Salon Internet Marketing: How to Stop Others Sabotaging Your Salon Marketing
This salon got 40 new clients in two days – no thanks to their local newspaper…
Interesting case this week which shows just how vigilant you need to be to stop people sabotaging your marketing efforts.
Untrained staff will do it all the time, if you let them. Phone rings madly after your ad comes out, only to be met by “uh…sorry, don’t know about that offer, hang on, I’ll ask someone…”
That’s something that IS under your control, and only YOU can fix it. But what about when your local newspaper refuses to publish your ad because ‘it’s against the law…”!!!?
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| Inner Circle member Tamara Jones of Beauty Bliss in Cairns, Queensland – 40 new clients from a single $300 ad on page 23 of the local newspaper. But no thanks to the newspaper itself. |
It happend to Inner Circle member Tamara Jones of Beauty Bliss in Cairns, far north Queensland.
“At first they point-blank refused to run my ad at all,” says Tamara, “Then they refused to let me use the word FREE!”
Turns out that some fool at the newspaper had half-read – and totally misunderstood – a recent case where the consumer watchdog had clamped down on an internet company pretending to offer free bonuses which weren’t actually free, they were hidden by inflated prices.
Rightly so…but for the newspaper to interpret this as a blanket ban on the use of the word ‘free’ was clearly nonsense. I know this because, being the diligent reporter that I am, I personally phoned the relevant mouthpiece at the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and got it from the horse’s mouth.
“Are you saying that it’s now illegal for businesses to give away stuff for free?” I asked the spokesman.
“Not at all,” he said, “all we’re doing is stopping people building the cost of so-called bonuses into an inflated price for the original product,” he said.
Sometimes, bureaucracy is a a condom on progress. But its effect is magnified a thousand times by officious and ill-informed employees mis-interpreting the ‘rules’ and needlessly preventing perfectly-legal marketing.
So what happened to Tamara’s ad?
On a happier note, Tamara persisted with the idiot newspaper rep. With no time to check the facts with the authorities, she agreed to change the word ‘free’ to ‘bonus’, and let the ad run last Saturday.It was published way down in the paper, on page 23.
“We had 21 bookings on Saturday, another 17 on Monday, more on Tuesday, and the phone is still ringing. 40 bookings so far, and the ad is scheduled to run again Thursday. I am so impressed. Of these bookings, only 2 are existing clients. My new therapist was supposed to be only working 3 days a week, she’s already doing 5 days…this is great for us, the salon is buzzing again, thank you to all the staff at Worldwide Salon Marketing…!”
Forty new clients…let’s say she keeps only half of them for the long term…and each is worth say $1,000 a year. So that single $300 could well have added $20,000 a year to Tamara’s sales. That’s pretty good leverage.
INNER CIRCLE MEMBERS: Want to see the ad Tamara used? Log into the Members Only ‘sealed section’ and navigate to Getting New Clients – Beauty’ and you’ll find it in .jpg format you can download. Hair salon owners: don’t give me grief about ‘oh, that’s for beauty, we’re a hair salon’. Instead, think: “How can I make this work for my hair salon…?”
