Stand out above your competitors in 2017 but doing these MUST do Salon promtional ideas for your salon.
2017 will be the year of hyper local, mobile marketing whether you are are Hair Salon, nail salon or spa.
There is no other time than now for making sure your salons’ website is at the center of your salon marketing strategies.
And making sure you are winning online is not as expensive or as difficult as you think it is. There are now a range of low cost and easy to use promotional tools, some of which we will cover here.
So without any more suspense lets get on with our 15 salon promotion ideas for 2017…
- Google My Business
If you must do one of our salon promotional ideas, make sure it is this one!
It should take you only 5 minutes!
We find far too many salon owners and managers are not claiming or adding their salons listing on Google My Business and this is a huge wasted opportunity.
We realize that Internet marketing can be daunting my many people but Google has made this tool so easy to use, so there is no excuse.
Why Is Google My Business So Important?
As you well know, Google is the king of search engines in most countries
– only in China where Baidu.com is leader & Russia where Yandex.ru is the leader is not the two countries where Google isn’t the #1 search engine.
And with this dominance in search, did you know that there are over 1 million searches a month on Google in the USA for hair salons (and its variants)?
YES – 1 million POTENTIAL clients a month are looking for a NEW hair salon!
That makes Google a proven one of the best salon promotions that work that you can use us in your salon to drive new business that we can suggest
(apart from referrals by happy clients)
but please don’t stop reading, we do have another 14 hair salon advertising examples for you
Google My Business is the tool you use to ensure that your business appears in the search results on Google desktop and mobile next to the map, which is called the ‘3 pack’.
I am sure you regularly check Google to see where you own salon is in the search results or may be a restaurant or bar?
so you are used to seeing the map together with venues being listed beside it
If you haven’t done this: go to Google and type what customers would do to find a hair salon in your area…
Do you see your salon there?
If you don’t see yourself on the search results in the area of the lower red box,
then you need to fix it!
Google Desktop Search Results – ‘Hair Salon New York City’
Google Mobile Search Results – ‘Hairdressers London’
start managing your salons Google My Business listing today and start getting all those potential clients for your salon.
As mentioned before, it will only take you 5 minutes to set up and remember it is one of THE BEST hair salon marketing ideas you will carry out for your salon.
See How to Claim Or Add Your Salon
Our top tips when creating a perfect listing for your salon
Make sure you add…
- Correct company name (i.e. your hair salon or spa name)
- Correct address including zipcode / Postal Code
- Correct business category, i.e. hair salon
- Opening hours
- Website Address
- Good description including keywords like your salon name, business type (i.e. hair salon), location or district and services…but don’t over do the keywords though. It is needs to be natural.
- Add quality pictures of your salon
When adding pictures to your listing, we suggest excellent quality exterior and interior shots with no people (people date pictures quickly).
Remember pictures paint a thousand words!
It is important to remember, that if you have changed some information, this can take a few days to appear on Google.
- Have A Salon Marketing Plan
As with an good strategy, you need to a good plan
Taking time out from your busy schedule to plan your salons future marketing and promotions will be a great investment in your time and will give you the returns financially.
Within your marketing plan, you should include the following items
- A calendar of events; i.e. Mother’s Day, Black Friday etc
- Channel, i,e. social media, email marketing, website etc
- Marketing message
- Objective for marketing / promotion campaign; i.e. sell more retail, increase spend per client by x%
There are many free online marketing plan templates for you to use and populate your own data
- Create & Manage Your Salons Facebook Page
It is still a shock to us that some hair salons or nail salons do not have a Facebook page.
Or if they do, they have not set it up correctly
In November 2016 Facebook had 1.79 billion monthly active users!
If you are a salon with a single location, make sure you have set your Facebook profile up as ‘Local Business’ page.
If you are a chain of salons, we suggest open individual ‘Local Business’ pages and one ‘Brand’ page.
Quick ‘How to Create a Facebook Business Page’
a. Go to your personal profile on Facebook
b. Click on ‘Create Page’ on the left-hand-side of your Facebook feed
c. Choose ‘Local Business or Place’ when choosing what type of profile.
