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Unless you are one of those rare individuals who likes working with numbers, you’ve probably been avoiding writing your Salon Marketing plan.
This is one of the less-glamorous sides of running a salon business.
Managing the day to day running of your business and keeping to the financial plan of a salon don’t always go together. Keeping track of what products you use and if your pricing is set right is paramount to knowing if you’re doing well.
So creating your marketing plans isn’t always top priority.
Of course, to be successful in business today, and stay ahead of your competitors tomorrow, you also need to be a whiz at marketing.
But Salon Marketing goes way beyond placing an ad in the local paper (which isn’t effective these days) and writing a short salesy post on Facebook.
In fact, what you need to manage the bombardment of all these apparent add-ons to paperwork is a salon marketing plan.
What Is A Marketing Plan?
You might ask yourself: what is a marketing plan and what is the purpose of a marketing plan for your salon?
And, actually, how do you create a marketing plan?
First, don’t freak out. Building a marketing plan to support and grow your business hopes and dreams isn’t rocket science. But it’s true that you need a good salon marketing plan to make your salon business the best it can be. And, importantly, to pay yourself a decent wage because you deserve it!
Is developing a salon marketing plan a lot of work?
Depending on the size of your salon business, marketing plans can be as thick as a house brick or just several pages. If producing only a few pages scares you, don’t worry. We’ve got a handy template for you to download.
Together with these 9 easy marketing plan steps, you’ll be in your marketing groove in no time.
You will also not need to look for a hair salon marketing plan pdf, as we’ll also give you a free salon marketing plan template to make things easier.
Steps in the salon marketing planning process
Step 1. Prepare to write your salon marketing plan
If you’ve done any research about how to write a marketing plan, you might be bursting with ideas already. But before you dive in (and drown in the details), you need to be organized.
Make sure you’ve got all the data you need to hand, such as your accounts, and any marketing ideas that have inspired you. You need to get in your creative space, so you’ll benefit from a quiet area without any interruptions.
Ready?
Now you’re prepared, it’s time to get down to business. Next, we’re going to look at the key elements to include in your marketing plan adventure.
What needs to be including in a marketing plan
If this is the first time you’ve done this, bear in mind you can add or take away any parts of your marketing plan components later.
Don’t feel intimidated by any marketing plan examples you’ve seen already.
A salon marketing plan can seem complex, but they all follow a similar outline and share key elements. Big-sounding words are often used to make big business sound ‘big’, nothing more. It’s the result that counts, not how well you write it.
As long as you and whoever else need to read it can, that’s all that matters.
So, to get things moving, you’ll need a marketing plan outline.
Salon Marketing plan outline
If you like, the next marketing plan steps can provide the titles (index) for your own marketing plan outline.
You might want to rename them to make the plan feel more personal and relevant to your salon business image. Plus, you’ll be showing your plan to the key staff who help you manage everything.
Using a language style you can all relate to makes everyone feel more involved. When everyone’s on the same page, things always run smoothly within a salon.
Ultimately, this means a more productive business and better profits.
If this was our salon marketing plan, the outline would look like this:
- Research & Get Inspired
- Carry Out SWOT analysis
- Set Marketing Goals
- Develop Marketing Strategy
- Exploiting all avenues
- Financial Plan: Budgets and Resources
- Create Salon Marketing Calendar
- Monitoring Performance
Step 2. SWOT analysis
What is a SWOT analysis?
SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.
This intuitive framework is a tried and tested means of identifying and resolving any challenges your business faces. It also highlights what you’re doing right, so you can build on those strengths.
How To Create A Hair Salon SWOT Analysis
Strengths and Weaknesses
First, we’ll look at what’s going on in your workplace. Internal factors you can control. If you’re just starting out, you’ll be hyped and raring to go – you probably haven’t fallen into the ‘same old routine’. No bad habits and no out-of-date processes. Not yet. But you could still be at a disadvantage.
To identify your strengths and weaknesses, look at things like:
Strengths
Do you have a good team?
For example, you know one of your greatest strengths is your staff. You have a talented team of punctual individuals who are all a hit with your clients. Delivering excellent customer service is never an issue.
Weaknesses
Here you need to be honest with yourself. Nobody is brilliant at everything. And if you’ve been in the trade for sometime, chances are you’ve fallen out of fashion somewhere.
For example, you might think your salon looks great, when really it needs a refurbishment. Or maybe your lack of confidence with computers means your online marketing strategy is terrible.
