by Greg Milner | Aug 4, 2015 | Ask the Experts, Beating the Competition, Salon Advertising Tips
Whenever I watch Gordon Ramsay tearing the throat out of a hapless head chef or muddle-headed restaurant owner, I wish I was in the food business.
Every rest
aurateur with even half a brain must surely be spending at least part of every working day down on bended knee, giving heartfelt thanks for the f***ing marketing opportunity this foul-mouthed and charismatic Brit has provided.
What Ramsay has done is focus the attention of millions of restaurant-goers on the stuff most restaurants would hate them to know – what goes on in the kitchen. And for the smart ones, that spells opportunity.
Now, what has this got to do with your salon business? Think outside the square for a moment.
Here’s how I would use the ‘Ramsay Factor’ in my restaurant business.
First, I would identify what it is about restaurants that – thanks to Ramsay’s TV show – makes people lie awake at 3am, staring at the ceiling….and thanks to Ramsay, that’s pretty easy. Has the food been prepared days earlier? Is the kitchen crawling with cockroaches? Do the chefs wash their hands every time they go to the bathroom? Are the ingredients fresh? Is there mold growing over the food?
THEN…I would create a new marketing message, based on those fears and anxieties. The DUMB thing would be to attempt to bury your head in the sand and ignore the Ramsay factor. In fact, I would HIGHLIGHT the negatives, and turn them into positives. E.g.,
How to Be Gordon Ramsay for a Day!
“You know what its like when you go to a restaurant and you have no idea what’s going on in the kitchen? Well at Greg’s Culinary Emporium, our kitchen is so clean our own chefs eat their dinner off the floor! We have CCTV cameras watching our staff to make sure they wash their hands every time they leave the bathroom. Pest inspectors regularly ensure that not a single bug gets anywhere near our food. In fact, we invite YOU to be Gordon Ramsay for a day.
“Come to Greg’s Culinary Emporium for your next night out. If you can find a single cause for complaint, you have our permission to swear at our f***ing chef. PLUS, your meal is FREE!”
Get MORE salon marketing inspiration, tools, downloadable templates, how-to videos and more, as a Member of the Salon Accelerator program here.
Can you see how that statement would set my restaurant apart from any of my competitors? This technique is called
Making the Invisible Visible
It does TWO clearly distinct things.
a) By capitalizing on highly-public information, it enters the conversation that’s already going on in your customers’ heads. Do that, and you become a Welcome Guest… instead of an Unwelcome Pest. They are already talking about what you want them to talk about.
b) It highlights the process. Most businesses assume their customers are only interested in the result, the final product. But there is magic in the detail….there is MONEY in the story of how you deliver what your customers are buying.
Now, if you haven’t done so already, replace restaurant with salon. What can YOU do to tell the story of your process – a story that addresses what your customers are fearful and anxious about when making a decision about whether to do business with you?
Are your products sourced using a suddenly rediscovered formula developed by primitive tribes in the steamy jungles of Burma? Does one of your treatments originate from the desert rituals of Bedouin tribes in ancient Mesopotamia? (I exaggerate for effect, but you get the picture.)
by Greg Milner | Jul 29, 2015 | Beating the Competition, Getting Salon Clients Quickly, The Smell of Success
Every salon & spa owner fears the day when a long-serving staff member suddenly announces she’s leaving. Whether she makes it obvious or not, the instant fear is that she’ll take valuable clients with her.
If this has ever happened to you – or you fear it might – then you need to study this campaign closely. Because it just might not only save you a fortune, but actually make you money as well.
Worldwide Salon Marketing member (ten years) Tracey Orr (left) of Absolute Beauty in Launceston, Tasmania, runs a VERY tight ship. And, as the Commanding Officer, she takes absolutely no prisoners when it comes to protecting the only real asset her business owns – her clients.
A while back, two of Tracey’s nail technicians left to start their ‘own business’. Tracey wished them well – and then swung into action a well-planned, two-pronged attack designed not only to sabotage her former employees’ ambitions, but to actually profit from it.