DO NOT select any other profile types.
Like mentioned before the only time you should choose ‘Brand or Product’ and that is when you have multiple salons and you need brand page for your group of salons,
but even then, each of your salons will need to have their own local business page.
Once you have your page sorted out you need to ensure you have a good content plan
There are a number of tools to help you create content for your profile and these are:
Postplanner allows you to get post ideas and find trending topics to give you inspiration
Canva is an easy to use graphic design tool which allows everyone to become a graphic designer. It has all the correct image dimensions for all the different social media platforms to make it even easier for you
Always wondered when is the best time to post of social Facebook? Let Buffer work it out the best time for you to post and ensure you get maximum impact for your post.
Here are some good Facebook post ideas for your salon
- Appointment availability
- Launch of new service or product
- New hair stylist or nail technician joining your salon
- When a good client review has been given
- Any hair salon promotions you may be having
- Before and after pictures
- Remind clients of opening hours
- Fun or inspirational hair quotes
- If a staff member is going on or returning from vacation
- Add or Claim your Salon on Yelp
As well as Google My Business and Facebook
there is another elephant in the room and that is Yelp.
Love it or hate it, Yelp is the leading local business review website and app, which isn’t going anywhere and can boost your salon marketing activities.
In a 4 month period of in late 2016, Yelp had 25 million unique monthly average visitors via its app and 72 million unique monthly average visitors who visited its website!
Many salon managers or owners do not agree with the way that Yelp presents it scores but it is done this way for a reason….
To keep you promoting Yelp as a review platform to your clients
As with both Google and Facebook, make sure you have put the correct details and opening hours for your salon, as well as great pictures.
It is essential that wherever your salon is listed, you have all the same address and telephone details, this helps Google realize it is the same location on each website.
Make sure there is only 1 listing for your salon, if there are several, you can contact Yelp and ask them to be removed, if there are multiple listings for your salon, it will effect how your salon shows up in the search results.
Later we will talk about how to increase your reviews
(the right way)
on Yelp and other reviews website.
- Use Salon Software To Track Clients
More and more salons are using salon software to manage their scheduling and online booking.
It may seem a strange thing to include in this marketing ideas post
but many of the best marketing strategies for salons is creating a client database and using it effectively to drive more new business and create loyal clients.
Knowledge is power…
Ensuring that you know how often individual clients visit you, how much they spend and more importantly ensure that those that have stopped coming to your salon, that you are able to market to them again.
You don’t get this from a client card or from a paper based appointment book!
You need to make sure with your chosen salon management software you are able to download your client records.
Some salon software providers have integrations with specialist email marketing software and we will talk about this later….
- Have A Website & Make Sure It Is Mobile & Search Engine Friendly!
Getting your salon online has never been easier and low cost then today
There are various ways of getting online quickly these days
You can use a website builders such as Weebly or Wix.
With these tools you are able to get online in a matter of minutes.
Alternatively, you can create your own website using WordPress; choosing template from a theme store like Themeforest, where they have hundreds of templates for salons
and create a WordPress hosting account with a company such as SiteGround for instance.
If you are looking for someone to assist you with setting up your website, you can use such a marketplace like Upwork, where you can find quality providers to assist you setting up etc
Is your salons website mobile friendly?
Google announced in late 2016 that they will check your mobile version of your website first before they check your desktop version for what will appear in its search results.
This is big news!
If your site is not mobile friendly Google will push you further down the search results in favor of mobile friendly websites or even more scary
not list your salons website at all
You can see if your salons website is mobile friendly by checking your website on Google Mobile Friendly checking tool
Don’t waste all of your salon marketing ideas or promotional budget whether online or offline if your website is rubbish and not mobile friendly.
You might as well hand money out to random people in the street!
Make Sure Your Salons Website Has Keywords
Too many salons don’t have the right secret sauce on their homepage for Google to list their website properly in the search results.
