by Greg Milner | Feb 21, 2017 | About Us, Beating the Competition
Marketing Plan For A Beauty Salon: What To Do When Your Competition COPIES You…
We’ve often had Members ask what to do when a nearby salon sees the marketing churned out by one of ‘our’ salons – and attempts to copy it.
For most Members, this is rarely a big problem, mainly because the salon ‘swiping’ the ideas in our Member’s advertising hardly ever ‘gets it’, and invariably makes a botch-job of it…. gets half of it right, but leaves out crucial direct-response compenents and therefore the ‘copy-cat’ ad fails miserably.
When you’re successful, when your success is obvious, you will always get people attempting to copy you. And if a rival sees your salon packed with clients, the queue heading off down the street, they ARE going to wonder what you’re doing that they’re NOT doing, and a (very) few will attempt to second-guess you and some will get it half right.
I know this because as Worldwide Salon Marketing gets bigger, as our reach stretches further and further around the planet, there are more and more people trying to ‘knock us off’. In fact, there is one fly-by-night marketer in Canada – whose name I’m not generous enough to publicize here – who has carbon-copied not only our products and services down to exactly the same brand names, but plagiarised our entire lead generation and sales system as well. He’s got more front than Dolly Parton, effectively passing himself off as us.
This is a guy who was actually representing us for a short time. Enough time for him to obtain all our copyrighted and trademarked material, and for us to realize he was world-class at over-promising and under-delivering, lousy at supporting Members and hopeless at any kind of follow-through. In other words, he wanted the cream but wasn’t prepared to put in the backbone of support infastructure to give it substance.
Now, I’m not going to reveal here the steps we’re taking to counteract this threat. Safe to say, when you’re about to punch someone, you don’t flag it, you just punch. He’ll probably take some of our business from us in the short term. But in the medium term, we’ll win because we know that there are VERY few people in the world who are prepared to invest in all the stuff, the systems, to keep the wheels that nobody ever sees turning.
And sooner or later, the salon owners who sign up for his system (er, actually our system) will quickly figure out that you get what you pay for.
Had to laugh recently when one of our own Members faced this exact problem. A rival salon in the same shopping mall decided to compete via price war, offering $5 haircuts. Our Member soon put a stop to that, with a sign outside her shop that said it all.
“We Fix $5 Haircuts.”
Amen.
by Greg Milner | Jan 25, 2012 | Ads that Have Worked, Australia, New Zealand
STOP PRESS: We’ve just opened the NEW Salon Advertising Templates Webstore here!
If you are a Worldwide Salon Marketing Inner Circle member you will know what an amazing marketing tool and integral part of the program the members only website is. Many members tell me how they often spend hours browsing around all the different templates and marketing ideas and solutions.
And each and every year the website grows as more material is added and the archive gets bigger. In fact there is over 6 years worth of archived material on the website now. It’s easy for some of the older archives to be lost in depths of the website.
And it’s safe to say that if you were to employ a design firm or an ad agency to create the material on the members website and give you multiple options for designs, template sizes and concepts, you would be looking at spending into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. On the other side of the coin, if you were to try and design all this material yourself, well firstly you’d probably need a degree in copy writing, graphic design and a heck of a lot of time on your hands!!!
So, in this new feature I intend to delve deep into the archives, blow the dust and cob webs away and unearth some of the hidden gems that perhaps you have never come across before.
In this first feature I am going to look at a clever little flyer that was actually created by a Pizza Shop.
This was actually one of the very first promotions we use for our salon D’Aguiar: hair.skin.nails after joining the Inner Circle Program back in 2007 and it was a huge succuss. Our version was slightly different and at the top said ‘FREE $20 Voucher – No Strings Attached’ We then looped a piece of string through the flyer and hung it on peoples door knobs around our neighbourhood. We consistently got 10 bookings from every 100 door flyers delivered and we had so many people saying they LOVED the out of the box marketing!
We still have dozens of clients that come to our salon today who originally came from this flyer. So when you think for the cost of a $20 service, we have made upwards of $4 – 5K from EACH of those clients since then, it’s a pretty good return on investment!
Here’s a link to find this template in the members only sealed section.
http://www.worldwidesalonmarketing.com/members/salon-marketing-ideas/ideas-to-steal/a-different-kind-of-mailbox-flyer-try-this/
If you are a WSM Member and want to share a success story from another members only website ‘hidden gem’ then drop me an email chris@worldwidesalonmarketing.com and I’ll be sure to feature it in an up and coming article!
If you are NOT a WSM Member and are sick and tired of sitting in front of a computer screen trying to come up with designs and copy for flyers and ads, if technology bamboozles you, click here to watch the video and Request a FREE live demo of the My Social Salon program.
by Greg Milner | Nov 3, 2009 | Marketing Superstars
Hair Salon Flyer Template For Inner Circle Member of the Week: 33 New Clients from a Single $540 ad
Leah Bobridge of Fresh Hair & Body in Salisbury, South Australia is our Inner Circle Member of the Week thanks to a concentrated salon marketing campaign that’s produced dozens of new clients. Leah only joined the Inner Circle program and received her Toolkit in August 2009, and in two months has increased her small hair & beauty salon’s revenue by “about $1500 a week.”
And she’s taking my advice and acting on it: using multiple marketing channels, not relying on ONE individual ad or flyer template from the Toolkit, doing several simultaneously. She’s doing newspaper advertising to generate new clients, basic geographic marketing using mailbox flyers around the salon, text message marketing to fill chairs and treatment rooms via her existing database – in other words, lots of stuff.
And she’s already getting frustrated. “I wish I had more time just to do marketing,” says Leah, echoing a common sentiment among those in the beauty industry who suddenly discover the thrill of getting results from ‘my’ kind of targetted, copy-intensive direct response marketing, as against the kind of marketing most in the salon industry do, which is basically throwing mud against the wall and hoping.
Example: Leah ran one of the ads out of the Toolkit in the local paper last week, cost $540, contained a great value-ad offer (the ‘LA Glam package’) and drew no fewer than 33 new clients, spending roughly $3,300.
But that’s far from the end of the story – Leah says each client is worth an average of $2,000 in a full year, so do the sums; $2,000 X 33 = $66,000 in potential new business over a full year. From an ad costing $540.
by Greg Milner | Jul 22, 2009 | New Zealand, The Smell of Success
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Caroline Martelli (2nd from right) and staff at Martelli’s Beauty & Makeup in Mt Maunganui, New Zealand |
Salon Marketing Ideas That Made This Salon Superstars – Inner Circle Member of the Week: Caroline Martelli
Congratulations to Inner Circle member Caroline Martelli of Martelli’s Beauty & Makeup in Mt Maunganui, New Zealand for a cracker of a result from an advertorial layout in her local paper this week.
Caroline joined the Inner Circle program in June and one of the first things that she said to me after joining the program was “Chris, I am going to be your best member ever!”
And if her first month in the program is anything to go by, she is certainly keeping her word. You see Caroline is a perfect example of someone who takes massive action. She has a great attitude, has implemented numerous techniques from the Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit™, found out what works best for her salon and has seen her business thriving in just the few weeks the doors have been open.
Caroline ran a combination editorial and ad in her local Sunday paper and by the next day she had 14 new clients. Four days later she has now got a total of 24 new clients from that one ad, and they are still calling.
“I am totally gobsmacked,” says Caroline. The ad cost Caroline $450 to run and has so far brought her in over $2,300 in one week. If only 50% of those new clients become regular clients worth around $1500 per year each, then that will have increased Caroline’s annual turnover by $18,000…Not bad for a single promotion!!!
In addition to this Caroline has also booked in 26 clients (11 new and 15 existing) from a combination of ‘Raise the Dead’ letters (from the Toolkit), new client letters, a mail box drop, in salon promotions and much more. Keep up the great work Caroline!
Want the ad Caroline used? Log into the Members Only ‘sealed section’ and navigate to ‘Getting New Clients – Beauty’ and you’ll find it under July 23, ready to download.
