[VIDEO]: Do you make this common mistake when it comes to marketing your salon or spa?

by Greg Milner | Mar 25, 2013 | Advertising Tips

FREE: we have two complete copies of the Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit, valued at $4,995, to GIVE AWAY to the next two salons or spas to join WSM’s ‘My Social Salon’ marketing program – see below!

Back in the late seventies, there was a band called Woolley and the Camera Club. No, I don’t remember them either. I doubt anybody remembers them, ‘cept their mothers. But they recorded a one-hit-wonder that gained a cult-following, “Video Killed the Radio Star”.

Apart from a catchy tune, everything about the title and the chorus was wrong. Yet so-called ‘experts’ have since paraphrased the same message, that suddenly, the ‘new’ is killing off the ‘old’. Video didn’t kill radio. Radio is bigger than ever, and growing in reach and effect, specially as daily commutes to work and home again get longer. Particularly talk-back radio. People like to sit in their cars and be part of a conversation. You don’t get that listening to music on an iPod.

Neither did TV kill off movies, as so many doomsayers predicted in the fifties. Quite the reverse. TV made the movie business bigger. There are lessons here, for those who want to run their salon or spa business with a pulse, instead of by rote learning, or worse, on the basis of ill-informed opinions from Gen Y staff, the next graphic designer you talk to, or any one of legion of so-called ‘internet marketers’.

It always makes me chuckle when I see a salon or spa owner declaring, often in forums, that ‘I’ve tried newspaper advertising and “it” doesn’t work.’ Or ‘I’ve done radio advertising and “it” was a waste of money.’ Such comments betray a lack of understanding of what advertising actually is. But worse, they make it obvious that few owners of small businesses such as a hair or beauty salon realize they’re talking about the relative merits of various media, rather than advertising itself.

Let’s get at least one thing straight – newspapers, direct mail, Facebook, Twitter, mobile apps, websites, radio, TV, cinema, billboards, posters in the window, the elastic band of underpants worn above the jeans by cool dudes, and yes, word-of-mouth ALL have one thing in common:

They are just MEDIA.

In other words, they are no more and no less than delivery boys – merely a device by which a message can be delivered from Point A – usually you, the business owner – to Point B, the eyes and ears of your intended target market. To claim that any of them, either individually or collectively, ‘doesn’t work’ is akin to claiming the world is indeed flat, that the sky is really red, not blue.

It is true that some media that worked decades ago no longer has the same impact. But today’s online shopping sites are just the modern version of the mail-order catalogue of the 1930s. (And yet, real, hard-copy catalogs are still being mailed in their hundreds of millions every year by some of the biggest, smartest companies on the planet. Think Victoria’s Secret. Or IKEA.)  When email caught on in the 1990s, the ‘experts’ predicted the end of direct mail. Could they have been any more wrong? Email is just about dead as a means of driving new business, yet direct mail has not only survived, it’s bigger than ever.

What has NOT changed – and this has never had anything to do with mere media – is the need for every business to find a way to differentiate itself from its competition, and to then translate that difference into words, images, sounds to be used in the various forms of media appropriate for that message, and the target market you want to reach.

Declaring that you’ve given up all forms of paid advertising in favour of Facebook ‘because it’s free’ is just plain dumb. Sure, you wouldn’t run an ad in Seniors Weekly if you want to appeal to working women in their thirties. But do you really expect Facebook to deliver you hordes of affluent, 60-year-old customers who drive to their golf club in Mercedes convertibles? (Nope. You’d advertise in their golf club newsletter!)

Yes, it’s complex. More so now than ever. So how DO you navigate your way to a sensible, well-planned and reasonably well-executed strategy, one that takes into account all forms of media, that helps you develop and deliver a compelling message to the right people, at the right time, using the right media for that target market?

It’s the primary reason we developed the salon & spa marketing program called My Social Salon.

Hundreds of salons & spas around the world have already signed up for MSS. Because for the first time, anywhere in the world, the busy, time-poor salon owner can access and use the power of ALL forms of media, online and offline, in a single, proven, affordable system.

And, also for the first time, we giving away one of the most famous, enduring and still absolutely relevant marketing & sales tools ever developed for the small salon or spa. The Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit®. The Toolkit, full of done-for-you templates, strategies, sales systems and CD/DVD tutorials, has been used by more than 4,000 salons & spas around the world to bring in more clients, more often, than any other such system on the planet. And it’s still being used heavily by smart salon owners today.

We’re giving away a complete Toolkit, valued at $4,995, to the next TWO salons who join the My Social Salon program. Watch the video below, and complete the form to get a free LIVE DEMO of the entire system….and you might qualify for WSM membership.

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