Beauty Salon Marketing 101: Back to Basics
Asking Too Much Of Your Advertising.
Most business owners try to get their ad to do too much, to appeal to all possible prospects. And by doing so, it achieves nothing. Asking a single ad to do everything is asking too much of it.
A single ad should have one purpose, one job, one expected outcome, and nothing more. If you want to sell a particular kind of body treatment or hair service, only sell that service…sell it hard, with a great offer, a terrific headline, a strong guarantee… don’t simply fill your ad with a bullet-pointed list of everything you do. That’s not an ad, it’s an expensive 
business card. And nobody ever sold anything off a business card.
business card. And nobody ever sold anything off a business card. Here’s a typical beauty industry salon ad…. typically thoughtless, wasteful advertising, trying to do everything and in the end achieving nothing.So instead of saying in your advertising something like “call us for all beauty needs such as body treatments, pedicures, manicures, massages, nails, facials, blah blah blah…’ make your ad specific, make the offer very clear…
A word of warning: Most of the people who sell you advertising space are ignorant of this kind of advertising, and if they’re not ignorant of it, they fear it, because it is so accountable.
Many, many times we have had Members tell us that advertising reps have mocked the copy-intensive style of advertising in the Toolkit, sneering at it because it looks unprofessional, doesn’t look glossy, doesn’t have lots of pretty pictures in it, has too much text, etc etc.
Often, magazines have even refused to run this kind of ad, because their main interest is producing a glossy publication that looks pretty to their readers, rather than accepting advertising that actually works for their advertisers…the people who actually pay the magazine’s bills.
The general advertising industry is not at all tied to results. What the smart business owner has to do is educate himself enough so that he’s an informed, well-researched consumer when he does deal with service providers like agencies and printers and publishers.
As a small business owner, you should be investing only in marketing that is results measurable, so that you can track what you get for your dollar. You have to learn to say no to certain advertising reps or advertising opportunities, unless and until those opportunities pass the accountability test, for example if you’re approached to advertise in a magazine, you ONLY go ahead with that offer if you can run YOUR kind of ad, not their kind of ad – and only then if you’ve satisfied yourself that that particular publication is attracting the kind of readers you want as clients.
Most businesses in the beauty industry are out there with no message at all. Typically, salon owners will buy or lease their space, hang a sign out the front, spend a huge amount of time and energy on the interior, fret over the logo etc etc…. and open the door and wait for customers.
Very few spend any time at all on the only thing that really matters, which is getting customers through the door. Very few spend any time or research on what they’re going to communicate to the market about who they are, and why prospects should do business with them. Very few spend any time doing what we call ‘sales thinking’: which is analyzing what you sell, what your USP is, what your customers really want – and crafting a perfectly-pitched message that sells you and your business.
You see, advertising is nothing more than salesmanship in print.
