Peta Hyde owns a successful salon in Caloundra, Queensland, just south of the Sunshine Coast. She’s been a Member of Worldwide Salon Marketing’s top-level My Social Salon marketing & coaching program for a long time.
So she knows that successful salon marketing and advertising is about taking lots of action, simultaneously…not doing one thing and waiting a month before doing something else.
In this video, she explains how a well-executed campaign brought in 30 new clients…
Salon Marketing Tools: Why Emotion Beats Logic Every Time
I wear myself out trying to teach salon & spa owners that customers buy based on emotion, which is the most profitable salon marketing tool hands down. It has nothing to do with logic.Yet ad after ad, flyer after dreary flyer waxes lyrical about the features of the product (or service), often using impossibly-technical jargon, and pay scant – if any – attention to the emotional benefit the customer will get, or makes any attempt to even so much as attract the prospect’s attention in the first place with an emotional headline.
Arguably the best ad ever written didn’t even mention a product or service. Far from trumpeting overblown benefits and features, it actually went the other way, in a deliberate, well-planned and brilliantly-executed dare to the manliness of every red-blooded adventurous male in England.
Although nobody has yet been able to track down the original copy of the London Times of December 29, 1913, here is a reconstruction of the tiny ad Sir Ernest Shackleton reportedly inserted to recruit men to his dangerous expedition to cross the Antarctic continent from sea to sea. It attracted 5,000 applicants, including three women.
(Creative Theft Department: I know what you’re already thinking…what has this got to do with my hair salon/day spa/nail bar/laser clinic yada yada yada.)
Here’s what: I’ve just used this very ad to steal the idea for the headline for a big Yellow Pages ad for one of our Inner Circle members. Go on, think. How could you apply this to your business? Inner Circle members should already be dissecting this and using it. For non-members, unaccustomed to my teachings, believe this:
The University of Life surrounds you. Google is your best friend. There is NO excuse for saying “I don’t know where to look for ideas” any more. Truth is, the answer to anything is right at your fingertips. Claiming you can’t find answers is akin to insisting the world is flat.)
Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, emotion. The idea that you must offer a rational benefit in your marketing is nonsense.
There IS no rational, logical reason to buy a Porsche. Yet Porsche is THE most profitable car maker in the world. One of the most famous ads for Porsche cars featured nothing more than a picture of the car, and the following text:
Product benefits:
Too fast.
Doesn’t blend in.
People will talk.
Then there’s the famous David Ogilvy ad for Rolls Royce, which didn’t even have a photo of the car, just a clock.
“At 60 miles an hour, the loudest sound you can hear in the new Rolls Royce is the ticking of the clock.”
In the beauty business, a rational benefit might be
Your skin will be 37% smoother.
But more powerful, and much more emotional:
Warning: Men will look at you.
Your target market is uneducated about the relative benefits of one hair stylist versus any of a thousand others. Has pretty much no idea of the difference between one laser clinic and a hundred competitors. Attempting to explain a rational, logical reason why they should choose you as against any and all of your competitors is considerably more difficult that pushing a peanut up the main street of town with your nose.
Singapore Airlines didn’t try to compete on price, they made it emotional with the Singapore Girl...
Faced with such a challenge, most businesses resort to the easiest, no-brainer path: discounting. The airlines are a classic example of this, undercutting each other because they can’t be bothered putting in the hard mental yards to come up with something better.
(Even here, there are examples of airlines actually striking an emotional note with their marketing. Remember the Singapore Airlines ads featuring their emotional icon, the Singapore Girl? They backed it up with the rational proposition, ‘Inflight service even other airlines talk about…’)
Aside: the rebel in me can’t help wondering what would happen if an airline offered a guarantee: We’ll get you there alive, or your money back.
Most business owners, having come up with a compelling offer – which is the rational reason to buy – rest on their laurels and leave it there. But the smart ones keep working at it, chewing away until they come up with that hard-to-define emotional reason to buy. I often call it a Unique Selling Proposition. But it can equally be re-named an ESP or Emotional Selling Proposition.
Either way, these are salon marketing tools that work, and work for you.
The real difference between one hair salon and another, between one day spa and another, is at best small, and certainly difficult to convey to the uneducated. But an emotional difference is – while more difficult to find in the first place – much easier to get across, much easier for the prospect to feel, and therefore much more powerful.
Why Most Salon Marketing Fails – Message to all salon & spa owners addicted to Facebook, brainwashed into thinking that ‘old-fashioned’ types of salon advertising and marketing are dead:
A lot of people had a lot of good ideas before you were born. And most of those good ideas are still good ideas. But their lessons have been largely forgotten, which is why most hair & beauty industry marketing in the ‘modern’ era is a complete failure.
Take a look at this Revlon TV ad from 1973.
A ‘Charlie Girl’ had power and confidence unheard of among women in 1973 – hence the briefcase, and her hand on HIS backside instead of the other way round!
Anybody over the age of forty will remember the famous print and TV campaigns for Revlon’s ‘Charlie’ perfume. In the seventies, when women were still fighting to be seen as ‘equal’ to men, these ads were a revelation.
For the first time, they portrayed women as strong, deliberately sexy, confident and powerful at a time when most advertising put women firmly in the kitchen and laundry.