Threats and opportunities
When you analyze your threats and opportunities, you’re evaluating the current market situation and trends. These are generally external factors you have little control over.
Understanding these paints the portrait of your business landscape. You’ll be able to see how economic factors are helping or hindering your progress. Although these are external forces, it doesn’t mean there’s nothing you can do about them. What you can do is adapt.
To identify threats and opportunities, ask yourself questions like these:
Threats
Are there any current trends likely to cause you a problem?
For example, a competitor may have just launched a new beauty treatment. Their new eagerly- awaited product could make your current line look outdated. Or, there could be a change in legislation meaning views about a certain treatment have changed. Like those towards sunbeds did.
Other threats may include things like the popularity and convenience of mobile services, Or new salons opening close by and undercutting your prices.
Opportunities
Are there any current trends you can take advantage of?
Maybe a new business centre is set to open nearby. You know hundreds of people will be relocating there for work. You also know that women like to pamper themselves after a hard day’s work.
Bingo!
Other opportunities could be trends in organic products you source for a good price. Men taking more pride in their appearance means your barbering skills can be put to good use too.
Or, improvements in technology mean you can use software to manage appointments and stock levels.
In short, knowing your hair salon target market and current trends, how they impact you, will help you adapt to any threats and opportunities.
Step 3. Marketing goals
Step two looked at the overall picture of your current situation.
How trends affect your business right now. Marketing plan goals look into the future and what landscape you’d like to paint. What are your marketing plan objectives?
To help decide what objectives you want to achieve, you need to write a sentence describing them. To meet your goals, give yourself a target to hit.
For example, if you grew your client base by 20% in the first two years, try for 10% more this year.
Other ideas might be to train your staff to cross-sell more products and services. Start a new product line; one with better margins. Or, you could start a trend of your own using a cost-effective product. Maybe offer a package to those men and women at the new business centre?
Now you’ve got a few ideas, list at least six goals and explain how you can reach them. They could read something like, ‘Goal: increase men’s services by 50% before the end of the financial year.’
Step 4. Marketing strategy
In this step we’re going to look at the strategies you can use to make your business a success. Don’t be put off by the word strategy. It’s just another complex-sounding word. A strategy is simply the way you go about things, your approach.
How do you develop a marketing strategy?
If you break down the different aspects of your business, the strategy areas to work on could look like this:
Pricing
What do your prices say about your business?
Too cheap might not attract the clientele you want for your image. Too expensive could mean you alienate locals; locals who will be loyal and help promote you. Here a strategy could be to offer services and products for all budgets. Most products have a low, mid and high-spec option.
Services
Is there a service or product you can provide? Maybe there’s a space in a corner to set up a nail bar or add a colourful display. You want to see if there’s any possibility to add something which could be profitable or attract new clients. Or, take away something that’s not working and is losing you money.
Image and branding
Branding, especially in your line of work, is everything. However shallow it may be, looks count. What does your image say about you? Is it good enough?
When businesses look at branding strategies, they basically want people to associate them with something.
Greenpeace save the planet. Prada make bags for rich people. The RSPCA stops animal cruelty. McDonald’s sell fast food; The Hilton posh rooms. Branding means when people see your business logo, they instantly associate it with what you do.,/p.
It’s what makes you different from your competitors.
PR
How do you market a new product? What promotional strategies do you use? PR is marketing in its rawest form, and today the avenues are many. Step 5 goes into this more in-depth.
Hopefully, now you understand what marketing strategies are and how to develop your own. Next, we’ll look at how to link them all together.
Step 5. Exploiting all avenues
If there was a treasure-trove full of precious stones, gold jewellery and thousands of priceless coins, what would you do?
You’re told there’s a van to carry everything, and that the treasure is free for the taking. You wouldn’t take the gold and leave the rest, would you?
Exploiting all avenues is about using all the marketing resources you have available. Unfortunately, many salon owners fall back on one or two.
Facebook might be popular, but it’s not the only way to promote your business. What if FB finished, like many of its predecessors did. Of course, drawing out an online marketing plan and a social media marketing plan is a great idea. But there’s other avenues to include. Collectively, they will make for one hell of a marketing treasure-trove.
You know how advertisements appear online, on the radio and on TV, right? You might also see them on buses, trains and billboards. What advertisers know is that by repeating a message via different channels works. They know when you’re walking down the supermarket aisle and you need something specific, you’ll reach for their brand.
What avenues can you exploit?
