by Greg Milner | Jun 16, 2013 | Australia, Blog, Email marketing, Featured, Mag 05, Website Marketing
Salon owner and WSM member Cherie Underwood is a passionate convert to the power of her salon’s online presence to attract customers
There are many ways to dominate any given market in the salon & spa industry. You can have product dominance, when your product or service is the only such product or service in your area. You can have demographic dominance, where more people in any given demographic come to your salon as against all the competition.
And you can have media dominance, where your marketing message gets the lion’s share of any given media in that particular market.
My Social Salon – gives your salon the power of Media Dominance
Here’s an example of Media Dominance that most salon owners would give their right arm for. In Jannali, in the southern suburbs of Sydney, long-time Worldwide Salon Marketing member Cherie Underwood has owned Femme Fatale Beauty & Skin Care for a number of years. Several years ago WSM constructed a website for Cherie, which quickly became the top-ranked website for relevant search terms in her area. Last year, we built her another website – because it’s better to have two, three, ten websites than just one. A quick Google search for ‘beauty salon Jannali’ now brings up the following results on Page One of Google: 
When you analyze it, there are a number of things worth pointing out here: 1) Cherie’s original website, www.femmefatalebeauty.com.au, is the very first result on Page One. 2) One of the pages from that website is listed at No. 2 3) The YouTube video we set up for Cheri on her own YouTube channel is listed at No. 3 – important because about 30% of all online searches are for videos. Note that the link to the video contains her salon’s phone number; important because getting a phone call to book an appointment is certainly her Most Wanted Response 4) Cherie’s salon is listed at the very top of Google’s map listings for salons in Jannali. Here’s another example of Media Domination online. In Manly (Sydney) the competition among cosmetic clinics is fierce. But WSM member Alice Cassidy of Manly Cosmetic & Laser Clinic is enjoying marketplace dominance on the world’s biggest search engine thanks in large part to the ‘secret sauce’ SEO strategies our Director of Online, George Slater and his team inject into the websites we build for members. High up on the first page of Google search – for the search phrase ‘botox manly’ – Alice’s business occupies no fewer than four of the top five positions. 
The point is this: a combination of time, careful construction, frequent website updating, and an understanding of what it takes has given Cherie media dominance of her market. By achieving the top four spots on search listings, Cherie’s business has automatically reduced the amount of her competition her prospective customers can find. You simply can’t do it any better than that.
Want that kind of media dominance?
by Greg Milner | Apr 24, 2013 | Featured, Newsletter marketing, Website Marketing
Download a FREE sample of articles from the Salon & Spa Beauty Bank here!
Faced with the task of writing an article for a salon newsletter, a blog post or a social media status update, you can’t blame most hair stylists, beauty therapists or salon owners for throwing their hands in the air and groaning “I don’t know how to write an article!”
Let’s face it – you’re not trained as a writer; you’re trained to cut hair, do skin treatments, massages or nails. So it seems almost perverse that with the explosion in new media in the past few years, the need for the written word to promote a salon business is bigger than it’s ever been.
Websites require regular, frequent updates (blog posts) to keep them fresh and ranking highly in the search engines. Social media – like Facebook fan pages – need daily status updates to keep fans interested and responsive. Emails need interesting content, newsletters need articles containing news, not just product or service pitches.
It’s a LOT of work. More than most busy hair & beauty professionals can commit to, even if they had the skills to turn out an article that’s both interesting, compelling, and conveys the right message – over and over again.
The Salon & Spa Beauty Bank – at last, an online resource of done-for-you articles for hair & beauty salons to use in their own newsletters, emails, blog posts and status updates.
Thankfully, at last, there’s a solution.
Former spa owner (and long-time Worldwide Salon Marketing member) Susan Vincent of Staunton, Virginia realized the need for salons & spas to have ready access to a wide variety of done-for-you articles covering every imaginable hair or beauty-related issue, treatments, services, news and images. So Susan created the world’s first (and only) library of hundreds of articles, written precisely for the purpose of saving salon owners the agony and anxiety of having to create their own material for their websites, newsletters, emails and status updates.
For the very reasonable access fee of $97 a month – no contracts, you can leave whenever you like – Susan’s articles remove the pain of spending hours, days even, staring at a blank computer screen to research, gather material and put one laborious word after another. (Just think for a moment; what’s your time worth? Writing just one newsletter article or blog post a week might take you an hour of research and another hour of writing. Two hours a time, four times a month – 8 hours!)
In this interview, I asked Susan how she got the inspiration to start the Salon & Spa Beauty Bank.
[cf]Susan Vincent[/cf]
Download a FREE sample of articles from the Salon & Spa Beauty Bank here!
by Greg Milner | Mar 25, 2010 | Website Marketing
Luxury comes cheap in Bali – and they get people through the doors with efficient, sophisicated marketing
Rightly, you no doubt have zero interest in my recent five-day break at a luxury private villa near the beach in Bali, where the staff outnumbered our party of eight by two to one, and you couldn’t move without a butler polishing something or mixing you a clever drink by the pool.
But you might be interested in how we came to be there, and how a little island in a third-world country has profitably embraced the kind of marketing that any salon owner can do, but few bother with.
When I first visited Bali 35 years ago, it was a dirt-poor backwater of rice paddies and fishing villages. Electricity was a rarity.
But for many Australians, for whom Bali is but a few hours flight away, the island’s allure these days is as a holiday in a tropical paradise offering a vast choice of luxurious, cheap accommodation, where the people are almost embarrassingly courteous, civilized and welcoming.
