Life was so much more difficult before Facebook. Achieving really important goals was such an obstacle course.
As it is today, your friends were always vitally interested in what you were eating for breakfast. But you had to go find your Kodak Instamatic, take the shot (black and white, of course), send it off for processing, wait three weeks to get the prints back, then laboriously address and stamp envelopes and put them in the post.
Boring your friends with your holiday snaps was quite an exercise in the olden days. Back then, you had to find a date when everybody was available, invite them around for dinner and a few drinks, then, before they knew what was happening, you turned out the lights and fired up the slide projector.
(Big advantage with Facebook; you can’t see them nodding off.)
When you wanted to impress your friends with what you’ve done, what you’re going to do, or what you really want to do, you’d have to write notes and slip them under their front doors. Sooo tedious.
And when you needed to show your friends what a fabulous life you were leading, you’d have to buy or hire a yacht, park it somewhere you knew most of them would walk by, and lie there drinking champagne all day with a permanent grin. This was so tedious, not the least because you never knew when they were going to pass by, and neither did you know if all your friends would see you. (Even Facebook hasn’t solved that problem. But it makes up for it by showing your stuff to friends you never would have had in the olden days.)
Babies and toddlers were mostly pretty unremarkable back then. They certainly weren’t all over-achieving geniuses. It was only the very rare three year old who could play the violin part perfectly in Rachmaninoff’s Symphony Number 2 in E Minor that achieved any kind of publicity outside her own family.
Back in the 1980s, Prime Minister Bob Hawke promised that by 1990, no Australian child would live in poverty. If only he could have seen further into the future, he could equally have promised that by 2010, no Australian child would need to live in anonymity, every toddler would deserve and get instant fame, and the remarkable, ground-breaking advances made by each and every infant – far in excess of anything achieved by anyone born before 2004 – would be documented in eye-watering detail for evermore.
It was much harder to defame someone or ruin their business back in those days too. You had to a) first concoct a suitably outlandish story, b) use a pen and paper – only journalists and stenographers could type back then – write it all down, and c) post the letter to the editor of the local newspaper. The editor would assign someone to check the claims made in your letter, and a week or two later might publish your rant, usually alongside a carefully-considered rebuttal from the person whose life you were trying to destroy.
As a teenager, my life was quite miserable. At dinner, I was left with little option but to have face-to-face contact – even conversation – with my parents and siblings.
Minor illnesses were something that had to be suffered in silence. How frustrating it was not to be able to share your headache, winter cold, twisted eyelash or ingrown toenail with even a handful of friends, let alone hundreds or even thousands of people breathlessly awaiting the latest updates on your health. The most you could do was go to the office and cough over a few work colleagues.
Wishing someone a happy birthday was like wetting yourself in a dark suit back in the olden days. It gave you a warm, fuzzy feeling of goodness, but nobody else except the recipient noticed. You had to post a hand-written card or spend 25 cents making a phone call.
How annoying it was that hundreds of your friends didn’t know how generous of spirit you were for the 30 seconds it took to write that card or make that call.
When I got married, the wedding album I paid $3,000 for arrived in a box three months later. By then, none of your friends were interested. Nowadays, your friends have helpfully uploaded hundreds of photos and videos of your wedding before you’ve walked back down the aisle with your new bride.
Obviously, doing business was much, much more difficult in the dark ages pre-2004. To find customers you had to pay for advertising, cultivate personal relationships, give good service, sell proven products…it was all so difficult. Now, you just pop a post on Facebook, and customers queue up outside your door.
Oh, it was tough all right. Facebook has certainly made all our lives more fulfilling, more seamless, more connected. Society as a whole is demonstrably better. Isn’t it?
A salon owner once asked me – with a completely straight face – if I could write her an ad that would flood her salon with customers and turn her business into a thriving cash machine. Overnight.
In other words, “give me one perfect off-the-shelf, simple solution to a complicated, multi-faceted, ever-changing and, more to the point, on-going, ever-increasing problem.”