Together with your branded image, linking every available PR opportunity together is key.
Maybe your local radio will give you a shout out. Sure, use FB to promote a special offer. But what about sending the message to your clients who don’t have a Facebook account? Fir example, you could use a software program to send promotional messages.
The internet is a big van to move your treasure. Is your website up-to-date to date?
The point here is that not all people are the same. Not everyone uses the internet for everything. Some people don’t even trust advertisers so only rely on word of mouth. When you’ve exploited all avenues, you’ve cast a wide net. But remember, not all methods will work, you’ll fine-tune what does.
Step 6. Financial plan: budgets and resources
Whatever your business marketing plan goals are, reaching most of them will involve money.
This might mean outright spending money, or it may involve allocating time to meet them. Without a solid financial plan, things can soon get out of control and fail. You’ve probably heard the phrase ‘money pit’.
To manage your budget and resources properly, you need to allocate a budget for each marketing strategy. And don’t forget to take advantage of what you can do for free (remember about training staff to cross-sell). When you’re planning your business’ finances, you are investing in your business.
How much to spend?
How much you can allocate depends on how fast you want to grow your business. Ideally, you need to go for about 10% of your turnover. And if you’re entering new territory, add another 20% to your estimated cost.
Some of you may only have limited resources so will need to take a more creative approach. In this case, you could delegate a PR task to each staff member to carry out in quiet periods. This way you’re making the most of the time you pay them for. Again, make the most of software you can install to manage things to free up even more time.
Depending which strategies you use, you need resources for things like: time spent on retraining. Money for advertisements in local papers. Radio time. Local business pages like The Yellow Pages. Buying new products, etc.
Step 7. Create Salon Marketing Calendar
By now you should have an idea about what you need to do to get your business moving.
You will have identified problem areas and strengths you can build on. Together with your team, you should be all excited about the changes you’re going to make. You might even have decided on a brand new image. Whatever you’ve decided, you know that throughout the year there are opportunities.
From Christmas to Halloween and everything in between there are opportunities to increase sales. To keep track of everything and allow time to prepare for them needs planning. The best way to manage this is to use a marketing calendar. If events calendar sounds better, call it that.
Making the most of your calendar
Apart from the obvious occasions like Valentines day, there are lots of chances to push business. Every stationary shop pushes sales when a new school term starts. But have you thought about their teachers and other school staff? Everyone wants to look their best for first day back to school.
And then there’s the gaps where nothing’s happening. What do you do? Go on holiday? Go to the gym? By all means, take a well-deserved break, but gaps in the calendar offer a fantastic opportunity for you to create an event of your own. Throw a ‘strawberry and sparkly’ morning for those affluent retired ladies you see browsing the high street. Call it Pure Pampering or something they’ll lap up.
Or, if you have a space on your calendar and want to reward customer loyalty, give them something for free. Throw a raffle. Cause people to talk about you, it’s the oldest form of advertisement. Now, you should have lots of marketing ideas to build a solid market plan. Downloading a marketing calendar is like downloading your own personal PR. In fact, together with the inventory and appointment software, you should profit from every occasion just by doing this step.
Step 9. Monitoring performance
As you can see, you’re going to be busy over the coming months.
You’ll probably need some kind of management plan to keep on top of everything. You’ll need to monitor how various things are working, or not working. Then you’ll need to take whatever action to keep it all running smoothly.
Ultimately, this will lead to a healthy balance sheet and you being the best in your business.
To help monitor performance, you can take advantage of this useful marketing plan pdf to add to your armoury of new salon marketing software. With the boring stuff out of the way, you can go be your usual happy, glamorous self. But before you strut off, we want to make sure you are fully prepared first.
Staying focused
With your marketing plan in place, you’ll be looking at a bigger bright picture, one you’ve painted. You’re probably high on ideas and feel ready to rule the world, eh? Well, now it’s time for a reality check. Be revved up. Make your mark on the world. But keep your ego in-check. Don’t fizz and then go flat. With lots to do you can soon burn out. Then you’re no use to nobody. Like we said at the start, this is an ongoing process, you can add or take away elements that work or don’t work. Soon, you’ll have a streamlined strategy that almost runs itself.
Good luck and see you soon
We wish you well in this exciting venture. The next year will allow enough time to action your marketing plan intentions. But if you’ve reached this point and you’re struggling with creating yours, you can check out this marketing plan example for some more ideas. We also have a simple marketing plan template you can use to guide you through.
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