In the mountain villages, among the rice paddies and melon groves, the people are still poor by western standards. Yet on a bicycle ride down the mountain from the volcano at Kintamani to the cultural center of Ubud, we were greeted endlessly by smiling children dressed smartly in school uniform.
But the astounding growth of tourism in the relatively-affluent coastal resorts like Seminyak has spawned a new breed of Balinese; well-educated, hard-working, industrious. (Unable to sleep one night, I walked outside into the dark, warm tropical air at 4am to find a lone security guard patrolling the villa grounds, and was taken aback when he cheerfully stuck up a conversation in very passable English. A security guard!)
But the pay, even for the best jobs in the big villas, is low. One of our butlers told us he earned the local equivalent of about $170 a month. Which explains why you can build a luxurious three-bedroom villa, including land, for less than $250,000! Five full-time staff, maintenance and utilities will set you back $1500 a month.
Typical among Asian countries, small businesses – and there are thousands of them, tiny shops all selling the same sarongs, handbags and wood carvings – have absolutely no earthly idea about even the most basic direct response marketing methods – ‘my’ kind of marketing. They’re all competing on price alone.
But the island’s (often foreign-owned, locally-managed) luxury accommodation industry has become very sophisticated at cheaply and efficiently reaching a global market that was all but denied it until a few years ago, save for the laborious and clunky work of travel agents.
To find our villa on the coast near Seminyak, I didn’t even leave my desk. Google ‘seminyak villas’ and you’ll discover brilliantly-executed websites that give you virtual tours of the property, location maps, vast numbers of photos, testimonials, nearby restaurants, tour operators, even menus you can choose to be cooked by your private chef. You can book online, you can phone them up, or you can get your travel agent to do it for you.
Here’s the villa we settled on – for less than $100 a night per head.
They leave nothing to chance. As I often say, the more you tell, the more you sell. The Balinese accommodation industry has discovered the immense power and efficiency of the web to generate leads, drive sales, confirm bookings. They might not be the most adept at other forms of media – direct mail, outdoor displays, print media advertising etc – but in this particular media, they’ve become slick, sophisticated and experienced.
It’s a lesson in doing one thing, and doing it well.
by Greg Milner | Sep 3, 2009 | Email marketing, Website Marketing
Tegan Messineo and partner Brad with their freshly-minted twin boys.
Hair Salon Website Template: Email or Hard Copy? Salon owners have questions, we’ve got answers….
It’s no surprise to me when Inner Circle members like Tegan Messineo of Body Firming & Beauty in Bunbury, Western Australia (who only got her Toolkit in December 2008) tell me they’ve literally doubled their businesses.
Tegan is a prime example of entrepreneurial thought AND action, one who doesn’t merely join the Inner Circle program, get the Toolkit and expect it to, of its own accord, leap off the shelf and gang tackle prospects as they wander past her front door, dragging them in by the hair.
Instead, she treated Inner Circle membership as the beginning of her education in direct response marketing, not merely as the ‘magic pill’ end to all her business worries. As Tegan writes this week,
“I have been doing LOTS of reading on Emotional Direct Response Marketing and listening to heaps of cds…”
That’s pretty obvious by the intelligence and thoughtfulness of Tegan’s question re direct mail vs email:
“I have got my website up and running (http://www.bodyfirmingandbeauty.com) and we are offering a FREE $25 voucher. Now I have 2 choices:
Option 1-
Post voucher with letter, special offer and current price list out to client.
Post another letter 2 weeks after if they haven’t used up their voucher
Post a 3rd letter
Post a 4th letter out to the client (the voucher has a 8 week expiry on it)
Option 2 –
Set up auto-responder to email the voucher out once the form has been completed.
Set up the rest of the letters to be emailed out.
The email one is really cost effective and it saves a lot of time once it is set up and ready to go, however it is very easy for people to press X and get rid of it when it comes in. Where as in hard copy the client will have to open it and look at it before deciding what she wants to do with it. What way do you think will have the best response? (and I am almost certain that you will say………test them both hahaha)
Yup, you’re right. That’s exactly what to do – test.
And I would say this whether it be about beauty salon marketing or marketing for an accountancy firm. Email, sure – it might be efficient, but it’s nowhere near as effective as real mail.
I would run BOTH alongside each other, ie they get an email auto-responder plus follow-ups AS WELL as the hard copy equivalents, delivered at approx the same time. That way you can easily and quickly measure response right alongside each other, piece for piece.
And once you’ve set up the autoresponders they don’t cost you anything in time or money anyway, so you may as well put some effort into the direct mail while the email stuff runs by itself. You’ll soon know which is getting the response, but I’d bet my own mother it’ll be the hard copy stuff.
I would run BOTH alongside each other, ie they get an email auto-responder plus follow-ups AS WELL as the hard copy equivalents, delivered at approx the same time. That way you can easily and quickly measure response right alongside each other, piece for piece.
But here’s what’s really instructive in Tegan’s question: the fact that she’s asking it in the first place says much about her new approach to her salon since joining the Inner Circle program. That new approach is itself recognition that she’s not IN the salon or beauty business, she’s in the marketing business. Marketing IS the business.
If more salon owners could take the blinkers off and recognize this fundamental truth, they’d begin to become business people – even entrepreneurs (there’s a difference!) instead of merely technicians who find themselves owning a business, however reluctantly.
If YOU want the kind of success that Tegan’s enjoying, but better yet, the real and tangible THRILL of discovering effective direct response marketing for salons & spas, and how it really can make your phone melt down with appointments, you need to join the Inner Circle program and get your own copy of the Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit® – the original and still (by far) the most comprehensive system of advertising and sales templates and strategies ever developed for the small salon or spa.
