by Greg Milner | Jun 1, 2015 | Ads that Have Worked, Beating the Competition, Featured, Mag 05, Magazine, Packaging Salon Services
How to craft a compelling offer
Too many salon owners spend money on an ad, or a flyer, and somehow expect a flood of customers simply because they placed the ad. It’s an enduring mystery to me how so many business owners think the mere running of an ad should be enough in itself to generate business.
Yet the information about what makes great advertising – for the salon business, for any business – has been public knowledge for more than a hundred years.
It was six o’clock on a May evening in 1905 when John E. Kennedy sent a note up to A. L. Thomas, the senior partner of the Lord & Thomas advertising agency. Thomas was just getting ready to leave the office when the messenger brought him the note. It read as follows:
“You do not know what advertising is. No one in the advertising business knows what advertising is. No advertiser knows for certain what advertising is. If you want to know, tell this messenger that I should come up. I’m waiting in the lobby downstairs.”
It was signed: “John E. Kennedy.” Thomas read the note with an amused smile then handed it to Albert D. Lasker, the junior partner in the firm and said to him, “Well, you have been asking this question for years and nobody has yet satisfied you. Maybe here is the answer…You see the man.”
Albert Lasker saw Kennedy that night. It wasn’t until 3 o’clock in the morning before they left the building. And when Lasker left that night, he had the answer to what advertising was. What Kennedy told him that night was simple. Advertising is
SALESMANSHIP-IN-PRINT.
Salon advertising doesn’t get much worse than this. It smacks of pure laziness, ignorance and desperation. With advertising as pathetic as this, the salon deserves to fail. And it’s so easy for a competitor to counter with “We fix $5 haircuts.”
And the core skill of ‘salesmanship in print’ is in creating a compelling offer – then building a story around that offer which virtually forces the reader to keep reading.
Most business owners are too lazy to bother with this. About the best that most can bother with is a plain and simple discount. For example,
“Half price waxing!”
That’s not an offer. All it does is train your clients to expect a discount. It devalues what you sell. And it takes money right out of your wallet.
But it doesn’t take much effort to do so much better. Take a look around at what you already do in your salon or spa – things you currently provide your clients for free, in the normal course of business.
Now, what if you put a notional value on each and every one of these things?
A stylist will typically give a client a brief scalp massage during the shampoo. A beauty therapist might, in the normal course of doing a facial, relax the client with a soothing hand massage, some eyebrow grooming, perhaps a mini pedicure.
All of these things have a value. Yet, if they’re merely provided as a freebie, without declaring that value, then in the client’s mind they are worth…nothing.
It’s only when you clearly ascribe a defined value of each and every ‘extra’ service that you provide, that you create in the mind of the client what we call in marketing ‘perceived value’.
Worldwide Salon Marketing member salons will know all about this. The hundreds of ad, flyer and sales letter templates in the Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit, and in the Members Only ‘sealed section’ of this website, all contain some form of what we call
value adding.
Once you ‘get’ this, it suddenly becomes easy to create massive added value – and it allows you to actually increase prices under the valued-added ‘shelter’.
by Greg Milner | May 29, 2015 | Ask the Experts, Featured, Salon Advertising Tips
Salon Marketing Tools: Why Emotion Beats Logic Every Time
I wear myself out trying to teach salon & spa owners that customers buy based on emotion, which is the most profitable salon marketing tool hands down. It has nothing to do with logic.Yet ad after ad, flyer after dreary flyer waxes lyrical about the features of the product (or service), often using impossibly-technical jargon, and pay scant – if any – attention to the emotional benefit the customer will get, or makes any attempt to even so much as attract the prospect’s attention in the first place with an emotional headline.
Arguably the best ad ever written didn’t even mention a product or service. Far from trumpeting overblown benefits and features, it actually went the other way, in a deliberate, well-planned and brilliantly-executed dare to the manliness of every red-blooded adventurous male in England.
Although nobody has yet been able to track down the original copy of the London Times of December 29, 1913, here is a reconstruction of the tiny ad Sir Ernest Shackleton reportedly inserted to recruit men to his dangerous expedition to cross the Antarctic continent from sea to sea. It attracted 5,000 applicants, including three women.
