Why it’s DUMB to blame the media when your salon marketing doesn’t work.

by Greg Milner | May 14, 2013 | Featured, Salon Advertising Tips

Many times every week, we interview salon owners and almost invariably, to the question ‘what kind of marketing are you doing right now, or have done in the past?’ we get an answer like this:

“Oh, I’ve tried mailbox flyers/direct mail/newspaper ads/Yellow Pages/radio…(take your pick)…and IT doesn’t work/it’s a waste of money/it never got any results….” Blah blah blah.

And it always amuses me. What they’re actually saying is

“I couldn’t make it work…for me.”

If mailbox flyers ‘don’t work’, then why do ya reckon that every night when you go home, your mailbox is overflowing with ‘junk’ mail from every kind of real estate business under the sun? Would they keep doing it, week after week, month after month, year after year, if IT wasn’t working? No company has a bottomless pit of money.

If newspaper advertising was a complete waste of money, it would seem to me that almost every company on the planet is staffed with

The Dumbest People in Dumb Town

Because you’ve gotta ask yourself, surely they wouldn’t keep shelling out year after year if the thing didn’t produce a result?

If newspaper advertising was nothing more than a black hole that sucks down money like a vortex and never spits anything back out again, newspapers would a) never have got off the ground in the first place, or b) would long ago have gone out of business, their only source of oxygen cut off en masse.

But it’s pretty typical. Salon owners – most owners of small businesses, in fact – blame the media when their marketing doesn’t work. It ain’t the fault of the media. It’s yours, for lack of clear thinking.

Most business owners get the process all backwards. They book space in the newspaper then they think about what to put in the ad. And because they’ve done the last thing first, with no ‘sales thinking’ the ad usually ends up looking like nothing more appetizing than a business card.

Here’s the process:

1)    Marketing message. What are you going to say to your target market that is compelling, that cannot be ignored, that is unique, that must be responded to?

2)    But the best marketing message on the planet is no better than the worst marketing message on the planet if it falls on deaf ears. Who are you going to say it to – and by deliberate strategy, who are you NOT going to say it to? Are you specific with your preferred target market, or are you just going to throw mud at all of ‘em and hope some of it sticks?

3)    Finally, when you’ve figured out what compelling message you’re going to deliver, and who you’re going to deliver it to, the media pretty much chooses itself. (Hint: you’re hardly going to create a great offer appealing to debutantes/young brides-to-be, then book a full page in ‘Seniors Week’, are you??)

Be intelligent with your marketing. Do the ‘sales thinking’ process in the right order. Identify your target market. Create a compelling message/offer just for them. Only then do you choose the media you’re going to use to deliver that message to that market.

Once you get the process right, you’ll find that in fact, with better Direct Response methods applied to the copy, whichever media you choose is going to work a whole lot better for you. And that applies to online – websites, apps, social media – just as much as it does to hard copy.

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