And if you’re a student of marketing, you’ll notice one more crucial thing: the ads aren’t about the product! There’s not even a hint about what’s in it, no dreary nonsense about how it was created by white-coated scientists with lots of letters after their names, in clinical laboratories using secret ingredients distilled from the purified secretions of a now-extinct South American tree frog.
Revlon founder Charles Revson knew the secret that most business people seem to have forgotten long ago; that nobody cares a damn about the product.
Revson’s advertising answered emphatically the only question that really matters:
‘Why should I, your prospective customer, buy this?’
There’s an old saying that talks about not being able to ‘see the forest through all the trees’.
Everybody suffers from it from time to time, even those who’re often seen by others as super-successful.
Like the salon owner who approached me last week for some advice. This very young salon owner joined Worldwide Salon Marketing a few years ago when she was working alone and struggling, and became almost an ‘overnight’ success.
She devoured everything I teach about direct response marketing for salons, soaked it up like a sponge, rapidly and repeatedly implementing everything she found in our systems, and pretty soon found herself creating her own advertising through everything she’d learned.
Became, in effect, a marketing machine. Her salon grew and grew, she bought another salon, and within two years of joining WSM was working almost exclusively from home, while her salons ran on automatic pilot.
But that wasn’t enough for all this new-found entrepreneurial zeal. It had to find another outlet somewhere. So she decided she’d develop her own skin care product line, and use the internet to sell it.
All good so far. Then she ran into a bank of fog that clouded her once-clear vision. She wrote to me and asked
“Greg, I need a bit of reassurance…is this web-based ‘glop’ a good idea, or am I frigging mad???!!! We all have these days when we wonder ‘what the hell…’ – don’t we?”
We do indeed. This is what I wrote back to her:
“Don’t think of it as ‘web-based glop’. There is no such thing as an ‘internet business’. The internet is not a business, it’s merely a media. Just one media.
You need to think of your idea as a business, like any other business. As a marketing and sales business that just happens to be selling a beauty product or products, using the internet as just one of the many forms of media it uses to get its message out, gather leads, make sales to those leads.
It’s much bigger than just an ‘internet business’. And it’s not something you can do for a couple of hours a week, sitting at the kitchen table in your track pants, thinking this is all it takes.
You’re contemplating setting up and growing a business. Not a hobby. Don’t think of it as a ‘internet glop’ hobby. Imagine instead that you’re setting up a drilling company, or a construction business, or a fashion brand. Do all the same things you would do for your ‘glop’ business as you would do for those businesses.”
She got it immediately.
“ Thanks for that…..reality check. You’re exactly right! It comes down to marketing and sales…there are companies selling the same product, the difference will be my marketing and my sales ability…which these other companies have no idea about!”
She hit the nail on the head.
Most people, particularly in big, dumb companies, lose sight of the fact that it’s not what you’re selling that matters, it’s how you market and sell it.
They fall under their own spell, mesmerised by their own wonderful product or service, deluded into thinking that their prospects, customers and clients actually give a damn about the product. They don’t, at all. People only care about what a product does for them, not the product itself.
Which is exactly why you see most companies selling any kind of hair or skin product blathering on endlessly about obscure and meaningless ingredients – essentially, selling the sausage instead of the sizzle.
So the next time you’re tossing around product options for your salon, look closely, ask questions, and when the product rep tries to blind you with science, hold your hand up and demand clear, concise answers.
“If you were standing in front of a customer, what would you say to this customer that would clearly, in a single sentence, convince the customer to buy your product as against any and all options available to her?”
Unless and until you get a great answer to that question, all you’re selling is ‘glop’.
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!”
All NEW Mothers Day advertising, posters, fliers – instant downloads for Members
We’re adding dozens of new salon advertising and marketing templates to the Members only ‘sealed section’ website site every month – in March, a completely new series of templates for one of the BIGGEST salon marketing events of the year.
Mothers Day is a big day for salons & spa marketing all over the world. It’s when thousands of salons make (or should make!) a large part of their annual revenue.
But so many face the thought of marketing with a shudder – all that work!
Not for Worldwide Salon Marketing members. As always, we provide our members with fresh direct response marketing templates – for all the major Marketing Trigger Events – throughout the year.
You’ll find them in various sizes and formats, both US and A4, postcards, posters etc.
The new templates join literally hundreds of done-for-you advertising only for salons & spas, in the world’s biggest specialist library for salon & spa marketing.
All you do is simply download them from the website, edit them to suit your own salon’s offers and specialties, enter your own business name and address, and bingo – instant advertising! Never again stare at a blank computer screen, not knowing what to write or how to lay it out.
These templates are being continually produced by our copywriting and graphics team, adding to our vast library every month.
The Members website is a storehouse containing literally years of proven, done-for-you direct response marketing templates. They’ve been downloaded, tested and proven to grab salon clients fast, all over the world.
Online marketing, email, SMS, newspaper ads, radio ads, salon posters, client letters – you’ll find them all on the Members Only website.
Not yet a member?
Still sitting in front of a computer screen, tearing your hair out, not knowing what to put in your ads?
Peta Hyde owns a successful salon in Caloundra, Queensland, just south of the Sunshine Coast. She’s been a Member of Worldwide Salon Marketing’s top-level My Social Salon marketing & coaching program for a long time.
(Creative Theft Department: I know what you’re already thinking…what has this got to do with my hair salon/day spa/nail bar/laser clinic yada yada yada.)
Product benefits:
