right. If you truly believe in what you’re selling, sell it hard. You do nobody any favours by hiding the benefits of your product or service behind a bland, say-nothing mere label like ‘enzyme skin peels.’ If your intent is honest, then shout from the rooftops.
Few things are more dangerous than a bad person with good people skills. History abounds with them, from Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin down. But in business, there is nothing more powerful, more persuasive, more compelling than a promoter with good intentions who believes passionately that what he or she is selling is of genuine, ground-breaking benefit to the consumer.
Pearl of Beauty salon owner Amber Clayton was working on clients full time and struggling to grow her business when she joined Worldwide Salon Marketing in February 2014.
Now, little more than a year later, she has four full-time staff and is completely ‘off the tools’, spending her time training and mentoring staff, and most importantly, marketing the business to keep them busy.
In this video, Amber explains how she did it…
Want your salon to be as successful as Amber’s?
Get hundreds of done-for-you salon marketing templates – the same ones Amber and many others use – click here to find out more.
Nearly 70 years ago, ad genius David Olgilvie did the same with the Hathaway shirt company. Hathaway was a largely invisible shirt manufacturer founded way back in 1837.
