Katie Godfrey is the entrepreneur behind the KG brand, and single-handedly built her empire from a single salon bought aged 19 as a school leaver with no qualifications, to a chain of salons, a UK-wide beauty training academy, an eyelash product range and a salon coaching business. In addition to maintaining the salon and pro businesses, Katie is a dedicated business mentor and looks after over 35 salons. Read on for her top tips on easy to implement marketing strategies…
This month in my salon owners club, Coffee, Cake and Chat, we talked all about marketing hacks. For those of you that aren’t part of this, I wanted to give you a few pointers of what we went over, to help you and your beauty and hair business.
Marketing is something we need to do every day within our business to help it grow and to keep us in front of the crowd in the face of ever-increasing competition.
Email marketing
Never underestimate the power of email marketing. Most of you reading this will agree you don’t send emails to your database. This is a huge part of my marketing strategy for growing my salon and brand. Most salon software nowadays will have the option to send emails directly from there. If you’re not using this already, I highly suggest you do. You need to establish a personal relationship with your clients to build up rapport. Sending an email doesn’t mean being ‘Salesy’ (don’t we hate selling?!) or sending out offers. Just connect with your clients, update them with what’s going on in your salon or business. Give them tips and after-care advice, share any wins, and just chat to them on email like you would a friend.
Social Media
Many small businesses now put all their energy into social media. Social media needs to be a huge part of your marketing, just don’t forget the other ways that you can also market your business. Knowing your audience through your social platforms is key to using them most effectively and deciding what content you will produce. If your existing clientele are the people that are following you, you then need to do more than sell treatments as your clients already come to you for those treatments. If your clients don’t follow you, you then you need to promote what you do within the salon.
For example, my salon’s Facebook group is full of regular clients. On there I promote new services but share lots of hints and tips and updates on the salon. On our Instagram page, it’s newer clientele. So on there, I focus a lot more on interaction and showcasing our work to convert these followers into clients.
Social media needs to be social. Use the tools that the platforms give us to interact with your followers. There are different ways you can do this. Here are some examples:
Poll: Using polls on your stories will help interaction on your page. You can make this fun with different games. for example, “This and that” or “Yes or No”
Question Box: Using the question box is a good way for you to get to know your followers and for your followers to know you. When a question comes through, make sure that you always reply, either privately or through the story.
Quizzes: Quizzes are also fun to do with your following. Let them guess how much they think they know you.
As you can see, we basically want people to be able to interact as much as possible. We need to add anything on our stories which will entice your follower to click on something.
When you are posting on Facebook or Instagram as a post, you always want to make sure you have a call to action. People like knowing what to do. What action are you asking them to take from your story or post?
Connecting with other businesses
People like to buy local and support local. Even more so since Covid. What businesses are there around you that have a similar target audience that you could connect with and promote each other to be able to get new clients through your door. There are so many ways of doing this that can work very effectively. You just need to think outside the door…
For example, if you’re a make-up artist can you connect with a local beautician who doesn’t offer make up. If you are a beauty salon, can you connect with a local florist. You can then share leaflets, share posts for each other on social media, do a competition together, or even raise money for a charity together. There are many ideas and businesses you can connect with to help grow you both. We go through this in a lot more depth in my salon owners club.
Remember, a client needs to see you at least 7 to 14 times before they trust to come to your business or buy a product. Above are ways to get in front of potential clients more, to speed up this process.
Good luck and I would love to know how you get on with these tips.
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