Your salons website should have the correct salon keywords, in the the volume and the right place on each page.
Having just your logo on you homepage doesn’t work and you as with some of our other salon marketing ideas, it will on take 5 minutes and should have a positive impact if you can’t find your website on Google.
You should have the following keywords in the right places on your salons websites….
(obviously use your own locations and salon name)
Page Title: hair salon (or nail salon) + district / city – Salon name (example Hair Salon San Francisco – Headcutters Salon)
H1 Title: hair salon + district / city (example Hair Mission District)
H2 Title: Should be somewhere lower down you page and should be something like ‘hairdressing’ or ‘hairstylist’ or ‘nail technician’.
Use SEO Review Tools to check your website for the right titles and see whether your website is set up properly.
- Get More Online Reviews For Your Salon
Many people turn to Google, Yelp or Facebook for reviews to help them find their next salon, may sure you are driving clients to leave reviews for you.
If you are providing a great customer experience and product then you should have no fear of online reviews…
but if you do, be warned they can make or break your business!
An interesting fact from the BrightLocal 2016 ‘Local Consumer Review Survey’ reports that 7 out of 10 consumers will leave a review for a business if they’re asked to.
That means 70% of your clients will leave a review if you ask them
So if you have 100 clients a week, that could be 70 reviews a week…..
Pretty powerful for driving new business to your salon!
How Do Online Reviews Work?
Google Reviews are especially important due to the fact that the frequency and rating is part of their algorithm on where you appear in the ‘3 pack’
Yelp works in a similar way, they have an algorithm to keep you motivated to drive fresh reviews and if not they will start to ‘hide’ old reviews and this where you see small business owners sometimes fall out with Yelp.
Facebook uses reviews to rank how your salon would appear in their search results and this is called EdgeRank. Your score could also appears on Google search results, as seen on the listing for Taylor Taylor a hair salon in London.
Watch This Video On How To Get More Reviews For Your Salon?
How To Increase The Number Of Reviews
Some salon software providers include tools to increase online reviews, such as Belliata Salon Software has this function. If you do not have such a tool there are other ways you can do it…
Timing is important…
Follow up a client appointment (under 12 hours) with an email or SMS to ask for an online review
May be offer a donation (i.e. $1/£1/€1) to a local charity for every online review made. This is a nice touch and shows your a caring salon or spa
DO NOT offer customer discounts for giving an online review, that is bribery and often find out
DO NOT cheat Yelp by creating fake reviews or any other of the online review platforms, they have many years of experience in catching people and you are likely to have reviews removed or even worse be marked as possible having fake reviews
An Example Of A Business Caught Faking Reviews By Yelp
Do you really want possible new clients and existing ones seeing the message below?
Hopeful not!
- Facebook Custom Audiences
Stop wasting money in 2017 on pointless un-targeted Facebook advertising and start using your existing client data to focus your salon marketing and promotions budget.
Remember if your not using salon software in your salon, you probably won’t have the client data stored electronically
But if you do then read on…
Many salon owners or managers are not aware of a great advertising tool within Facebook Advertising called Custom Audiences.
What is this amazing marketing tool? I hear you ask….
This is a tool within Facebook, where you are able to upload your clients telephone number and or email address in an CSV file.
Facebook then uses this data to look in its database for users who have the same telephone number or email address..then bingo you have a custom audience!
But it gets more interesting…..
You can then ask Facebook to find similar people (Lookalike audiences) to those of your clients, so likely to be your clients friends, like the same groups etc
this makes it ideal for you to be able to find other clients for you salon
There are a couple of things to point out…
Facebook likes a minimum of 20 records, but this is far too less to get good data back, we suggest a minimum of 200
The more records you upload to Facebook, the more ‘Lookalike’ people it will find
Don’t forget when using a ‘Lookalike’ Audience that you set the location for the ad, else you could be paying for huge amounts of people not in your area.
- Check Your Search Engine Positions
Well you have a website, you have done your Google My Business profile, you now have to track where your salons website shows up on Google search results.
