by Greg Milner | Apr 24, 2013 | Featured, Newsletter marketing, Website Marketing
Download a FREE sample of articles from the Salon & Spa Beauty Bank here!
Faced with the task of writing an article for a salon newsletter, a blog post or a social media status update, you can’t blame most hair stylists, beauty therapists or salon owners for throwing their hands in the air and groaning “I don’t know how to write an article!”
Let’s face it – you’re not trained as a writer; you’re trained to cut hair, do skin treatments, massages or nails. So it seems almost perverse that with the explosion in new media in the past few years, the need for the written word to promote a salon business is bigger than it’s ever been.
Websites require regular, frequent updates (blog posts) to keep them fresh and ranking highly in the search engines. Social media – like Facebook fan pages – need daily status updates to keep fans interested and responsive. Emails need interesting content, newsletters need articles containing news, not just product or service pitches.
It’s a LOT of work. More than most busy hair & beauty professionals can commit to, even if they had the skills to turn out an article that’s both interesting, compelling, and conveys the right message – over and over again.
The Salon & Spa Beauty Bank – at last, an online resource of done-for-you articles for hair & beauty salons to use in their own newsletters, emails, blog posts and status updates.
Thankfully, at last, there’s a solution.
Former spa owner (and long-time Worldwide Salon Marketing member) Susan Vincent of Staunton, Virginia realized the need for salons & spas to have ready access to a wide variety of done-for-you articles covering every imaginable hair or beauty-related issue, treatments, services, news and images. So Susan created the world’s first (and only) library of hundreds of articles, written precisely for the purpose of saving salon owners the agony and anxiety of having to create their own material for their websites, newsletters, emails and status updates.
For the very reasonable access fee of $97 a month – no contracts, you can leave whenever you like – Susan’s articles remove the pain of spending hours, days even, staring at a blank computer screen to research, gather material and put one laborious word after another. (Just think for a moment; what’s your time worth? Writing just one newsletter article or blog post a week might take you an hour of research and another hour of writing. Two hours a time, four times a month – 8 hours!)
In this interview, I asked Susan how she got the inspiration to start the Salon & Spa Beauty Bank.
[cf]Susan Vincent[/cf]
Download a FREE sample of articles from the Salon & Spa Beauty Bank here!
by Greg Milner | Apr 15, 2013 | Blog, Featured, New Zealand
There are some really crucial elements to any successful salon marketing ad or flyer, an attention grabbing headline, a strong offer, guarantee, use of scarcity and of course a call to action.
So when Lynette Adams of Glory Salon in Thames, Coromandel recently put together a Mothers Day campaign using a Worldwide Salon Marketing template, to run in her local paper using all the above marketing elements, she was excited about what results she would achieve.
But her excitement soon turned to anguish when the paper arrived in her letterbox only for her salon PHONE NUMBER to be missing of her ad. She checked the original and the phone number was there, but the paper had accidentally deleted it when converting the file to a PDF. The call to action was completely gone.
Now you’d expect the salon phone to be quiet as a mouse. Instead, what happened completely amazed and amused Lynette. Here’s what she emailed to me…
“I have sold 19 of the ‘out of order’ Mothers Day packages already!!! + when I saw the ad they had left off my contact details (somehow they had got deleted from bottom when converted to pdf) so they are going to run it again this week for free! Kinda cool that still got response from people without the number as they would have had to look it up.”
You see, what happened here was that the other parts of Lynette’s ad where so strong and enticing that people actually took the time to find her salon’s number in the phone book or on the net and call her to book. Her customers simply didn’t want to miss out on what was on offer. That’s pretty amazing and goes to show how incredibly effective and powerful the Worldwide Salon Marketing templates are, even when they are not used 100% right!!!
And there was one other thing that really made her ad stand out. She got the paper to print the ad upside down. Yes that’s right, upside down…except that bit was done on purpose.
WSM members can view the ad used by Lynette in the members website by clicking here now
Now I am not saying you should all leave your phone number off your ads from now on, but just imagine what would have happened if the phone number was on the ad!!! It will certainly be interesting to see how Lynette’s follow up ad goes with the phone number on it.
And Lynette went on to tell us how she had done in the last 12 months since joining Worldwide Salon Marketing…
“So happy just looked at figures up $4000 on last March!!! + I started WWSM end March last year so from 1 April to 31 March this year increased my turnover by 50% AMAZING!!! Sold $5000 more in vouchers as well =) Thanks so much for all your help really appreciate it! Lynette x”
Keep up the great work Lynette! And make sure the paper send you a proof next time!
If you want to achieve results like Lynette then call me now on ** *** **** (haha, just kiddin 09 476 1592) or email me chris@worldwidesalonmarketing.com – or if you prefer you can click here to fill out a contact form and we’ll be in touch within 24 hours.
Happy Marketing
Chris D’Aguiar-Sanders
09 476 1592
0800 029 668
by Greg Milner | Apr 10, 2013 | Featured, Marketing Superstars, The Smell of Success
Marnie Kallmeyer – WSM member 5 years – owner of Evoque Salon in Perth. “I bought a Jeep!”
Five years ago, Marnie Kallmeyer was broke. Her Perth beauty salon was struggling week to week, she’d lost her house, she was on the verge of nervous breakdown.
So I couldn’t help but smile this week when Marnie turned up at my office in her brand new $60,000 Jeep SUV. She’d picked it up that morning from the dealer. “I wanted to show you that you were right,” she said. “I can’t thank you enough for everything Worldwide Salon Marketing has taught me about marketing & the salon business.”
(And for those salon owners who watch this and think ‘she must be working 80 hours a week’, take note: two months ago, Marnie broke her hand, putting her completely out of work. In the next two months, her salon’s turnover & profit hit new record highs!)
[cf]Marnie[/cf]
If you own a salon or spa and you’re struggling, fed up with not making enough money for yourself, then isn’t it time you took action?
Click here to find out how you can join Marnie and hundreds of other salon owners as Members of Worldwide Salon Marketing
by Greg Milner | Mar 28, 2013 | The Smell of Success, UK
Hannah McEnteggart of Oasis Health & Beauty Spa in Great Missenden, UK
When Hannah McEnteggart of Oasis Health & Beauty Spa in Great Missenden sat down to address envelopes to 50 of her ‘lost’ clients, she had no idea the contents of those letters would have such a dramatic effect.
A day later, her phone started ringing…and kept ringing, over and over again, in the coming weeks. No fewer than 48 of those 50 ‘missing in action’ clients called and booked appointments – a response rate of 94% – and of those, 92% re-booked!
If you haven’t already figured it out, good old-fashioned direct mail still works – if you do it the right way, as Hannah discovered when she joined WSM’s Lite marketing system, and began to download a series of proven hard-copy marketing letters instantly to her computer.
In this short video, Hannah told me how she was staggered at the response, not just to the ‘lost client’ letters she downloaded from the program – another promotion brought her 6,000 pounds, a massive increase on the year before.
[cf]Hannah McEnteggart[/cf]
Want the same kind of results? You can join the Lite program here for two weeks free, and test it for yourself! Get a video tutorial each week along with tested, proven marketing and advertising templates, instantly downloadable and editable to suit your own salon or spa.
Just $27 a week after 14 days free
NO CONTRACTS – you can leave whenever you like
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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