by Greg Milner | May 15, 2015 | Blog, Featured, Latest News
At Worldwide Salon Marketing we’re always looking for ways to add value…and we’re found an absolute beauty here – no pun intended.
We’ve been working for months behind the scenes with a Nationally Accredited RTO to bring you a great opportunity to build value into your salon. That opportunity is to allow you to get on a Cert2 Nationally Accredited Makeup Course – SIBXFA201A – Design and apply make-up.
And it’s going to be happening in Australia in the Sydney CBD!
Makeup MasterClass Sydney This is the most amazing value for money Nationally Accredited Makeup Course in Australia today. (By clicking the link you will be put in a list of interested Salon Owners and receive more information from our partner, Makeup Masterclass Sydney Pty Ltd)
Note: There are only 87 spots available at this amazing price Of $799 – these courses are normally over $1,888!
You can pay a deposit to secure your seat and pay in full nearer the course date your choose.
There will be a cap on the amount of student places available.
Opportunities like this don’t come along all that often.
We believe this opportunity will help your salon by
- Offering wedding makeup and hair
- Add more value to your salon
- Retain more clients in the future
- Help increase salon profits
- Rid yourself of expensive and unreliable freelancers
PS as always with our offers there is a 100% MONEY BACK GUARANTEE!!!
by Greg Milner | May 14, 2015 | Featured, Salon Advertising Tips, Salon Service Guarantees, The Smell of Success
So what IS the difference – the unique, significant, compelling difference between your salon and any number of competitors within walking distance? I’ve been having this conversation repeatedly with many Members in our lately.
It’s THE issue that bedevils almost every salon owner I’ve ever talked to. And I’ve advised and coached literally thousands over the past ten years.
Most bang on with the usual platitudes. We give great customer service. Yawn. Our stylists/therapists are fully qualified. Sigh. You mean, other salons don’t have qualified staff??
Yet when I ask salon owners to list a handful of things that aggravate customers about going to a salon, guess what wins Top of the Pops almost every single time?
Being Kept Waiting!
And that’s where it gets interesting. I then suggest that perhaps the key clue to their uniqueness lies not in all that drivel about how wonderful their business is, what great customer service they give, how terrific their stylists/therapists are….but in their answer to the very issue that almost ALL salons identify as the most common complaint from customers.
Great marketing is about the unexpected, not the expected. Customers expect they’ll get good service. (Well, these days it seems more of a hope than an expectation.) They expect your stylists and therapists to be competent, able to perform their job. They expect you’ll use professional-quality products and technology.
Delivering the expected ain’t no foundation for a sizzling marketing statement.
So I suggest to these salon owners that they might just want to consider actually delivering on the one promise they implicitly make when a customer calls up and makes an appointment for 10am next Thursday.
And that promise is: 10am means 10am. Not 10, 15 or 30 minutes after 10am. In other words,
“The Most Amazing Guarantee You WON’T Get from Any Other Salon in (Your Town): If you’re on time, and we keep you waiting more than 9 minutes past your scheduled appointment, it’s FREE!”
Almost every time, my suggestion is met with choking, spluttering exclamations of disbelief.
“Wha…what???? We can’t guarantee that!!!”
Well, think about it. You’ve just identified the ONE thing that pees people off more than anything. You’ve sold the customer a 10 o’clock appointment on Thursday morning. And yet, you’re telling me that the customer has to wear the risk of you not delivering on that promise?
I’ve recently had plenty of time to mull over this line of thought. Forty two minutes, actually. That’s how long my doctor kept me waiting past my appointment time earlier this week. But doctors – who are, in essence, merely expensively-trained body mechanics – are in high demand. They have customers queuing up for their services, day after day. They don’t have to guarantee anything.
My dentist, however, is entirely different. Dentistry is an intensely competitive industry. My dentist never keeps me waiting. He calls his patients customers, not patients, “because the very word ‘patient’ has negative connotations.” Last time I saw him, I asked him about this.
“Firstly, it’s plain rude to keep people waiting,” he said. “If you can’t organise and manage your business to give people what they’re actually buying – prompt, competent service – you shouldn’t be in business. If I got a reputation for keeping customers waiting, sooner rather than later they’d find another dentist. It’s not as if there’s a shortage of dentists.”
Neither is there a shortage of hair salons or laser hair removal clinics. The country is lousy with them. Customers have almost limitless choice. They’re busy. They have appointments to keep too. Yet salon owners tell me they can’t guarantee the one thing people actually want, ‘because things happen out of our control.’
Yes, they do. Customers arrive late. (Or not at all, but that’s another story.) And if you let your customers dictate how you manage your business, that’s going to disrupt an entire day. My dentist has the same issues.
“I always allow 15 minutes ‘fat’ for each appointment that’s an hour or longer,” he says. “If a customer has a 10am appointment and doesn’t turn up till 10.30, I politely tell them I won’t be able to see them because I have another customer at 11, and I simply won’t keep another customer waiting because the previous one hasn’t had the courtesy to turn up on time.
“Funny thing is, ever since I implemented that policy, only two customers have ever been more than a few minutes late. One had a heart attack and died. The other had a bad car accident on the way to the surgery. Even then, she called from the accident scene, profusely apologetic.”
Strong, bold marketing is about having Brass Balls. It’s about making and keeping promises that your competitors are not prepared to make. And it’s about being accountable for those ballsy promises. Anybody can offer a limp-wristed, ho-hum guarantee. “We guarantee good service.” Big deal. But it only grows balls when it carries an accountability rider, such as “….or your money back.”
And, at the risk of sounding like that broken record, the value of such accountability in your marketing message far, far exceeds and outweighs the tiny risk you’ll ever have to make good on it.
But I’m probably wasting my breath. Who really has the balls to actually deliver what customers consistently tell you they want?
by Greg Milner | May 11, 2015 | Advertising Tips, Blog, Featured
[VIDEO] Why ‘old-fashioned’ salon marketing still works – Two interviews with salon owners who swear by the effectiveness of ‘old-fashioned’ hard copy marketing.
These videos were recorded about the time when it seemed many salon owners had become seduced into thinking that modern marketing was all about social media, email and text messaging…because it’s (allegedly) free.
In this video, Catherine Hanson of City Looks in Winnipeg, Canada, and Marnie Doman (then of Evoque Spa in Perth, Western Australia) reveal the huge impact direct mail and print advertising have had on their businesses.
[VIDEO] Why ‘old-fashioned’ salon marketing still works
by Greg Milner | May 9, 2015 | Ads that Have Worked, Advertising Tips, Featured
David Ogilvy – had a better understanding of what makes effective advertising than anybody else
This is quite a long blog post. Deliberately so, to be honest.
If you have even a passing interest in what actually makes people buy stuff (your stuff, maybe), what makes for ‘good’ advertising and what deserves to be instantly consigned to the trash, this will be riveting, eye-opening stuff (particularly if you believe the nonsense peddled by so many fools about ‘people won’t read it if there’s lots of text’, and ‘fill it with lots of pretty pictures and not much else…’).
Take one of the world’s top car makers, Honda. This esteemed Japanese company spent no less than $US107,000 on a full page ad in the New York Times magazine. Take a moment to cast your eyes over this ‘masterpiece’ below.
For their $107,000, Honda – thanks to the geniuses at their high-priced agency – ended up with an ad that clearly gave the ‘creative’ art director a warm fuzzy feeling, but breaks almost every rule in the advertising book.
The Honda ad misses the mark in so many ways. Here are just a couple:
1) the entire premise of the ad is a single small headline in the middle of the page – “Our speakers can create an interesting sound. Silence” – followed by one paragraph of text so tiny you need a magnifying glass to read it. Here is what it says (clumsily):
Most speakers only create sound. Ours, on the other hand, can also take it away. Microphones inside the cabin constantly monitor unwanted engine noise. When noise is detected, opposing frequencies are broadcast through the speakers to eliminate it, literally fighting sound with sound. The result is dramatically reduced engine noise for a quieter, more comfortable cabin. Active Sound Control in the Acura TSX V-6. The most innovative thinking you’ll find, you’ll find in an Acura. Learn more at acura.com.
—Honda Motor Co., Ltd.
2) “The wickedest of sins,” said ad guru David Olgilvy, “is to run an advertisement without a headline.” This pathetic effort for Honda contains a bizarre headline of three blank treble clefs with no notes of music. Er, doesn’t the sound system in the Honda play music??
3) Then, in a tribute to laziness, the copywriter has left the remainder of the page entirely blank. A complete waste of (very) expensive real estate.