Making sure you are top ranking on Google can make your business.
Did you know that over 60% of people click on the top 3 results on Google search results?
There are tools which you can use to monitor this and one of those is Positionally, a leading search engine engine position tool which allows you to keep track of where you in both the local listings and in the main search engine results.
- Deliver A Great Customer Experience
Not exactly salon marketing but offering a great customer experience and prodcut is how you grow a profital and long lasting business.
Here are some easy ways to improve the customer experience in your salon:
- Why not offer a drink on arrival, such as a cocktail or coffee
- Provider a free Japanese head massage as standard when washing clients hair
- Ensure that all of your staff are friendly and courteous when interacting with clients, even if it isn’t their client
- Deliver a great product; ensure you staff are superb at their job whether it is cutting hair or painting nails
- Send booking appointment reminders, to remind clients of their appointment. Not only will it reduce no-shows it is good customer service
- Even a reminder sent to a client to be seen as a positive customer experience
It is important that you are following up your clients visits with a customer satisfaction survey to gather feedback on how you can improve your product or service
Always follow up feedback with clients, whether good or bad. Hiding from bad feedback is not good….remember a complaint is a gift to allow you to improve
If you want to improve your customer experience, read some of your competitors online reviews to see what they are doing better then you, online reviews give great insight into your competitors services and products.
- Grow Your Salons Instagram Following
Running a salon, wether it be a hair salon or nail salon is a visual business and what could be more visual then Instagram (well Pinterest I guess).
There are millions of posts on Instagram everyday, so it is essential that you make sure you stand out from the crowd but more important you need to…..
remember to post regularly, follow, like, comment and repost images to gain maximum impact for your account.
Top Tools For Better Instagram Account
- Find local followers on Instagram by using tools such as worldc.am, which allows you to find local photos and people posting at locations. Remember to follow these users to grow your follower base but don’t over do it and get blocked by Instagram
- Create Instagram images by using Fotor.com which allows you to create and post unique images to your profile
- Seen a clients post for your salon? Why not repost it, it is free easy content. But Instagram rules state that you have to show the originator of the image and tools such as Repostapp ensures you are keeping within the reposting rules
- Monitor your Instagram performance and if you have a number of salons, you could use something like Iconosquare to track your Instagram performance
- Improve Retail Merchandising
Want to increase your the spend per client?
We thought you might!
Well one of the best ways to do this is to through better retailing of retail products within your salon.
Take some time out, do some research on Pinteret etc to find some great inspiration on how you can merchandise better…
But it is also about ensuring your team are great sales through an excellent customer experience, if people are happy they spend more! FACT.
Work with your suppliers to visit your salon, get them to train your staff on how to sell more products and more importantly understand the products you sell.
You can also ask suppliers for merchandising materials, possbile budget towards salon marketing and other promotional items. Remember it is in your suppliers to help you sell more products.
- Create Email Marketing Campaigns
Some salon software providers have integrations with specialist email marketing software like Get Response, MailChimp or Constent Contact to make it easier for you send emails to clients
Although people reading and using email is on a decline, it is still an important marketing communications channel for businesses to communicate to with clients, so don’t ignore it
If you are have hair salon software in your salon, it could be that it either is able to send to emails or it links into a email provider such as Getresponse.com, where you can link
- Add Your Website To Local Business Directories
We have already talked about Google My Business, Yelp and Facebook but make sure you are listed on as many (quality) local listings websites as possible.
Again, as with the other listings we have spoken about, ensure that your salons address, telephone number and website URL are the same across all of the those listings.
Not only will it help you get traffic from those directories, it will also provide backlinks for your website, which will help push you up Google search results.
If you are looking for sources of local listings, you could try out Local Visibility and their list of places to add your local salon.
- Set Up ‘Local’ Google Adwords Campaign
As we mentioned earlier, 2017 is all about hyper local marketing for salons, whether large or small.