It amazes me how so many people in small businesses somehow expect a single, ‘silver bullet’ answer to a complex problem:
how to get more customers.
Very, very few business owners ‘get’ the complexity and difficulty of the task, the details that matter.
Keith and his new bride Yumi…their wedding was an exercise in military precision
I’ve just returned from a family wedding on a tiny jungle island called Koh Tao in the middle of the Gulf of Thailand, where one of my son Keith married his beautiful South Korean bride Yumi.
At such a remote location, the wedding was a logistical nightmare, requiring more than 18 months of planning. Emails and phone calls went back and forth for month after month. Six months before the big day, Keith flew to Koh Tao to personally co-ordinate the various elements of the event.
Getting the wedding guests committed to booking their flights – from as far afield as Vienna and Brisbane – was an exercise in trying to herd cats.
Depending on where they were coming from, it took guests at least two, often three or four plane rides plus a two-hour boat trip just to get there. Co-ordinating accommodation for 30 people, plus caterers, wedding planners and photographers by remote control in a non-English speaking third-world country was an exercise in patience, understanding and persistence.
Koh Tao – a jungle covered speck in the gulf of Thailand.
The event went off without a hitch, all thanks to my son and his new wife. And it made me think;
It seems to me if business owners put as much thought, planning and attention to detail into their product launches or marketing campaigns, their lives would be so much more prosperous.
But people invest more effort, expend more energy, drive themselves into more of a tizzy over their…Christmas parties…than they do their own businesses. Go figure.
And yet, when focus, energy and attention to detail is turned into a carefully-planned campaign to generate business, much can happen.
Example: Kim Susskind’s Brazilathon Campaign
Just part of the free publicity generated with a carefully planned and executed marketing campaign…
Last year, Noosa salon owner Kim Susskind wanted to generate publicity to promote a planned ‘brazilathon’ – to create a ‘world record’ number of brazilians performed in a single day. Over a period of weeks, I worked with Kim to design a campaign that got her not one, but two front page stories in the local newspaper, radio air time, social media exposure, and a series of emails and text messages that – in combination – produced saturation coverage in her local market.
The result: a new ‘world record’, the talk of the town, and a backlash from competing salon owners jealous of Kim’s new-found fame. (Kim now features as a columnist in the same local paper, further cementing her ‘authority’ as an expert – the ‘go-to’ person in her area.)
Worth noting: this could not have been achieved with a lazy mere email, a single mailbox flyer, a hap-hazard text message, or a thrown-together post on Facebook.
Successful marketing isn’t an event, it’s a process.
Kim’s campaign required planning. But the most careful plans in the world are useless without timely, persistent execution.
“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” Abraham Lincoln
One of the greatest frustrations for many salon & spa owners is NO-SHOWS! They’re expensive, time-wasting and profit-sapping. But it doesn’t have to be that way. In this webinar, recorded with successful Brisbane salon entrepreneur Anita Clements of Twisted Desire, watch and listen carefully as Anita explains how she eliminated no-shows forever – and discovered many other ways to take money from clients UP-FRONT.
Quotes
“I feel I’ve moved from Hairdresser to Business Women”
“You have my back”
What changes have happened?
” The biggest change is now my VIP events are profitable now – they were not before”
“My Staff are now interested in marketing where as before they were not – we’re making money now”
Taking deposits “I was very nerves to begin with but now with any VIP night we take money up front”
How did you implement taking deposits? ” We started doing this in January, we took a big hit because of not taking deposits. I felt very nerves about taking money off existing cleints. So we started small and any new cleint that is having any chemical treatment has to pay a deposit. We have a script and we have no problems with people paying them. ”
What did that do to your no shows.
