Reboot your salon business with effective marketing

Following on from last month’s Business Reboot article on finances, salon business specialist Antony Whitaker turns his attention to marketing. To reboot your marketing efforts and kickstart your business communications, you need to take stock of what you are doing and what you should be doing, and the most powerful way of ensuring you focus on the right areas is to ask some searching questions. So as a starting point for our marketing reboot, ask yourself: • Is your marketing a complete system that works for you all year round? Or do you take a scattergun approach, constantly reacting to changing circumstances and reinventing your approach just to get new clients through the door? • Marketing is not just about getting new clients in the salon for the first time, so what strategy do you use to get first-time clients coming back for a second and third visit? • What must you do to get them coming back, not just two or three times, but forever? As salon owners, we often focus all our marketing activities on getting new clients, when perhaps we should focus instead on the reasons they aren’t coming back. There is no point getting 10 new clients every week if you are losing just as many. So let’s go back to basics and do a quick audit of your business, looking not at how you get new clients, but at what you are doing to turn them into regulars and keep them as long as possible. The first essential of getting new clients in and then coming back again and again is high-quality work. Delivering quality work, creatively and technically, is the starting point for lasting success. So how good are your consultations and how good are your team members at delivering the quality of work today’s clients expect? We work in a very competitive industry so producing good work is, by itself, no guarantee of success. Today’s clients are not only paying for a service; they expect an experience to match. Making sure your salon delivers that experience is the responsibility of everyone on the team. The most successful hairdressers are those who can attract a steady flow of new clients and then turn them into long-term regulars. Of course, they need to deliver great technical and creative services with an experience to match, but they also need to be skilled at building and nurturing relationships with the brand and the client. It’s that one-to-one relationship between hairdresser and client, the trust and understanding that’s built up over time and separates your salon from all the rest. We live in a fast-changing world and just because something worked in the past, there is no guarantee it will work today or tomorrow. The biggest change in marketing has nothing to do with the message you want to put out, but is all about the medium you use to do it. Rapid advances in technology have given us a whole new digital armoury to communicate with clients that as little as 10 years ago we would never have dreamed of, from salon websites to automated text messaging, email marketing, salon apps, SEO, Google Adwords, QR codes and, of course, a rapidly expanding set of social media platforms. These changes are certain to carry on, with new technologies giving ever more opportunities to build and nurture relationships with new and existing clients. What it means is more ways to communicate, delivering increasingly tailored and personalised marketing messages that match specific products and service to individual client needs. The only question is, will you lead or will you follow?   Besides being a successful author, motivational speaker and business coach, Antony also does a weekly blog packed full of tips and advice on how to run your business better. Subscribe at www.growmysalonbusiness.com or follow him on Instagram and Twitter @growmysalonbiz