by Greg Milner | May 25, 2015 | Australia, Blog, Featured, Increasing Retail Sales, Salon Advertising Tips, The Right Mindset, The Smell of Success
Pearl of Beauty salon owner Amber Clayton was working on clients full time and struggling to grow her business when she joined Worldwide Salon Marketing in February 2014.
Now, little more than a year later, she has four full-time staff and is completely ‘off the tools’, spending her time training and mentoring staff, and most importantly, marketing the business to keep them busy.
In this video, Amber explains how she did it…
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by Greg Milner | May 14, 2015 | Featured, Salon Advertising Tips, Salon Service Guarantees, The Smell of Success
So what IS the difference – the unique, significant, compelling difference between your salon and any number of competitors within walking distance? I’ve been having this conversation repeatedly with many Members in our lately.
It’s THE issue that bedevils almost every salon owner I’ve ever talked to. And I’ve advised and coached literally thousands over the past ten years.
Most bang on with the usual platitudes. We give great customer service. Yawn. Our stylists/therapists are fully qualified. Sigh. You mean, other salons don’t have qualified staff??
Yet when I ask salon owners to list a handful of things that aggravate customers about going to a salon, guess what wins Top of the Pops almost every single time?
Being Kept Waiting!
And that’s where it gets interesting. I then suggest that perhaps the key clue to their uniqueness lies not in all that drivel about how wonderful their business is, what great customer service they give, how terrific their stylists/therapists are….but in their answer to the very issue that almost ALL salons identify as the most common complaint from customers.
Great marketing is about the unexpected, not the expected. Customers expect they’ll get good service. (Well, these days it seems more of a hope than an expectation.) They expect your stylists and therapists to be competent, able to perform their job. They expect you’ll use professional-quality products and technology.
Delivering the expected ain’t no foundation for a sizzling marketing statement.
So I suggest to these salon owners that they might just want to consider actually delivering on the one promise they implicitly make when a customer calls up and makes an appointment for 10am next Thursday.
And that promise is: 10am means 10am. Not 10, 15 or 30 minutes after 10am. In other words,
“The Most Amazing Guarantee You WON’T Get from Any Other Salon in (Your Town): If you’re on time, and we keep you waiting more than 9 minutes past your scheduled appointment, it’s FREE!”
Almost every time, my suggestion is met with choking, spluttering exclamations of disbelief.
“Wha…what???? We can’t guarantee that!!!”
Well, think about it. You’ve just identified the ONE thing that pees people off more than anything. You’ve sold the customer a 10 o’clock appointment on Thursday morning. And yet, you’re telling me that the customer has to wear the risk of you not delivering on that promise?
I’ve recently had plenty of time to mull over this line of thought. Forty two minutes, actually. That’s how long my doctor kept me waiting past my appointment time earlier this week. But doctors – who are, in essence, merely expensively-trained body mechanics – are in high demand. They have customers queuing up for their services, day after day. They don’t have to guarantee anything.
My dentist, however, is entirely different. Dentistry is an intensely competitive industry. My dentist never keeps me waiting. He calls his patients customers, not patients, “because the very word ‘patient’ has negative connotations.” Last time I saw him, I asked him about this.
“Firstly, it’s plain rude to keep people waiting,” he said. “If you can’t organise and manage your business to give people what they’re actually buying – prompt, competent service – you shouldn’t be in business. If I got a reputation for keeping customers waiting, sooner rather than later they’d find another dentist. It’s not as if there’s a shortage of dentists.”
Neither is there a shortage of hair salons or laser hair removal clinics. The country is lousy with them. Customers have almost limitless choice. They’re busy. They have appointments to keep too. Yet salon owners tell me they can’t guarantee the one thing people actually want, ‘because things happen out of our control.’
Yes, they do. Customers arrive late. (Or not at all, but that’s another story.) And if you let your customers dictate how you manage your business, that’s going to disrupt an entire day. My dentist has the same issues.
“I always allow 15 minutes ‘fat’ for each appointment that’s an hour or longer,” he says. “If a customer has a 10am appointment and doesn’t turn up till 10.30, I politely tell them I won’t be able to see them because I have another customer at 11, and I simply won’t keep another customer waiting because the previous one hasn’t had the courtesy to turn up on time.
“Funny thing is, ever since I implemented that policy, only two customers have ever been more than a few minutes late. One had a heart attack and died. The other had a bad car accident on the way to the surgery. Even then, she called from the accident scene, profusely apologetic.”
Strong, bold marketing is about having Brass Balls. It’s about making and keeping promises that your competitors are not prepared to make. And it’s about being accountable for those ballsy promises. Anybody can offer a limp-wristed, ho-hum guarantee. “We guarantee good service.” Big deal. But it only grows balls when it carries an accountability rider, such as “….or your money back.”
And, at the risk of sounding like that broken record, the value of such accountability in your marketing message far, far exceeds and outweighs the tiny risk you’ll ever have to make good on it.
But I’m probably wasting my breath. Who really has the balls to actually deliver what customers consistently tell you they want?
by Greg Milner | May 11, 2015 | Advertising Tips, Blog, Featured
[VIDEO] Why ‘old-fashioned’ salon marketing still works – Two interviews with salon owners who swear by the effectiveness of ‘old-fashioned’ hard copy marketing.
These videos were recorded about the time when it seemed many salon owners had become seduced into thinking that modern marketing was all about social media, email and text messaging…because it’s (allegedly) free.
In this video, Catherine Hanson of City Looks in Winnipeg, Canada, and Marnie Doman (then of Evoque Spa in Perth, Western Australia) reveal the huge impact direct mail and print advertising have had on their businesses.
[VIDEO] Why ‘old-fashioned’ salon marketing still works
by Greg Milner | Apr 28, 2015 | Ads that Have Worked, Featured
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’.
Why Most Salon Marketing Fails
by Greg Milner | Apr 20, 2015 | Featured, The Smell of Success
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
