5 Marketing Tips for the Business Owner

No matter how well you are running your salon, executing on production, service delivery, or customer support, you’ll find yourself playing catch-up across the board if your marketing isn’t up to scratch.

To help keep you ahead of this all important topic, I have put together five simple tactics you can use as a salon owner to give your marketing efforts a boost.

Let’s kick things off with a bit of background detective work.

Carry Out Proper Competitive Research

As Tony Robbins famously observed, success leaves clues. One of the best places to brainstorm for useful marketing initiatives generally is to carefully analyse what your competition is currently up to and cherry-pick the best ideas.

Begin by drawing up a list of three local competitors, then carry out a full survey of their respective sites and services. Be sure to also sign up for any newsletters or autoresponders that they’re offering to get a broader view of their marketing funnel.

Schedule Regular Promotions

Far too many salons approach marketing promotions in an ad-hoc manner – occasionally scrambling to put some sort of offer in front of their clients, and then being disappointed at the inevitably lacklustre response it generates.

If you’re running any sort of organised marketing strategy, you need to have a scheduled list of promotions and special offers in place that stretches far into the future. The majority of these should be centred around obvious recurring occasions such as Christmas, Valentine’s Day and so forth.

Obviously, not every business will get the same value out of each individual occasion, but virtually every salon can benefit from this approach. It introduces stability and regularity to your marketing efforts, keeps potential clients engaged, and gives you a repeatable formula you can analyse and tweak over time.

Activate Your Email List

Particularly with smaller salons, the full power of email as a marketing channel tends to be underutilised. Despite the explosion of interest in social media over the last five years, it continues to be one of the most effective options out there for driving real-world action and sales.

Start by making sure you’re actually maintaining a proper list of email contacts and have an easy way of creating and scheduling messages to them. Then move on to arranging regularly produced newsletter blasts to those who’ve given you permission to contact them. Once you’re comfortable with the basics of the channel, move on to explore the power of autoresponders and customer life cycle campaigns.

Explore The Full Power Of Facebook

The social media wars are a long way from being over, but there’s little doubt that Facebook is currently leaving all other challengers in its wake. The full potential of Facebook will vary from business to business, but their range of advertising and re-targeting options have come on in leaps and bounds over the last two years in particular.

If this is a paid marketing channel you’ve yet to fully dive into, there’s never been a better time to get started – even a few small exploratory campaigns should be enough to give you a feel for its power.

Remember That Online Marketing Is Not The Only Game In Town

The points we’ve covered so far are all firmly rooted in the online world, but offline marketing remains as effective as ever. Again, options here will vary from salon to salon, but you should at least investigate classic offline direct marketing options such as direct mail and print advertising. Also consider where real-world initiatives such as live events could bring more value to the table.

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Successful marketing is all about the willingness to experiment and incremental improvement over time. Any one of the suggestions above has the power to fundamentally transform your results down the road if you’re not already dabbling in it. Bring them all gradually into the mix and you’ll soon find a whole new stream of customers beating a path to your door!

Tracey Daniel is the Co-Founder of the Real Business Group, an organisation which has over 300 proven business strategies to assist entrepreneurs and freelancers to reach the next level in their business.

Real Business Group
http://www.realbusinessgroup.com.au/
office@realbusinessgroup.com.au
1300 887 136