Google Adwords, if used properly can be a highly effective source of new clients for your salon
Again, we can’t remind you enough…
more and more people are searching for local businesses on their smartphone and Google is at the centre of this. Google are also making it more difficult for local businesses to have ‘natural’ listings by adding more and more items on the first page of their search results ‘above the fold’.
One way to combat this is to the start using Google Adwords to make sure you appear at the top of the first page….(which is what Google wants your salon marketing budget!)
Set your budget low like $5 / £5 or day or whatever you can afford and let Google choose when to display your ads and not just to spend the budget as it will be used up very quickly in the morning.
Don’t use Google Adwords for your salon if:
- You haven’t got a website
- If you have a website put your prices on the homepage
- If you have not added you added your telephone number
- If you have not add your address or better still a map of your location
If you don’t have some of the above items, then you are likely to be wasting valuable salon marketing budget due to the fact that people will not book as you have made it too difficult to research and book!
How To Set-up Your Salons Google Adwords Campaign
We need to break the keywords down into groups
Firstly we will split the keyword search terms into US English & British English
‘Why is that’?
We hear you asking…
Well, people use different keywords when searching for a hairdresserin the various English speaking countries.
So which countries use the same search terms?
US English, which covers;
USA
Canada
British English covers;
UK
Ireland
New Zealand
Australia
What are best keywords for hair salons?
Let us look at the US Group first
(if you are only interested in the British English – click here and you will jump to the section)
Firstly the best search keyword terms you need to focus on for the biggest search engine traffic are:
- City Level – Hair salon NYC (& New York City)
- Borough Level – Hair salon Manhattan
- District Top Level – Hair salon Midtown or Hair Salon Midtown NYC
- District Drilldown Level – Hair salon Midtown east or Hair salon Midtown east NYC
- Zipcode + city – hair salon 10001
- Zipcode – hair salon 10001
There are two other opportunities to drive traffic:
Best and Top
For example you can have
City Level – Best + Hair salon NYC (& New York City)
or
City Level – Top + Hair salon NYC (& New York City)
If your salon is focused on a certain ethnicity you can also try (using New York City as our example again)
Japanese hair salon NYC
Dominican hair salon NYC
Asian hair salon NYC
African American hair salon NYC
etc….
So let us look at the British English version of the salon keywords list
The main one in British English is that people are looking for hairdresser more than hair salon.
For example
- City level – Hairdresser London
- Area level – Hairdresser East London
- District level – Hairdresser Islington
- City + Postcode – Hairdresser N1
Like the US examples, your hair salon may be specifically targeting a specific ethnicity
Asian hairdresser London
Afro-Carribean hairdresser London
If we now to look at paid keywords through Google Adwords, then we can start to use location targeting within the adverts.
Firstly, to ensure maximum effectiveness of your salon marketing spend, you will need to set up ‘Location Targeting’ which allows you to only show ads to those people near your salon and can be done by for either city or radius from your zipcode or postal code, on these campaigns.
Here is a great video from the Google Adwords Team on ‘How to Set Up Location Targeting’ to enable you to focus your ads to be effective.
Location Targeted Salon Keywords
- Hair salon near me
- Hair salons near me
- Hair stylist/s
- Hair salon/s
- Hairdresser/s
- Top / best hair salon/s
- Top / best hair hairdresser/s
- Cheap hair salon
- Cheap hairdresser/s
REMEMBER….
You must set up location targeting, or else your ads will be shown all over your country or even globally!!
Wherever you don’t put your city or district etc within the keywords for your ads, you MUST do location targeting.
Service Keywords
Many people forget that customers also search for the services they are looking for
For this you need to target
service + city or district
service + salon + city or district
- Hair straightening
- Black hair salons
- Hair braiding
- Ombré
- Japanese hair straightening
- Mens haircut
- Womens haircut
- Childrens haircut
- Brazilian hair straightening
- Extensions
- Weave
etc
What Hair Salon Marketing Ideas Do You Have?
Have you had some salon promotions that worked for you, or any other hair salon promotions that you would like to share?
The post 15 MUST Do Salon Promotion Ideas For You To Do In 2017 appeared first on Belliata.