New Zealand salon owners: if you want the kind of results Caroline is getting, call Chris Sanders in our Auckland office, 0800 029 668
by Greg Milner | Mar 4, 2009 | Ask the Experts, Salon Goalsetting
Marketing Plan For A Beauty Salon: How do YOU Compare with This Salon Owner??
History is a great teacher. In 1944, General Eisenhower assembled the greatest invasion force in history to storm the beaches at Normandy.
Eisenhower knew that anything less than MASSIVE, overwhelming force, and the Allied attempt to drive the Nazis out of Europe would fail.
It remains a source of mystery to me why so many business owners don’t get this lesson. Regularly, I get email from salon & spa owners who moan that ‘I sent one of your letters to 30 of my clients and only got one appointment…’
Or, ‘I ran one ad…on page 68, down in the bottom right hand corner…and I didn’t get any response…”
One letter? To just 30 people? Well, what do you expect? What else did you do?
It’s a well-known law that action and results are inextricably tied together. Yet it’s a never-ending source of bemusement to me that so many salon & spa owners have massive expectations from minimal action.
So it’s instructive to look below at what’s required to get BIG results. And it shows clearly that the 80/20 rule applies in all things… Clearly, only 20% of salon & spa owners are prepared to take this kind of action, but they make 80% of the money in the entire industry.
Inner Circle member Lisa Conway of Marinelli hair only joined the IC program and received her Toolkit in mid-2008. At the members-only closed-door networking session after this week’s Road to Riches salon marketing seminar, Lisa told me how, until she joined the program, she had spent years in fear, afraid to make changes in her business, afraid to confront lazy staff, afraid to take any action.
All that changed when she ‘saw the light’. In this email Lisa sent the day before the seminar, she reveals a partial list of the action she’s taken, the marketing she’s implemented, in just a few months…
“I got thinking about what I have introduced or changed in our salon since I joined the program and got the Toolkit last July….
1.Send out SMS to a data base at a moments notice with deals to make the phone ring.
2.Collect and use Email to send special offers
3.Advertise with huge success in the local paper.
4.Letter drop our area
5.Put flyers on car windscreens
6.Stand in the street outside our salon handing our brochures
7.Give away $50 vouchers in coffee shops to faces I don’t know.
8.Queen of referrals program
9. Raise the dead letters
10. Birthday $10 vouchers
11. Made a fabulous brochure using an offer and great testimonials
12. Thank you for choosing us letters and $10 vouchers
13. Introduced another retail line so we have two now
14. Went from never doing any treatments in salon to doing 30 a week
15. From not one package to consistently doing packages
16. Weekly staff group meetings
17. Weekly staff training in salon
18. Weekly staff one on one
19. Introduced a fabulous system that puts all staff behaviour into 4 simple groups (Attitude, team, skill and Neglect) easy for us both to track and understand.
20. Display the salon’s weekly takings in lunch room showing both great and not so great work.
21. Know my average dollar sale and watched it go up
22. Know how to find so much more out of my computer
23. I have used movie tickets, holidays and chocolate as staff incentives, not just money.
24. Have staff that gets to work on time and has had their breakfast.
25. Have a staff birthday club that we go out for breakfast.
26. A manager who can now manage staff issues with out me.
27. Cleared out the staff I had with bad attitudes
28. Made our 100% money back guarantee common knowledge
29. Ring all colour work one week later to check if client is happy
30. We regularly back the computer up more than once every day.
31. Dialled up and joined a conference call
32. Listen to disks sent every month that motivate me.
33. Raised my price across the board twice
34. My on the floor time is now 4 hours twice a week.
35.I asked one client to find somewhere else to have her hair done.
36. Renovated the salon completely from 6 stations to 10 and 2 basins to 3
37. Know what % my staff cost me, know what it costs to open the doors
38. Sent my staff to another salon to get their hair done for the experience
“I have enjoyed this journey very much, I would never have believed this much could be done in such a small space of time not to mention watching my profit go up and my anxiety level go down. I am looking forward to the next chapter………….. Lisa.”
So, no fewer than thirty eight specific changes, actions and outcomes… and the biggest outcome of all, a massive $60,000 increase in sales in the 5 months August-December 08 compared with 07.
How do YOU compare with this list?