How to Be Successful with Salon Promotional Marketing
You’ve built your business; you’ve hired and trained your staff. Time to make marketing your most important to-do because none of your other work will matter if you don’t have clients walking through your door.
Nowadays, your customers are inundated with choices. Your business can’t afford to wait for walk-ins or for word-of-mouth to attract more business while your competitors aggressively scoop them up. Growing your business quickly requires effective and professional marketing and communications.
Roll-up your sleeves. If you’re just starting, prepare for some hard work ahead. You can lessen the burden by hiring someone specialized in salon marketing and promotions to guide the process.
Before starting a salon marketing campaign, there are three basic but essential elements that you need to consider in your planning:
Targeted Promotion
Think about whom you want to target. Are you targeting working moms, stay-at-home moms, college students, employers … A campaign with a more defined target audience will work better than one with such broad audience. Knowing your audience will help you develop an effective message that hits all the right buttons, offers your audience the right kind of promotion to bring them through your door. Once you know who your ideal customer is, you along with the help of a professional marketing communicator, can develop a message and brand that attracts these clients.
Collateral
Create a professional-looking flyer, branded coupon cards, well-written brochures, targeted postcards, and an effective website to convey your promotional message to your audience. It is important to stand out from your competitors with respectable , high-quality collateral. Because before giving you their business, customers will judge your products and services based on what they see.
Communication Channel
Depending on your marketing budget and who you’re trying to reach, you have many distribution options you can tap into to communicate with potential clients. You can use in store displays, handouts, website promotion, email blasts, newsletters, direct mail, online advertising (Citysearch, Google, Yahoo), magazine ads, and press releases to local publications. The most cost effective and fastest place to start is with your current customer base and employees. By having your staff handout five flyers to each customer with which they come in contact. Assuming you have about 30 customers a day, by the end of the month you could have 4,500 flyers in potential customers’ hands.
Stick with it. Continue your communication and refine your message based on your return. Sometimes your first attempt isn’t as successful as you would have liked. Keep trying with different messages and tap different communication channels to see what works best at attracting your target audience.
These extra hours of work and organization will pay off if you invest time and money into a marketing program to properly launch your business. It’s essential to be creative and aggressive in your marketing campaigns to acquire customers. Help from a professional marketing firm can help you by ensuring quality, refined messaging, and ease the burden.
Based in Austin, TX, DesignBetty is an all-inclusive salon & spa marketing firm that offers its clients graphic design, web and promotional services. DesignBetty’s experienced consulting and creative promotional ideas are the key to launching successful small business marketing and effective growth. DesignBetty’s customers continue to use DesignBetty’s services because it’s unbeatable service and successful strategy. For more information on DesignBetty’s salon marketing services, visit www.designbetty.com.