It was breathtaking in its military precision.
Here’s how Tracey takes up the story…
Hi Greg,
Read the latest newsletter and thought I would share my thoughts with you. In relation to the section on the salon owner who does not think newspaper ads work…..
Neither did we until we started working with you guys all those years ago!!! Using what you have taught us we have gradually fine tuned our ads, promos etc until now when we have it down to a fine art!!
A bit of a story……
Two of our nail techs left to start their own “nail business”. I wished them well, gave them some advice but…all is fair in love and business! So I put a plan in place to absolutely crush them in a nice way – after all they are now competition.
We designed up an ad to target full sets of acrylics (new clients) as we knew this is the market they would initially be targeting. Basic black and white ad to run on a Wednesday and Saturday over three weeks. Not expensive, not large, but well designed. We also put the ad on our website. We knew that the two techs that left would also be advertising. We got a great response from the ads!
So far we have got 50 new clients that have already been in and another 25 future bookings.
That’s 75 bookings so far. The offer began the second week in July and ends on August 31 – so is still going. We increased our other nail techs’ hours and one returned from maternity leave to pick up the extra clients and still keep our regulars.
(HOW TO GET THIS AD: Members log into the Members Only ‘sealed section’ here.
Secondly, we did not want to lose regulars that had been going to these two nail techs here for the last two years. So we sent out a letter (using the tips from the Toolkit) to all their clients informing them that Katee & Jess were leaving and what we were doing to make sure all of them, our lovely clients, were looked after. This took away the “fear” for clients of who was going to look after them. This letter also contained a great offer if the clients pre-paid for their next 3 nail appointments.
By us getting them to pre-pay we ensured that they would not follow the other two, even if they did nails for $5! It also ensured that the clients (who come once per month for nails) would still be here in at least 3 months… and then their past nail techs would be but a distant memory….
We had 26 of their clients take us up on this offer (the letter was sent to their 68 best clients).
Of the 26 clients to purchase their initial offer, 7 of them then went on to buy a Solitone Package worth $1330 so this was a huge added bonus. 11 clients are yet to use their free stuff so we will get more ad on sales when they do. We run Beautyware here and so have been able to track the….wait for it…..loss of clients since Katee and Jess left – and it is a total of 5!The rest our clients have just kept coming, I suspect because they know what and who is going to continue to look after them, the extras we offer like monthly specials, newsletters, all treatments, extended hours, our guarantee, our child free zone, general atmosphere, free parking etc etc….. and the fact that a week after Katee and Jess left we launched heaps of new and exciting nail goodies for them!
So I say newspaper ads do work! And don’t panic when staff leave, instead plan, and you will reap the benefits!
NOT A MEMBER? Want templates like these and literally hundreds more?
by Greg Milner | Jul 23, 2015 | Ads that Have Worked, Featured
Hair extensions are one of the most profitable services for any salon. But you can’t simply post a glossy picture and hope for the best. Like all direct response marketing, it still needs to be accompanied by a compelling OFFER, and reasons to call you NOW (eg, scarcity, limited to the first X to call etc)
This template allows you to insert your own details, along with your offer, guarantee, scarcity etc.
You can use it as a mailbox flyer, turn it into an image for Facebook and Instagram, and upload it to your own website.
MEMBERS: Click HERE to download in Word (editable) format.
NOT A MEMBER? Get this – and hundreds more done-for-you, proven salon advertising and marketing templates as a Member of Worldwide Salon Marketing. For a ridiculously small price, never again sit in front of a blank computer screen wondering what to write!
Go here to find out more – you can be downloading winning promotions within minutes!
by Greg Milner | Jul 10, 2015 | Blog, Featured
How to sell salon memberships – My Salon Success magazine
“How to sell salon memberships that bring in clients and cash up-front”…latest issue of My Salon Success magazine out now!
Just this morning, one of our Member salons in Noosa, Queensland told me she had already pre-sold $9,000 worth of memberships to her clients – and they don’t even go on sale till July 25.
