Salon Internet Marketing: How to Stop Others Sabotaging Your Salon Marketing
This salon got 40 new clients in two days – no thanks to their local newspaper…
Interesting case this week which shows just how vigilant you need to be to stop people sabotaging your marketing efforts.
Untrained staff will do it all the time, if you let them. Phone rings madly after your ad comes out, only to be met by “uh…sorry, don’t know about that offer, hang on, I’ll ask someone…”
That’s something that IS under your control, and only YOU can fix it. But what about when your local newspaper refuses to publish your ad because ‘it’s against the law…”!!!?
Inner Circle member Tamara Jones of Beauty Bliss in Cairns, Queensland – 40 new clients from a single $300 ad on page 23 of the local newspaper. But no thanks to the newspaper itself.
It happend to Inner Circle member Tamara Jones of Beauty Bliss in Cairns, far north Queensland.
“At first they point-blank refused to run my ad at all,” says Tamara, “Then they refused to let me use the word FREE!”
Turns out that some fool at the newspaper had half-read – and totally misunderstood – a recent case where the consumer watchdog had clamped down on an internet company pretending to offer free bonuses which weren’t actually free, they were hidden by inflated prices.
Rightly so…but for the newspaper to interpret this as a blanket ban on the use of the word ‘free’ was clearly nonsense. I know this because, being the diligent reporter that I am, I personally phoned the relevant mouthpiece at the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and got it from the horse’s mouth.
“Are you saying that it’s now illegal for businesses to give away stuff for free?” I asked the spokesman.
“Not at all,” he said, “all we’re doing is stopping people building the cost of so-called bonuses into an inflated price for the original product,” he said.
Sometimes, bureaucracy is a a condom on progress. But its effect is magnified a thousand times by officious and ill-informed employees mis-interpreting the ‘rules’ and needlessly preventing perfectly-legal marketing.
So what happened to Tamara’s ad?
On a happier note, Tamara persisted with the idiot newspaper rep. With no time to check the facts with the authorities, she agreed to change the word ‘free’ to ‘bonus’, and let the ad run last Saturday.It was published way down in the paper, on page 23.
“We had 21 bookings on Saturday, another 17 on Monday, more on Tuesday, and the phone is still ringing. 40 bookings so far, and the ad is scheduled to run again Thursday. I am so impressed. Of these bookings, only 2 are existing clients. My new therapist was supposed to be only working 3 days a week, she’s already doing 5 days…this is great for us, the salon is buzzing again, thank you to all the staff at Worldwide Salon Marketing…!”
Forty new clients…let’s say she keeps only half of them for the long term…and each is worth say $1,000 a year. So that single $300 could well have added $20,000 a year to Tamara’s sales. That’s pretty good leverage.
INNER CIRCLE MEMBERS: Want to see the ad Tamara used? Log into the Members Only ‘sealed section’ and navigate to Getting New Clients – Beauty’ and you’ll find it in .jpg format you can download. Hair salon owners: don’t give me grief about ‘oh, that’s for beauty, we’re a hair salon’. Instead, think: “How can I make this work for my hair salon…?”
Sample Marketing Plan For Hair Salon: Jane and Niki’s $200,000 Salon Sales Boost
Nothing, but nothing, breeds success in the salon & spa business (or any other business) like ACTION.Thinking won’t do it. Planning by itself will achieve nothing at all.
American music legend Ted Nugent says it best: “What you need most to be successful is a dream, a dedicated work ethic, and an alarm clock.”
He means it literally – getting out of bed, early, and getting stuck into it. And, as Dan Kennedy writes in his latest newsletter, in the broader sense it means “recognition of urgency, a keen sense of the passing of time, a firm and even violent rejection of the ‘if not today, we’ll get it tomorrow’ mentality.”
Our most successful Inner Circle members embrace this philosophy.
Jane Dowling and Niki Koutrakis of Talking Beauty in Hawthorn, Victoria – proof that being shy is no barrier to success.
At the Road to Riches salon & spa marketing seminar in Melbourne on Monday, jaws dropped when Inner Circle members Niki Koutrakis and Jane Dowling of Talking Beautystood at the front of the room and proudly revealed how their business had taken off…regardless of the economy, swine flu and any of a million other obstacles, real and imagined.
“In the 11 months since getting the Worldwide Salon Marketing system in July 2008, we’ve put an extra $200,000 in the bank,” Jane told the audience.
This is NOT an isolated case. And neither is it dependent on being blessed with a certain peronsality type. Jane and Niki are both very quietly spoken, shy people. Other IC member salon owners are outgoing, confident and loud. It doesn’t matter. Action is something anybody can take, no matter whether you’re a wallflower or a showgirl.
Lidija Siskopoulos of Enigma Hair in North Perth, WA – $24,000 from a single Toolkit membership promotion.
Lidija Siskopoulos of Enigma for Hair is another case in point. Lidija collected her Toolkit from our office on May 21. Within 72 hours, she’d made an extra $9,000 in sales, just using a Membership letter she found in the kit. In the following three weeks, that figure shot up to $19,000. Take a look at Lidija’s photo – this is clearly not the picture of shy retiring type.
Among the many hundreds of Inner Circle members around the world, we have every personality type imaginable – drivers, emotives, analyticals, amiables and every shade in between.
None of that matters.
I read recently about one of America’s top salesmen. This guy was so shy, he could NEVER sell to anybody face-to-face.
His only means of communication with prospective clients was the telephone. Yet, for decades, he was the very top salesman in his field in the entire country.
You do NOT have to be a genius, a star, a show-stopper, a leading light to be successful in this business. You just have to educate yourself on what works, get the tools, and follow the system.
