by Greg Milner | Apr 29, 2014 | Blog, Featured
Kellie Rout – from little things, big things grew
What would YOU do if you were in your early to mid-twenties and starting out in the salon business right now – would you do things differently?
Ten years ago, young salon owner Kellie Rout was a typical small business person – working full time ‘on the tools’, trying her best to manage, train and encourage her small staff, and struggling to figure out how to turn her little two-basin salon into a thriving business. She found many of the answers with Worldwide Salon Marketing’s membership program. Kellie joined the same year WSM was founded, and has been a Member ever since.
Fast-forward a decade, and how things have changed – a success story only a tiny percentage of hair or beauty professionals can mirror. Kellie’s Emphasis on Hair is now a two-salon business employing 22 staff. Kellie hasn’t worked on the floor for years, and spends almost all her time working from home with husband Keenan and enjoy their two young children. Need inspiration for your own salon business? Watch this 7 minute video!
[cf]kellie[/cf]
Want the same kind of power behind your business? Check out the My Social Salon marketing & mentoring program and apply for a 30-day Money Back Guaranteed Test Drive!
by Greg Milner | Apr 19, 2014 | Featured, Getting Salon Clients Quickly, Salon Marketing Online
If your salon has a website, you could be in for a big shock. Google is changing the rules (again) on how it ranks websites in its search results. If your site doesn’t fit the new regime, you could find your site dropping out of view, unless you take urgent action.
Because as of this week, Google will begin demoting websites that aren’t “mobile responsive.”
The company announced its impending changes back in February, giving webmasters nearly two months and plenty of information to make the changes necessary to keep their sites from disappearing from mobile search results. But the update is still expected to cause a major ranking shake-up. It has even been nicknamed “Mobile-geddon” because of how “apocalyptic” it could be for millions of websites, according to Director of Online at Worldwide Salon Marketing, George Slater.
“Come April 21, a lot of small businesses are going to be really surprised that the number of visitors to their websites has dropped significantly. This is going to affect millions of sites on the web,” he says.
Businesses that depend on people finding them through localised search — like, if someone typed “hair salon Hawthorn,” into Google on their phone — could see a decrease in foot traffic as a result of this update, says Mr Slater.
“Google has always been about relevancy, and content is king,” he says. “But that’s changing. Yes, they’re saying content is still important, but user experience is just as important. It’s not enough to have good content — if people come to your site and the content is there but it’s not readable, that’s not good.”
“I’m worried about it, a lot,” says one salon owner whose website is featured prominently at the top of Google searches. Thanks to her website’s position on the first page Google – which has 80% of the world’s search business – customers were finding her more and more easily. And she should be worried. A quick check of her website on a mobile phone and the problem was obvious. Because Google is about to change the way it ‘rates’ websites in search results, her high-ranking site risked being downgraded – ‘sandboxed’, in geek terms – relegated to back pages where nobody will find it.
The problem: Her site was built back when smart-phones had nowhere near the market penetration they now enjoy. Recent studies indicate that people are now using their smart phones – iPhones and Android devices – for fully 60% of all online searches.
And on a smart phone, her website was just about unreadable; the full-sized, detailed, multi-page site, crammed into a tiny phone screen made it almost impossible for searchers to find relevant information…like her phone number. Why is that important? Because other studies show that of all people searching for a local business like a hair or beauty salon on a smart phone, more than 60% are doing so because they want to buy something or book an appointment…now.
According to George Slater, “The people at Google aren’t stupid. They know that smart phones are taking over the world. They also know that if a Google search on a smart phone doesn’t take the searcher to a website that’s easy to read, Google’s own relevance in a mobile world will diminish.
George Slater, Director of Online at Worldwide Salon Marketing
“So the folks at Google are checking websites that appear in the top three pages of its search rankings. If those sites aren’t ‘mobile responsive’, the sites will be downgraded. And the salon will lose valuable business before the problem can be fixed, and more valuable time before the site can climb back up the search listings.”
In other words, your website could disappear from search rankings completely. And for many salon owners, like Lesley, that could be disastrous for business.