“We have almost no no-shows now. We have got rid off all the time wasters who would book and not turn up”
“Our salon is now full of good customers”
What happens when people say they do not want to pay a deposit”
“Well it just means that we don’t get bad clients”
“If they don’t want to pay a deposit they can always just pop in and if we are not busy we will see them without a deposit”
“They tend to spend more money when they pay a deposit because the bill on the day is less”
“its made us a little more exclusive than the salon down the road”
“Its almost been a year and we’ve not had one person not show up or not call us”
“We take deposits for VIP events – if you pre pay you get a great package on the night (no discounts just added value) and mostly we are getting money from our existing cleints”
“The last VIP night we made $3,000 just from 2 packages and they could not wait to book in”
“We are doing the local Christmas market and take a stall and we are selling vouchers there at the festival”
“We’re also do the Christmas tree thing off the membership site – we don’t change a thing just run it straight off the system”
“We also did an Events and pre-sold Mini Membershps and made $9,000 – then I got scarred and pulled the pin but I should have done more”
“We don’t need bank loans anymore we just pre sell a mini membership – it just becomes a game, its no longer any struggle!”
For decades, word of mouth has been the most powerful and effective form of marketing just about any business can use. Restaurants, movies, holiday resorts and dozens of others live or die on the basis of their referrals…hardly anyone would even think of booking an overseas holiday these days without checking on Tripadvisor first. The internet has put the power of word of mouth on steroids.
For effective salon marketing these days, online reviews are absolutely imperative.
You can ignore it at your peril, or you can embrace it, like my guests on this webinar. Jenine Wood is one of our Worldwide Salon Marketing members, from Sandton Hair Gallery in Mitcham, Victoria. We’re also joined by the founder of one of the biggest Australian review sites, Fiona Adler of WOMO (Word of Mouth Online), and our own Director of Online, George Slater.
NEED HELP: go to www.mysocialsalon.com, comlete the form and we’ll contact you within two business days.
Achieving a massive increase in salon sales isn’t actually all that difficult – IF you’re prepared to to take Massive Action.
At Labella Beautique in Rockhampton, Queensland, owners Deanne & Shenae joined Worldwide Salon Marketing’s My Social Salon program in late May 2014. Two months later, they’d quadrupled their sales with a concentrated marketing effort using easy offline and online marketing tools & templates downloaded from the Members Only ‘sealed section’ website.
Admittedly, they were coming off a low base – but if a young (8 months old) little salon in the back blocks of regional Queensland can do it, any salon can. Here’s how Deanne and Shenae describe their marketing breakthroughs…
[cf]Labella[/cf]
Labella Beautique is a Member of the My Social Salon marketing & mentoring program, the world’s most comprehensive, done-for-you, online and offline marketing system developed ONLY for salons and spas. Membership is strictly-limited and available only for those salon owners who want to be business owners, nor merely therapists or technicians.
Life was so much more difficult before Facebook. Achieving really important goals was such an obstacle course.
And when you needed to show your friends what a fabulous life you were leading, you’d have to buy or hire a yacht, park it somewhere you knew most of them would walk by, and lie there drinking champagne all day with a permanent grin. This was so tedious, not the least because you never knew when they were going to pass by, and neither did you know if all your friends would see you. (Even Facebook hasn’t solved that problem. But it makes up for it by showing your stuff to friends you never would have had in the olden days.)
Back in the 1980s, Prime Minister Bob Hawke promised that by 1990, no Australian child would live in poverty. If only he could have seen further into the future, he could equally have promised that by 2010, no Australian child would need to live in anonymity, every toddler would deserve and get instant fame, and the remarkable, ground-breaking advances made by each and every infant – far in excess of anything achieved by anyone born before 2004 – would be documented in eye-watering detail for evermore.
“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”
For decades, word of mouth has been the most powerful and effective form of marketing just about any business can use. Restaurants, movies, holiday resorts and dozens of others live or die on the basis of their referrals…hardly anyone would even think of booking an overseas holiday these days without checking on Tripadvisor first. The internet has put the power of word of mouth on steroids.