Ogilvy, the creator of the most famous ad agency in the world, Ogilvy and Mather, was a stickler for research. And that discipline produced some of the world’s greatest advertising campaigns. The writer of this appalling Honda ad clearly didn’t do any research. If he had, he would have been able to creatively ‘steal’ some of Ogilvy’s work.
One of the most famous automobile ads in the history of advertising was David Ogilvy’s masterpiece for Rolls-Royce that ran 50 years ago. Like the Honda Acrua ad, the headline is pinned to the same USP—the quietness of the car. Here is that ad:
From “Ogilvy on Advertising”:
You don’t stand a tinker’s chance of producing successful advertising unless you start by doing your homework. I have always found this extremely tedious, but there is no substitute for it.
First, study the product you are going to advertise. The more you know about it, the more likely you are to come up with a big idea for selling it. When I got the Rolls-Royce account, I spent three weeks reading about the car and came across a statement that “at sixty miles an hour, the loudest noise comes from the electric clock.” This became the headline, and it was followed by 607 words of factual copy.
Here is Ogilvy’s copy:
Headline: At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock.
Subhead: What makes Rolls-Royce the best car in the world? “There is really no magic about it—it is merely patient attention to detail,” says an eminent Rolls-Royce engineer.
1. “At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise comes from the electric clock” reports the Technical Editor of THE MOTOR. Three mufflers tune out sound frequencies—acoustically.
2. Every Rolls-Royce engine is run for seven hours at full throttle before installation, and each car is test-driven for hundreds of miles over varying road surfaces.
3. The Rolls-Royce is designed as an owner-driven car. It is eighteen inches shorter than the largest domestic cars.
4. The car has power steering, power brakes and automatic gear-shift. It is very easy to drive and to park. No chauffeur required.
5. The finished car spends a week in the final test-shop, being fine-tuned. Here it is subjected to 98 separate ordeals. For example, the engineers use a stethoscope to listen for axle-whine.
6. The Rolls-Royce is guaranteed for three years. With a new network of dealers and parts-depots from Coast to Coast, service is no problem.
7. The Rolls-Royce radiator has never changed, except that when Sir Henry Royce died in 1933 the monogram RR was changed from red to black.
8. The coachwork is given five coats of primer paint, and hand rubbed between each coat, before nine coats of finishing paint go on.
9. By moving a switch on the steering column, you can adjust the shock-absorbers to suit road conditions.
10. A picnic table, veneered in French walnut, slides out from under the dash. Two more swing out behind the front seats.
11. You can get such optional extras as an Espresso coffee-making machine, a dictating machine, a bed, hot and cold water for washing, an electric razor or a telephone.
12. There are three separate systems of power brakes, two hydraulic and one mechanical. Damage to one will not affect the others. The Rolls-Royce is a very safe car—and also a very lively car. It cruises serenely at eight-five. Top speed is in excess of 100 m.p.h.
13. The Bentley is made by Rolls-Royce. Except for the radiators, they are identical motor cars, manufactured by the same engineers in the same works. People who feel diffident about driving a Rolls-Royce can buy a Bentley.
Price. The Rolls-Royce illustrated in this advertisement—f.o.b. principal ports of entry—costs $13,995.
If you would like the rewarding experience of driving a Rolls-Royce or Bentley, write or telephone to one of the dealers listed on the opposite page. Rolls-Royce Inc., 10 Rockefeller Plaza, New York 20, N.Y. Circle 5-1144.
When Ogilvy presented his copy to Rolls-Royce management in New York, the senior engineer said, “We really must do something to improve our clock.”
According to the Ogilvy agency, this ad ran in only two newspapers and two magazines. Yet it sold a ton of Rolls-Royce cars and the headline is Ogilvy’s entry in the “Oxford Book of Quotations.”
Why Ogilvy’s Ad Was a Masterpiece and the Honda Effort Is a Dud
The Rolls-Royce ad dazzled the reader with an avalanche of goodies, whereas Acura pinned its pitch to one small element of a very complex machine: its quietude. Here is Claude Hopkins on why an advertisement—such as Ogilvy’s Rolls-Royce effort—should tell the whole story:
Whatever claim you use to gain attention, the advertisement should tell a story reasonably complete …
Some advertisers, for sake of brevity, present one claim at a time. Or they write a serial ad, continued in another issue. There is no greater folly. Those serials almost never connect.
When you once get a person’s attention, then is the time to accomplish all you can ever hope with him. Bring all your good arguments to bear. Cover every phase of your subject. One fact appeals to some, one to another.
Omit any one and a certain percentage will lose the fact, which might convince.
People are not apt to read successive advertisements on any single line. No more than you read a news item twice, or a story. In one reading of an advertisement one decides for or against a proposition. And that operates against a second reading. So present to the reader, when once you get him, every important claim you have.”
In terms of copy, Ogilvy tells the quietness story in six succinct words:
Three mufflers tune out sound frequencies—acoustically.
To say the same thing—clumsily—the sad-sack Honda copywriter takes 64 words:
Most speakers only create sound. Ours, on the other hand, can also take it away. Microphones inside the cabin constantly monitor unwanted engine noise. When noise is detected, opposing frequencies are broadcast through the speakers to eliminate it, literally fighting sound with sound. The result is dramatically reduced engine noise for a quieter, more comfortable cabin. Active Sound Control in the Acura TSX V-6.
Finally, you judge which ad has the sexier call to action:
“If you would like the rewarding experience of driving a Rolls-Royce or Bentley, write or telephone to one of the dealers listed on the opposite page.”
Or…“Learn more at acura.com.”
And when you go to acura.com and you get a navel-gazer of headline created by a copy team talking to itself:
Rational thought meets freedom of expression
Good grief.
Acknowledgement: Although I have written extensively on the subject of ‘telling the whole story’ before, I thank Denny Hatch (www.dennyhatch.com) for much of the source material for this article.
by Greg Milner | May 7, 2015 | Beating the Competition, Featured, Salon Service Guarantees, The Right Mindset
The harder you try to sell your prospect on how good your salon is, the faster she backs away, emotionally if not physically
A phone conversation with a salon owner this week started like this:
“I’ve got a new salon opening up just three doors down, three others nearby are cutting prices, I don’t know what to do!!”
This salon owner was beginning to panic, but she was missing the point, so I told her, ‘settle down, and think for a moment’.
Most hair salons, beauty salons and day spas are terrified of their competition, ever watchful for price undercutting, more worried about what their perceived competition is doing than they are about their own backyard.
And that’s primarily because of a misconception about who your competition really is.
Your biggest competitor isn’t the salon down the road, it’s not the worry of staff leaving and taking clients with them. No, your biggest competitor is…
Your own prospect.
Imagine this for a moment. Your prospective client, whether she’s just walked into your salon, or she’s picked up the phone to call you after seeing one of your ads, has only four basic choices.
1) She can choose to buy from you
2) She can choose to do it herself
3) She can choose to do nothing, or
4) She can choose to do business with somebody else.
Only ONE of those four choices involve a rival salon. The other three involve only YOU.
As Harry Beckwith writes in his best-seller about marketing in the service industry, ‘Selling the Invisible’, Peggy, your typical prospect, is fearful – fearful of making the wrong decision. Peggy is not looking to make the ‘superior’ choice, she is looking to avoid making the bad choice. It is less risky for her to do nothing.
Almost every prospect for every service would rather minimize the risk of a bad experience than shoot for the best experience.
It’s called ‘looking for good enough’. Forget looking like the superior choice, make your salon an excellent choice. Then, eliminate anything that might make you a bad choice.
And that means eliminating the risk of Peggy doing business with you, eg with a free trial, or a money-back guarantee. And make sure you deliver a good service, rather than spend needless energy attempting to convince Peggy that yours is the best service.
Peggy isn’t looking for the best. What she wants is a comfortably good result, without any risk.
Which is why we have hundreds of already-proven ads and flyers that contain these ‘risk-reversing’ devices.
These devices haven’t been written into these marketing pieces just to fill out a bit of space. They’re there for a very good reason.
Because your competition is not the rival salon nearby, your strongest competition is your prospective customer. And you need every means you can muster to get that prospect to make the ONE choice you want them to make.
by Greg Milner | Apr 28, 2015 | Ads that Have Worked, Featured
Why Most Salon Marketing Fails – Message to all salon & spa owners addicted to Facebook, brainwashed into thinking that ‘old-fashioned’ types of salon advertising and marketing are dead:
A lot of people had a lot of good ideas before you were born. And most of those good ideas are still good ideas. But their lessons have been largely forgotten, which is why most hair & beauty industry marketing in the ‘modern’ era is a complete failure.
Take a look at this Revlon TV ad from 1973.
A ‘Charlie Girl’ had power and confidence unheard of among women in 1973 – hence the briefcase, and her hand on HIS backside instead of the other way round!
Anybody over the age of forty will remember the famous print and TV campaigns for Revlon’s ‘Charlie’ perfume. In the seventies, when women were still fighting to be seen as ‘equal’ to men, these ads were a revelation.
For the first time, they portrayed women as strong, deliberately sexy, confident and powerful at a time when most advertising put women firmly in the kitchen and laundry.
And if you’re a student of marketing, you’ll notice one more crucial thing: the ads aren’t about the product! There’s not even a hint about what’s in it, no dreary nonsense about how it was created by white-coated scientists with lots of letters after their names, in clinical laboratories using secret ingredients distilled from the purified secretions of a now-extinct South American tree frog.
Revlon founder Charles Revson knew the secret that most business people seem to have forgotten long ago; that nobody cares a damn about the product.
Revson’s advertising answered emphatically the only question that really matters:
‘Why should I, your prospective customer, buy this?’
There’s an old saying that talks about not being able to ‘see the forest through all the trees’.
Everybody suffers from it from time to time, even those who’re often seen by others as super-successful.
Like the salon owner who approached me last week for some advice. This very young salon owner joined Worldwide Salon Marketing a few years ago when she was working alone and struggling, and became almost an ‘overnight’ success.
She devoured everything I teach about direct response marketing for salons, soaked it up like a sponge, rapidly and repeatedly implementing everything she found in our systems, and pretty soon found herself creating her own advertising through everything she’d learned.
Became, in effect, a marketing machine. Her salon grew and grew, she bought another salon, and within two years of joining WSM was working almost exclusively from home, while her salons ran on automatic pilot.
But that wasn’t enough for all this new-found entrepreneurial zeal. It had to find another outlet somewhere. So she decided she’d develop her own skin care product line, and use the internet to sell it.
All good so far. Then she ran into a bank of fog that clouded her once-clear vision. She wrote to me and asked
“Greg, I need a bit of reassurance…is this web-based ‘glop’ a good idea, or am I frigging mad???!!! We all have these days when we wonder ‘what the hell…’ – don’t we?”
We do indeed. This is what I wrote back to her:
“Don’t think of it as ‘web-based glop’. There is no such thing as an ‘internet business’. The internet is not a business, it’s merely a media. Just one media.
You need to think of your idea as a business, like any other business. As a marketing and sales business that just happens to be selling a beauty product or products, using the internet as just one of the many forms of media it uses to get its message out, gather leads, make sales to those leads.
It’s much bigger than just an ‘internet business’. And it’s not something you can do for a couple of hours a week, sitting at the kitchen table in your track pants, thinking this is all it takes.
You’re contemplating setting up and growing a business. Not a hobby. Don’t think of it as a ‘internet glop’ hobby. Imagine instead that you’re setting up a drilling company, or a construction business, or a fashion brand. Do all the same things you would do for your ‘glop’ business as you would do for those businesses.”
She got it immediately.
“ Thanks for that…..reality check. You’re exactly right! It comes down to marketing and sales…there are companies selling the same product, the difference will be my marketing and my sales ability…which these other companies have no idea about!”
She hit the nail on the head.
Most people, particularly in big, dumb companies, lose sight of the fact that it’s not what you’re selling that matters, it’s how you market and sell it.
They fall under their own spell, mesmerised by their own wonderful product or service, deluded into thinking that their prospects, customers and clients actually give a damn about the product. They don’t, at all. People only care about what a product does for them, not the product itself.
Which is exactly why you see most companies selling any kind of hair or skin product blathering on endlessly about obscure and meaningless ingredients – essentially, selling the sausage instead of the sizzle.
So the next time you’re tossing around product options for your salon, look closely, ask questions, and when the product rep tries to blind you with science, hold your hand up and demand clear, concise answers.
“If you were standing in front of a customer, what would you say to this customer that would clearly, in a single sentence, convince the customer to buy your product as against any and all options available to her?”
Unless and until you get a great answer to that question, all you’re selling is ‘glop’.
Why Most Salon Marketing Fails