How to check your site
It’s easy to check if your site is mobile responsive. Just grab your smart phone and in its web browser, type in the address of your site. If all you get is the whole website, with all its lovely graphics and photos, and you have to scroll around that little screen just to find your phone number…you’re in trouble. Imagine it from your prospective customer’s point of view; all she wants to do is find a salon in her area that she can call and book an appointment for a cut and colour, or a facial, or some waxing, and you’re making it difficult for her. So she hits the back button, and finds another salon that makes it easy for her to do business there and then.
What to do
Call your web designer NOW. If he or she can’t (or won’t) help you – or can’t be located/doesn’t respond, which is often the case for salons who had their websites built in some cases years ago – call us at Worldwide Salon Marketing on 08 9443 9327.
WSM builds, hosts and maintains websites for hundreds of salons, spas, medispas and wellness clinics all over the world – and every single one of them is ‘mobile ready’.
Check out our website plans here – and solve your website problems with a single phone call.
by Greg Milner | Apr 8, 2014 | Blog, Featured
“I almost never go into the salon any more. I stay at home with my toddler son, while the business grows and grows…”
Nicole Lopez is living the dream that only a small percentage of salon owners ever realize. From a standing start three years ago, her hair & beauty salon in a down-market, outer suburb of the most isolated capital city in the world (Perth, Western Australia), Nicole’s Destination U has grown rapidly to the point where she now has a salable asset – one that generates serious profit without her being there.
DIRTY LITTLE SECRET: To this day, Nicole’s staff and clients – even her husband – think she’s a marketing genius, that she’s created a ‘marketing machine’ entirely through her own talents. Her husband still doesn’t know that the entire time, she’s been downloading her marketing ideas, templates and strategies from WSM Members Only Million Dollar Resources Library.
In this 8-minute video, Nicole describes exactly how she transformed a run-down, outer-suburban salon into a cash-generating powerhouse – with only FOUR staff.
[cf]Nicole[/cf]
Want that kind of boost to your business, and more importantly, your LIFE? When Nicole joined WSM she was one of just FIVE salons accepted each month into the Worldwide Salon Marketing ‘My Social Salon’ marketing & mentoring program. Click here to apply for a 30-day Money Back Guaranteed Test Drive!
by Greg Milner | Apr 4, 2014 | Blog, Featured
Amber Clayton is excited. Understandably. For months, her beauty salon in the little South Australian town of Port Pirie (pop. 13,000) struggled to bring in $3,000 a week. Suddenly, in the space of a month, weekly sales jumped to more than $5,000.
How? In this video, Amber explains the dramatic effect some carefully-implemented marketing has had, not only on her sales, but her new-found enthusiasm for business.
[cf]Amber[/cf]
Want that kind of boost to your business, and more importantly, your LIFE? Amber was one of just FIVE salons accepted each month into the Worldwide Salon Marketing ‘My Social Salon’ marketing & mentoring program. Click here to apply for a 30-day Money Back Guaranteed Test Drive!
by Greg Milner | Apr 3, 2014 | Featured
Sometimes I have to be brutal. And this week, a lovely lady in Johannesburg (I’ll call her Jenny) copped both barrels. Jenny had filled in a form on our website requesting a free 30-minute marketing one-on-one with me to find out how to save her beauty business from the smoking crater it had become.
It was no more than five minutes into the Skype video conference call before Jenny’s biggest problem hit me between the eyes.
Jenny had fallen in love.
If you’ve ever fallen in love, you’ll know the feeling. That heart-fluttering, shallow-breathing kind of love. The lying-awake-at-night, staring-at-the-ceiling and seeing stars kind of love. And like most love-struck people, she’d fallen in love with the idea.
On a trip to Europe about three years ago, Jenny was introduced to a new beauty product. Instantly, she fell in love with it. And because she fell in love with it, she knew in her heart that everybody else would fall in love too. Of course, it would fly off her shelves. So Jenny arranged to bring the product to South Africa and become its national distributor.
And that’s where the wheels started to fall off. Jenny had fallen in love with the product, and ignored its uglier, more difficult and cantankerous twin, the business. Like a jealous lover, the business took revenge, and sabotaged Jenny’s starry-eyed relationship with the product she’d fallen for.
Now, her garage shelves were groaning under the weight of bottles of gloop she couldn’t offload. Jenny’s situation wasn’t completely beyond salvage. In a few minutes, I gave her a prescription – admittedly, some of which involved taking some rather bitter medicine – that if implemented would give her the best chance of turning her fortunes around.
In short, she needed to woo the business as much as the product.
Here’s the lesson: loving what you sell – product or services – is necessary but not sufficient in itself to be successful. I’d dearly love a dollar for every time a beauty therapist or highly-awarded stylist has bubbled over with enthusiasm when telling me how much “I just love cutting hair,” or “I just love seeing my clients walk out of my salon looking so gorgeous.”
Admirable, for sure. But without the appropriate systems in place to generate a constant – and increasing – flow of customers, to upsell to those customers, to get those customers referring their friends, the enthusiasm soon withers on the vine for lack of sustainability.
Be in love with the business as much as what you actually sell.
Need a ‘kick-start’ for your hair or beauty business? Complete the brief form here for a FREE 30-minute coaching & consulting session with entrepreneur and Worldwide Salon Marketing founder Greg Milner.
by Greg Milner | Jan 8, 2014 | Featured
“My interest is in the future because I am going to spend the rest of my life there.” C.F. Kettering
Jokes aside, there WILL be great shifts in the hair & beauty industry this year. Some will be brought about by technology (mobile apps, for example), some will be caused by changes in consumer behaviour, others by the gathering increase in disposable income, and still more by competition.
As a keen observer of, and supplier to, the hair & beauty industry for a decade (yep, Worldwide Salon Marketing is ten years old this year), I’m probably as qualified as any to dust off my crystal ball and gaze into the future.
Be aware: assuming you’ll be able to run your business in 2014 the same way you did it in 2013 is a recipe for failure. The world IS changing. Here are my predictions for the year ahead.
Technology
Behaving like a two-year-old, holding your hand over your eyes and declaring “You can’t see me!” isn’t going to cut it in 2014. Sure, technology IS confusing, headache-inducing. Only those business owners who embrace it’s efficiencies and the opportunities technology offers will prosper this year. No, that doesn’t mean you have to become a geek, or a web developer, or a programmer. But at minimum, you must acknowledge the need, and hire the right people to get things done for you.
Back when cars had carburettors, distributor leads and zero computers, I could tear down the engine of my old 1951 Riley and put it back together again. These days, they’re so complex I’d be an idiot to even attempt it. But I willingly pay an expert to make sure my Range Rover is always in peak condition.
For the same reasons, salon owners all over the world pay WSM to host, maintain and fine-tune their mobile apps, websites, search-engine-optimization and more. (Find out more about that here.)
Prediction: mobile – that means smart-phones and tablets like iPads – will completely swamp ‘old-fashioned’ desktop and laptop computing in 2014. Those salons which embrace mobile, find out how to use it, and exploit it will leave behind those who ignore it, hoping it’ll go away. It won’t.
Finding your Niche
The days of the ‘one-stop’ shop, all-things-to-all-people salons are over. The vast majority of hair & beauty salons are ‘me-too’ operations that provide pretty much the same kind of services and products as a hundred competitors within a ten-minute drive. Hair salons do hair. Beauty salons do facials, waxing, spray tanning. And all of these same-same businesses will pretty much take anybody with a pulse.
The way forward to prosperity in 2014 is niche. Being ‘the’ one salon in your town/suburb that becomes known as the go-to place for X, or Y, or Z. Or the salon that certain ‘types’ of people prefer. There is absolutely zero marketplace advantage in being ‘average’. You must research, discover, invent if necessary, products and services that are unique to your business, that cannot be found anywhere else. And/or, you must find a way to attract and exploit niche demographic and psycographic markets, and learn how to specialize in them, become known as ‘the’ place to go for that kind of person/group of people.
And one of the biggest drivers of this change is staring you in the face; almost nothing you currently sell cannot now be found faster and delivered cheaper through a simple online search.
Prediction: By the end of 2014, salons relying on retail sales of commonly-available products for their ‘cream’ will be largely out of business.
Read more about niche marketing here. And here. And here.
Products available online:
There are still (a few) product suppliers who refuse to sell their lotions and potions, machinery and consumables online. But their number is dwindling rapidly. It’s inevitable that more and more will face the fact that if they really want volume, they must buckle to the internet trend. Forums populated by hair & beauty professionals are frequently spiked with outrage at such-and-such ‘salon exclusive’ product suddenly turning up on www.strawberrynet.com.
Or a new DIY home IPL kit (‘Oh…what next!!!!’) or the latest, greatest hair straightening system, and a hundred others.
No, nothing is sacred any more. And less and less will be sacred a year from now. Face up to it. Refer to the paragraph on niche marketing above. Simply because virtually nothing you sell won’t be available online cheaper and faster forces the issue; you must find more ways to sell whatever it is you sell in a competitive vacuum.
Prediction:
Opportunity from failing competitors
Sad, but true; more hair and beauty businesses will close their doors this year than ever before. The widely-accepted industry ‘churn’ rate is about 20%, i.e., 20% of existing businesses will close, replaced by another 20% opening up with hopes and dreams.
On the face of it, your competitor closing her doors is good news (for you). But few take more than passive interest, doing little more to take advantage of this than merely hoping some of her customers will come your way. This year, the winners will become much more aggressive in their efforts to grab market share, not only by actively seeking to damage a competitor’s business, but by being ready to pounce on that suddenly-available opportunity.
Which means this: database is King. Salon owners who recognise the immense (marketing) value of a well-maintained, clean and accurate database of clients and their contact details – all of them – will be in a position to not only take maximum advantage of their own client list, but also know what to look for when a competitor closes. And pick up that competitor’s database for peanuts in the dollar.
(See Technology above.)
Prediction: For years, farmers have been forced to get bigger, by absorbing their neighbours, to survive. That’s just economies of scale. The same will happen in the hair & beauty industry.
Cutting costs
It’s tempting, when things are going well, not to worry too much about ‘little’ costs. A few dollars here or there. But 2014 will require more attention. Electricity prices aren’t going down. Neither are staff costs. But the winners this year will pay attention to the little things. Getting a better deal on phone and internet supply. It’s easier than you think. Prices have come down dramatically, thanks to competition, since you negotiated your last deal. Product suppliers will – if you push them – give you sample products you can use as deal sweeteners. Newspaper publishers are struggling to sell ad space. (One of our members got a brilliant deal when a local newspaper auctioned a series of spaces they couldn’t sell.)
Ruthless Management
Our business is a people business. By its very nature, it often attracts caring and sharing ‘people-pleasers’ who’ll bend over backwards not to upset anyone, clients and staff especially. Which was fine back in the days when clients wouldn’t dream of being disloyal and going elsewhere, when staff signed up to a career in the business.
Those days are long gone. Daily deal websites have turned millions of people into bottom-feeding deal hunters, who’ll descent like a swarm of locusts at the slightest hint of a bargain, strip the paddock bare and move on just as quickly. Even without the daily deal scourge, instant availability of products and services at the touch of a browser button has reduced concentration spans to that of a mosquito. People are ruder, more discourteous, more demanding, less forgiving, less patient.
Staff – particularly the young ones – no longer think in terms of a job for years. Very few think more than a few months ahead. Again, thanks to technology, competition and social media, your 20 year old staff member can find another job on the other side of the planet faster, and get their more cheaply, than most of us could have dreamed of even ten years ago.
Prediction:
The successful salon owner in 2014 will become more ruthless, less forgiving, more focused on figures, more stringent with staff demands, less willing to be trodden on by clients. She will demand deposits to secure long appointments. She will insist on staff being bound by a simple, carefully-worded Policies & Procedures “This is how we do things here” document. She will, in effect, be swallowing a handful of ‘harden-up’ pills as you’re reading this, determined that 2014 will not end – like so many years before – with her declaring “Next year, things are going to be different around here.”