Beauty Salon Marketing Strategy: We get (lots of) mail…
Does ‘our’ kind of marketing work?
Just a couple of the many emails we receive each week from IC members all over the world…these from New Zealand members to our NZ franchisee Chris and Rachael D’Aguiar-Sanders:
From Lorraine Burke, of Loaf in Christchurch:
Just listened to your recent CD no 28 which has fired me up ……..and also jogged my mind to write and tell you how wonderful your help and support has been for me over the last few weeks………It’s so nice to know you’re not on your own and support and encouragement at the end of a phone……….so thank you so much for that.Loaf has been up and running now for 5 weeks in which although I have been chasing my tail….. I have managed to start my marketing…I just want to say how thrilled I am at the response.
If one ad can do so much in 2 weeks what will all the other marketing systems bring? I placed the autumn makeover ad in one of the local newspapers, I have just done a tally and have reached 22 new clients………wow……. Out of them, 15 have rebooked….will get onto the ‘how to rebook’ section soon with my staff so we can make that at least 99%!!!!
So just doing the sums that’s
an extra $2178.00 that we wouldn’t have had ……(as well as the hidden advertising by people talking)… so over a year that’s worth $24,640.00 per year and that’s without retail recommendations to our clients. So thanks again Rachael, I’m looking forward to our next coaching call and all the support you will be giving me over the following months…I hope one day I can return the favour and do something for you.”
“We decided to take on someone to help us with the clinic as we have tried many things our way with very little success!
After looking around we decided to take on the Worldwide Salon Marketing team and thank god we did! It has been a great help to us to see where we were making the mistakes and to see immediate results!!!
Chris and Rachael have been there whenever we have needed help, which when you are trying to get things moving in the right direction GOOD help is what you need.
We totally recommend the system at Worldwide Salon Marketing and certainly have no regrets.”
Salon Marketing Tips: “I took an extra $9,500 in the next 72 hours!”
Yes, the tortoise WILL get there…eventually. But you don’t have to do it at a crawl.
Being part of the Inner Circle program and using the tools and strategies in the Toolkit is NOT a ‘get rich quick’ scheme. It does take work.
But there’s nothing inherently good about ‘getting rich slow’ either.
It’s always a mystery to me how it is that despite having exactly the same tools and support, the speed at which some Members implement those tools and strategies – and therefore the speed at which they reap the rewards – varies so greatly. Some leave the Toolkit sitting on their shelf, or tucked away under the reception desk, for months before actually bringing it out and using it. (One member recently told me that it was a full year before she actually got off her backside and put the ads, flyers and letters to work…lo and behond, in the next 12 months she increased her salon’s takings by a full $109,000 over the previous 12 months!)
But others do it at warp speed. Just last week, salon owner Lidija Siskopoulos of Enigma for Hair (right here in my home town) was so excited about getting into the Inner Circle program she refused to wait till the courier delivered her Toolkit, she jumped in her car and drove to our office to collect it herself.
This week she told me
“I took an extra $9,500 in the next 72 hours!”
Lidija is clearly one who understands that success is about Massive Action.
In other words, that massive action paid for Lidija’s entire first year Membership of the Inner Circle program in a single swoop.Now, to dismiss Lidija’s story as a flash-in-the-pan, as something out of the ordinary and quite unachievable for the average salon owner is akin to insisting that the earth is flat, and that she must somehow have gotten ‘lucky’. Success is all about taking action… not just in one area, doing ONE thing, sending out a single flyer or placing a single ad, but doing many things, all at once, rapidly. And luck has nothing to do with it. It’s simply planning meets opportunity.
As you’ll see and hear in this video, recorded at our recent Inner Circle Members Only Closed Door Mastermind session after our Road to Riches seminar in Sydney last week, those salon & spa owners who combine action with the right tools (eg the Toolkit) get a disproportionately-large result compared with merely putting the same amount of effort into just ‘doing the thing’ eg cutting more hair or applying more facials.
Inner Circle member Bruce Fisher (left, with wife Beth) of Fisher Experience in Braintree, Massachusetts writes that since he joined the program and got his Toolkit a few months ago, sales at his salon (www.fisherexperience.com) have leapt by over $10,000 a month.
But as Bruce explains, it took a lot of effort – and startling results – to get his staff believing that ‘our’ kind of direct response marketing for salons is a far better option than the typical beauty industry ‘branding’ style advertising they were accustomed to wasting money on…
“Greg, I certainly appreciate the opportunity to give back to the hairdressing community and many thanks to (Worldwide Salon Marketing) for what I see as breaking new ground.
I, like many others, have been a bit slow getting all of the ideas off the ground but the ideas that I have received from the Toolkit as well as from my Worldwide Salon Marketing coach coach Annette have worked for me quite nicely. I would advise new Members to adhere very closely to the principles of direct marketing and if you find you need additional help taking action you might find it helpful to recruit a local marketing student on an as needed basis.Our $99 dollar facial and massage special (normally 162 dollars) worked brilliantly as well as our ‘Raise the Dead’ campaign having resulted in 125 returned clients. When my team saw the results they started to come on board whereas in the past they were very doubtful. That has changed for the better and now I am getting much more enthusiasm and cooperation.
We are ready to launch our Mother’s Day campaign – e-mail, newspaper, mail drops, and banners and signs inside and outside of our building. I will be happy to report on these results next month but for now I am very excited about the response we will be getting.
Thank you to World Wide Salon Marketing
Bruce and Beth Fisher, Fisher Experience, Braintree, Massachusetts.