(Creative Theft Department: I know what you’re already thinking…what has this got to do with my hair salon/day spa/nail bar/laser clinic yada yada yada.)
Here’s what: I’ve just used this very ad to steal the idea for the headline for a big Yellow Pages ad for one of our Inner Circle members. Go on, think. How could you apply this to your business? Inner Circle members should already be dissecting this and using it. For non-members, unaccustomed to my teachings, believe this:
The University of Life surrounds you. Google is your best friend. There is NO excuse for saying “I don’t know where to look for ideas” any more. Truth is, the answer to anything is right at your fingertips. Claiming you can’t find answers is akin to insisting the world is flat.)
Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, emotion. The idea that you must offer a rational benefit in your marketing is nonsense.
There IS no rational, logical reason to buy a Porsche. Yet Porsche is THE most profitable car maker in the world. One of the most famous ads for Porsche cars featured nothing more than a picture of the car, and the following text:
Product benefits:
Too fast.
Doesn’t blend in.
People will talk.
Then there’s the famous David Ogilvy ad for Rolls Royce, which didn’t even have a photo of the car, just a clock.
“At 60 miles an hour, the loudest sound you can hear in the new Rolls Royce is the ticking of the clock.”
In the beauty business, a rational benefit might be
Your skin will be 37% smoother.
But more powerful, and much more emotional:
Warning: Men will look at you.
Your target market is uneducated about the relative benefits of one hair stylist versus any of a thousand others. Has pretty much no idea of the difference between one laser clinic and a hundred competitors. Attempting to explain a rational, logical reason why they should choose you as against any and all of your competitors is considerably more difficult that pushing a peanut up the main street of town with your nose.
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| Singapore Airlines didn’t try to compete on price, they made it emotional with the Singapore Girl... |
Faced with such a challenge, most businesses resort to the easiest, no-brainer path: discounting. The airlines are a classic example of this, undercutting each other because they can’t be bothered putting in the hard mental yards to come up with something better.
(Even here, there are examples of airlines actually striking an emotional note with their marketing. Remember the Singapore Airlines ads featuring their emotional icon, the Singapore Girl? They backed it up with the rational proposition, ‘Inflight service even other airlines talk about…’)
Aside: the rebel in me can’t help wondering what would happen if an airline offered a guarantee: We’ll get you there alive, or your money back.
Most business owners, having come up with a compelling offer – which is the rational reason to buy – rest on their laurels and leave it there. But the smart ones keep working at it, chewing away until they come up with that hard-to-define emotional reason to buy. I often call it a Unique Selling Proposition. But it can equally be re-named an ESP or Emotional Selling Proposition.
Either way, these are salon marketing tools that work, and work for you.
The real difference between one hair salon and another, between one day spa and another, is at best small, and certainly difficult to convey to the uneducated. But an emotional difference is – while more difficult to find in the first place – much easier to get across, much easier for the prospect to feel, and therefore much more powerful.
by Greg Milner | May 26, 2015 | Featured, The Smell of Success
[VIDEO] How Natalie Boosted Her Salon Takings by 13% – Why do some salons struggle to bring in clients, make hard work of re-booking them, seem to forever be ‘putting out bushfires’, when for others it appears to be so…. easy?
Well, don’t be misled. For successful salons like Natalie Tonks’ Kokum Hair in Hamilton, NSW, maintaining and increasing sales year on year means an approach to business that’s best described as…relentless.
But there is no better way of improving your own business fortunes than studying – carefully – why and how successful salons run their businesses. (There’s little point copying failing businesses!)
In this VIDEO, Natalie explains exactly
1) How she’s used newspaper advertising to bring in 20 new clients, from a single ad
2) How she re-books a whopping NINETY PERCENT of new customers into long-term clients
3) How she keeps track of results from all of her various marketing campaigns, online and offline.
4) How she’s brought in no fewer than 100 new clients between January 1 and March 12, 2014.
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Natalie Tonks has owned Kokum Hair in Hamilton, NSW for 11 years. As a Member of Worldwide Salon Marketing’s My Social Salon program, Natalie gets unlimited access to our massive library of marketing & advertising templates, strategies and tutorials, as well as a WSM-built and maintained website that’s at the top of Google search results, and a custom-built mobile app.
by Greg Milner | May 25, 2015 | Australia, Blog, Featured, Increasing Retail Sales, Salon Advertising Tips, The Right Mindset, The Smell of Success
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.
by Greg Milner | May 16, 2015 | Blog, Featured
Tracey Smyth, owner of Barberellas Hair Salon in Cessnock, NSW – a dramatic improvement in forward bookings thanks to her easily-replicated Diagnosis & Prescription system
Salon Marketing Tips: Tracey’s brilliant salon client Prescription & Diagnosis system
When your doctor hands you a prescription and tells you to come back in three weeks, what do you do? You buy the drugs, and go back to the doctor in three weeks!
Imagine if salon clients had that kind of respect for their hair stylist or skin therapist. Well, hair salon owner Tracey Smyth of Barberellas in Cessnock, NSW, is training her clients to treat her salon like a professional hair clinic, using a brilliantly-simple Diagnosis and Prescription system. In this brief video interview, long-term Worldwide Salon Marketing member Tracey shows the actual diagnosis tool she uses, and reveals the dramatic effect it’s had on her business in terms of product sales and forward bookings.
Salon Marketing Tips: Tracey’s brilliant salon client Prescription & Diagnosis system
by Greg Milner | May 16, 2015 | Featured, Salon Advertising Tips
Can’t think what to put in your salon’s ad or flyer? Take the ‘headline test’
Couple of weeks ago we took a call from a very disgruntled WSM member, who complained she’s followed the templates to the letter, done everything she’d been instructed to do, and got zero response.
She’d had 10,000 salon marketing flyers printed up and distributed to mailboxes for miles around her salon, and got not a single booking.
This was not a good call. This is why I tend not to take calls in the office.
So we got her to email us the flyer she’d wasted so much money on. And instantly spotted the reason for its failure.
She’d forgotten to include a fairly critical element.
Her phone number.
Put that aside, and it was a terrific piece of direct response advertising.
My point here is, you have to get EVERYTHING right to give yourself the best chance of success. Leave ONE thing out – testimonials, a guarantee, scarcity, a means of response – and you’re selling yourself short.
So let’s start with the most difficult thing first. The headline.
Do you get that horrible ‘blank screen syndrome’ when you’re racking your brains trying to come up with a compelling ad to fill your salon with clients?
Lazy salon owners, lacking the tools and templates our WSM members have at their fingertips, usually resort to some kind of lame discounting, throw in a pretty picture or two, a dreary list of everything they do, and let the whole thing fizzle out with a phone number at the bottom.
Very few bother to put thought, care and attention into the very first thing anybody sees when they’re reading your ad or flyer:
The Headline.
It’s the ‘ad for the ad’ – It’s only got one job, and that’s to compel the reader to keep reading.
Lazy salon owners tend to look around at what everybody else is doing, and copy it. And in most cases, that means using the name of the business as the headline for the ad. We call it ‘marketing incest’ – works pretty much like real incest, sooner rather than later everybody just gets
Dumb and dumber.
Nobody but YOU cares about the name of the business. The headline has to be about the customer, and what’s in it for them.
So here’s a simple test, a filter you can use to test how effective your ad’s going to be:
“Take away EVERYTHING except the headline and the phone number.”
Now, take a look at it. Is it still going to work, still going to get people to pick up the phone?
Example:
I’ve taken two ads, stripped out everything except the headline and the phone number. Which one do you think is going to get the phone ringing?
Example #1:
Contours Hair & Beauty Clinic for all your beauty needs.
Phone 000 000 000
Example #2:
Attention Ladies! New Glam Makeover Package Valued at $297 – Only $99 – Guaranteed to Contain No Illegal Sexual Stimulants. However, Men Will Look at You…
Phone 000 000 000
So the next time you’re writing an ad or flyer, put it through the Headline Test.
Like Amber Ahmed of Amber Esthetics in Montreal, Canada – click play below to watch this video:
