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:
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 | Apr 2, 2015 | Featured, Salon Advertising Tips
In my daily newspaper, a story that shows just how little even experienced business people know about pricing, value propositions and marketing. If you own a salon or spa and want to charge premium prices for your salon body treatments or hair styling, this story is a classic example of how not to do it – and a lesson in how you CAN do it.
A reader had written a glowing letter of praise for the magnificent quality of food and service at one of my city’s top restaurants. “Very stylish, with interesting, tasty and creative food.” he wrote. “The service was almost faultless too, thank you.” And then came the “….but.”
“A smallish plate of (beautifully cooked) pieces of suckling pig and a little bowl of sauerkraut was…$55. Oh, COME ON…! Is this just cynicism? Do you just think people will pay this because they don’t want to be thought of as uncool by complaining…?”
The diner’s complaint was justified, because the restaurant had failed to justify its high price by providing value. And yet, that value was easily explained, had the restaurant’s management bothered to find out how to do so.
In fact, they had the answer at their fingertips. Yet they blew it. Sarcastically, they wrote to the customer thus:
“As far as going into detail and explaining our prices for you we won’t bother. We’re sure you don’t email big companies such as Calvin Klein or Armani and ask them to explain themselves for the expensive prices for a pair of jeans or a white T shirt.
“We serve good quality food that has had a lot of love and hard work go into it.”
Huh? As if other restaurants charging half the price serve lousy food thrown together by trained monkeys? Dumb. Yet they had the right answer at their fingertips. In the very same article, the restaurant’s part-owner and high-profile chef David Coomer detailed exactly the right justification for charging top dollar – yet, ignorantly, this brilliant sales information is presumably kept a secret from the company’s customers.
Each pig costs us about $180 to buy. It is air-freighted clear across the country from Victoria, and collected at Perth Airport by restaurant staff. By the time preparation, garnish and labour costs are added, it doesn’t leave much of a margin.
“If you were a rational restaurateur, you wouldn’t bother,” said Mr Coomer. “But we want to be perceived as people who are dedicated craftsmen serving very good quality food.”
Er, how on earth are they going to be perceived as dedicated craftsmen, if they don’t tell the story, shout it from every available rooftop. If I were Mr Coomer, I’d be instantly re-printing the menus, complete with the story of each and every dish. E.g.,
“For our suckling pig, we personally select only the best available animal from a specially-certified farm, approved by our part-owner and master-chef David Coomer, (name of farm?) in the cool highlands of sub-alpine Victoria. Each pig costs approximately $180. Most restaurant food supplies are trucked across the Nullarbor Plain to Perth, a distance of 2,500 miles, however we believe in only delivering the very best and freshest food to our diners, so instead of trucks, our animals are air freighted at a cost of $70 each. At Perth Airport, our restaurant staff personally meet each arriving aircraft to inspect the purchase and ensure it has arrived in perfect condition….”
Etc etc. You should by now be getting the picture. There is Magic in the Details.
Too often – and this applies to salon & spa marketing as much as the marketing of any other business – the owner assumes that the customer has no interest in the process, only the end result. Nothing could be further from the truth. Hark unto me; there is case study after case study of smart entrepreneurs turning the actual process into a ‘business within the business’, not only generating another revenue stream, but using the process as means of not merely justifying the high prices of its products, but making the customer feel intensely excited about paying those high prices.
Case in point: premium European car manufacturers such as Mercedes and Porsche have erected massive museums in the grounds of their plants, tied to tours of the factory where customers can watch their car being built.
Schlitz beer – telling the story, revealing the DETAILS, turned Schlitz into the world’s biggest
Famous US brewer Schlitz was the biggest in the world for decades, thanks at least in part to advertising which – unlike other companies – extolled the process by which their beer was made. (See example on this page.)
There is much to be learned and even more to be implemented in your salon or spa business from this. Do you simply present your customers with the end product and assume they know how you arrived at that product? Is your method of pricing little more scientific than the ‘Flinch Test‘?
(Explanation: the Flinch Test is one of three common pricing methods used by all businesses. Method #1: Look around at what everybody else is charging, and take an average. Method #2: figure out what a product or service costs you, and simply add a margin. Method #3: stick any old price tag on the thing, and if the customers don’t flinch, keep pushing it up until they do.)
The restaurant had a magnificent story to tell, yet failed to do so, and its only defence against price criticism was arrogance. That’s not stupidity, it’s ignorance. There’s a difference. Stupidity is not being ignorant, it’s being ignorant and refusing to educate yourself despite an abundance of information at your fingertips.
by Greg Milner | Feb 6, 2015 | Ads that Have Worked, Featured, Salon Advertising Tips
“Salon Marketing Why Salons Fail?” I just don’t get it. How can it possibly be that so many salon owners and beauty professionals spend so much time, effort and money furnishing their shop, making things look glossy and sexy, hiring and training staff…and put so little effort into the one thing that really matters; getting customers.
Sure, all of those things – ensuring the ‘public face’ of your business is clean, well-groomed and wears a smile is important. But it’s at least as important to put the same kind of effort into the systems, tools and tricks that get customers through the door. And by that, I mean salon marketing systems, and the ‘sales thinking’ that needs to go into them.
Thumbing through a local suburban newsletter this week, I stumbled on page after page of truly awful marketing. My staff scanned a few of these, so you can get a better idea of what I’m talking about.
Collectively and individually, these examples are about as lousy and useless as advertising gets. There are dozens of mistakes in all of these ads, I’ll point out just a few. (And see if you can identify them with your own marketing efforts.)
Let’s take this little gem of an ad. It’s right up there with the worst ads in the world. Hard to know where to start with this one, but let’s try
1) the headline. Er, there isn’t one, unless you count the name of the business. And almost without exception, your business name is the last thing you’d put at the top of your ad. In Dallas a few years ago, I met a guy whose industrial fan business changed it’s name from HVLS Fan Company to Big Ass Fans. Now that’s a name that’d pass for a headline. This one ain’t.
2) Price. There’s nothing else going for it. And, like most business owners who’ve made not the slightest attempt to educate themselves on any form of marketing, those who compete on price alone are on a slippery slide to oblivion. There’ll always be somebody who’ll undercut you. And in this case, even the price is airy-fairy. The mere use of the word ‘from’ sets off warning bells.
3) Story. There’s no story here to involve the reader. No compelling reason to read the ad at all.
4) there’s no proof. Why should I use this salon, other than on price alone? There’s not an ounce of evidence here that I’ll get what I’m paying for.
Salon Marketing Why Salons Fail
This ad isn’t much better. If the very BEST, most compelling thing this business can say about itself is that it’d like to ‘welcome Emma Harris to our team of highly qualified therapists’, they’re in deep trouble. There’s everything wrong about this ad, I’ll analyze three.
1) It makes the mistake of talking about the business, not the customer. ALL people act out of self-interest first. The unconscious first question in any reader’s mind is
‘what’s in it for me?’
In this case, a new therapist (big deal) at a salon I’ve never heard of. Be still, my beating heart.
2) It immediately sets the tone for the business by offering a 50% discount. Put aside that discounting is evil and profit-sapping by its very nature, the ‘50% off’ statement is meaningless anyway. 50% off what?
3) Like the ad above, there’s no compelling story here. What does ‘hair free’ mean? How do they do it? Will it hurt? Who’s had it done, and what do they say about it?
Here’s another one, from the same paper. (They must have all listened to the same ad sales rep; “Have a look at what all the other advertisers are doing, and do something pretty much the same.”)
This one makes the same mistake as Example #1 (name of the business at the top of the ad) plus a few extras.
1) A picture that wastes an enormous amount of ‘selling space’ without selling anything. Who are these people, and why are they in the ad?
2) There’s nothing even resembling an offer. Having read this ad, what is the reader supposed to do…cut it out and stick it to the fridge?
3) The bullet points are meaningless. Under new management? Didn’t know the last management, so why would ‘new management’ mean anything to me? ‘Subiaco service without Subiaco prices’? They’re price cutting. If they knew how to charge ‘Subiaco prices’, presumably they would. Business is about making a profit. ‘No appointment necessary’? It means they let customers call the tune, not the other way around.
By and large, these ads and thousands of others like them (yours too?) are little more than expensive business cards. If you want to make your marketing work, you have two choices:
1) Spend years studying great advertising, learning how to write copy that sells, implementing that knowledge, testing and measuring it in your salon. OR
2) Do it the easy way. Have a look at the Salon Marketing Starter Pack The Salon Marketing Starter Pack is full of templates you can use now to create winning flyers, sales letters and promotions. Including the Famous Raise The Dead Series.
Salon Marketing Why Salons Fail
by Greg Milner | Jan 17, 2015 | Ads that Have Worked, Advertising Tips, Beating the Competition, Featured, Getting Salon Clients Quickly, Packaging Salon Services, Salon Advertising Tips, Salon Marketing Online, The Smell of Success
I’ve lost count of the number of times over the past 10 years I’ve been accused of advocating ‘tacky’, so-called ‘unprofessional’ or ‘cheap’ marketing for salons and spas. In one memorable instance, a member of the ‘upper echelon’ of the beauty industry, a veteran of some 30 years, approached me during a marketing seminar I was giving and snootily told me “no self-respecting proper company would lower themselves to using your sales & marketing tactics.”
Well, I told her then, and I’m here to tell ya now, she was wrong in every possible way.
Have you heard of Time Magazine? Yep, the very same, establishment publishing giant that’s documented the movers and shakers of the world since 1923.
Like all publishers, Time makes its money from advertising, and to a less extent, subscriptions.
Now, nobody would ever consider Time Magazine any kind of hip, brash, swashbuckling outfit. Certainly not the kind of ‘old-money’ business that’d consider doing something even remotely ‘trashy’ or lowbrow just to boost its market share.
Um, well, yes they would.
Here’s a Time offer that arrived in WSM Director of Online George Slater’s mailbox this week. Yes, a full-color, four page direct mail piece offering
FREE WATCHES!
…in exchange for a drastically-discounted, 54-month subscription. (Watches. Time. Get it?) Now, for the serious student of marketing, this is worth studying. There’s nothing new here. Time is using one of the oldest, tried-and-tested, bait ‘n switch marketing strategies in the book. Because they know that people will often buy the product just to get the free bonus.
You see this exact strategy every time you browse your local newsstand; a free DVD or CD, glued to or packaged inside the magazine. Only a handful of people actually want the magazine. But many more just want the bonus CD. In Thailand, the Talisman 
Billiards Company gives away a free golf shirt with every order over $100. “I do see people increasing their order just so they can get the free shirt,” says Talisman owner Tony Jones.
This strategy works in almost any business. Salons and spas are no different. Got a cupboard full of products you haven’t been able to give rid of? Give them away, with an offer tied to an appointment for a service. “Yours Free” has for more than a century – and remains – one of the most powerful phrases in any marketing arsenal.
by Greg Milner | Dec 8, 2014 | Beating the Competition, Salon Advertising Tips, Salon Events
UPDATE: Membership of Worldwide Salon Marketing comes with many benefits – including but not limited to the kind of support and expertise that can give your salon or spa massive free publicity. Using WSM’s technical expertise and marketing know-how, Noosa (Queensland) salon owner Kim Susskind of Ebony Beauty is the talk of her town after staging a ‘stunt’ to create a ‘World Brazilian Record’ for the most number of Brazilian waxes performed in a single day.
Driven by free publicity in the local newspaper and radio station – generated by a carefully-crafted Press Release she downloaded from the Members Only Million Dollar Resources Library – Kim and her team of two performed no fewer than 55 Brazilians on Monday, December 8th….Here’s how Kim describes the amazing response….
[cf]kim[/cf]
The media is a Hungry Beast. Newspapers, radio stations, TV networks, magazines, not to mention a zillion online outlets, are voracious consumers of content. They soak it up almost faster than it can be created…which is why it’s not all that difficult to take advantage of it and get priceless free publicity for your salon. Few, however, even bother to try.
All this free publicity came about because we helped Kim ‘invent’ an idea for an event. In this case, a
World Record Brazilian Attempt.
There’s nothing NEW in this idea. In fact, it was originally dreamed up by another Worldwide Salon Marketing member, Tracey Orr of Absolute Beauty in Launceston, Tasmania, who set a record of 38 Brazilians in a single day a couple of years ago. But records are there to be broken.
Now, I’ll admit that I’m no expert in the art of Brazilian waxing, sugaring or any other form of removing unwanted hair from one’s nether regions. That’s not the point. Any number of silly, fanciful ‘world records’ are set or broken every week, and the sillier they are, the more the media loves them. Kim got to work immediately, and drafted a Press Release and emailed it to me within hours. After some careful editing and re-writing, I sent it back to her, and she took rapid ACTION, sending it out to local newsrooms.
NOTE: Worldwide Salon Marketing members can log in here and download that exact Press Release used by Kim to get all that free publicity.)
The very next morning a photographer from the local paper was in Kim’s salon, and the result appears here. (It is worth noting that this ‘story about nothing important’ trumped dozens of other more worthy stories buried on inside pages in the same paper.)
But that’s only the beginning.
With more than 3,000 fans on her Facebook fan page, Kim posted the newspaper clipping there, as well as a short video recorded on her iPhone. That video and newspaper clipping was also posted on her website, and she emailed and SMSd her clients with a link to the video to generate more responses.
As you’ll see, marketing is often a complex and drawn out process that requires many different threads to be drawn together.
WANT THIS KIND OF ACTION IN YOUR SALON? Worldwide Salon Marketing is taking advance applications for Membership of the flagship My Social Salon marketing & Mentoring program for 2015. Click here to apply for a 30-day Money Back Guaranteed Test Drive. (Note: application does not automatically imply acceptance.)