There’s a whole new issue of My Salon Success magazine, and it’s all about selling memberships.
You can view the magazine on your iPhone, iTouch and iPad. (We are just updating the Android version and it should be out soon – watch this channel.)
If you have ever wondered now to sell memberships in your salon to raise cash and lock your clients into coming back you need to read this Issue.
Click on this link and you’ll be taken straight to the Magazine. You can subscribe for free and get this and 16 other Issues.
by Greg Milner | Jun 10, 2015 | Advertising Tips, Featured
Recently, a relatively new member of Worldwide Salon Marketing conducted a marketing campaign in a little outback country town where her tiny two-person salon is located.
When she released the promotion for sale, she was astounded when she collected more money in three days than she normally takes in three weeks.
How? Because she’d discovered the single most important ingredient a business needs to bake a successful cake.
MEMBERS: go here to the Members Only Resources Library to watch the video and find out exactly how she did it.
If you could have only one significant advantage over your competitors, what would you want it to be?
A better mousetrap (product) than your competitors? . History is littered with ‘better’ products that sank without trace. (If you’re old enough, you’ll remember the VHS vs Beta home video wars of the early eighties. Sony’s Betamax version was perceived to be technically a superior system. But JVC’s VHS torpedoed it in the marketplace.)
Perhaps a much slicker system for building and delivering that improved mousetrap? Maybe better customer service?
All of those advantages might help, but they’re not the ‘killer ingredient’. Many business owners ponder this question, and rarely come up with a compelling answer.
Yet there IS one key advantage that’ll help a business out-perform its competitors, no matter how superior their products or services, regardless of more efficient delivery systems, in spite of a rival having flashier premises, big-budget TV ads and a squadron of salesmen wearing out shoe leather.
And that killer advantage is…a starving crowd.
The late and legendary American direct response copywriter Gary Halbert first talked about the concept back in the 1970s. In a classroom exercise, students would get to pick their favoured competitive advantage in a hypothetical hamburger stand. Some chose a finer quality meat, others would copy McDonald’s system of cooking and serving the food.
After all the students had chosen their advantage, Halbert would ask first and foremost for…a starving crowd.
So who (and where) is your starving crowd?
Some crowds can be simply found. Fans at a football game will buy thousands of meat pies and cans of coke.
A ‘starving crowd’ for a dentist is anybody with a broken tooth. I was part of a starving crowd a couple of years ago when, on the day my wife Michelle and I were due to fly out for a wedding in Bali, our hot water system crapped out…with a house-sitter moving in the next day.
It was a Saturday afternoon. I had to find a plumber who could replace the system that day. I was starving for a solution. I found one, at last. It cost me $2,000. I paid without a whimper. I was grateful.
Some starving crowds have to be created. That’s what our salon owner at the beginning of this story did. For weeks before her sale, she used all kinds of media – flyers, text messages, emails, posters and more – to create the crowd, and hold it back until the day of her sale.
Which, on a much larger scale, is what the world’s most valuable company has been doing for years. For months before releasing a new phone or other gadget, Steve Jobs used secrecy to generate hype, buzz and demand. By the time the new product was released, starving crowds were literally queued up outside Apple stores all over the world.
How to find your starving crowd.
People don’t care about your product. (Nobody really cares about Apple’s products. But they buy Apple’s latest products because Apple has cultivated the concept of ‘cool’ among its disciples. It’s cool to have Apple’s latest gadget. My iPhone 4 still makes and receives perfectly clear phone calls. But it’s so last decade.)
So shift your focus from your precious product or service, and turn it to finding (or creating) groups of people who need solutions. What pressing need or desire do people have that your products or services solve? And what can you do to identify and find those people?
It’s almost never about selling to everyone. (The White Pages is not your target market.) It’s always a process of identification.
Hint: as a start to this process, look at your own website. Does it have any kind of device to capture and collect the names and contact details of visitors? Most of the people visiting your website are interested in what you have to sell. They’re part of your starving crowd.
