A beauty salon is a business that wins big when it comes to online advertising. You have all the advertising opportunities and more at your disposal - from Instagram to loyalty programs and advertising. All that remains is to understand how to use them, in what order and how much money to invest. With this material, the magazine's expert, Eva Katz, owner of the social promotion agency Tokki and managing partner at the online sales agency 5 o'click (Moscow), will begin a series of articles on how to promote your salon on the Internet and become a brand yourself.
Plans and goals
Every business owner is interested in profit. It is good when an list of japan cell phone numbers entrepreneur understands exactly how many and what kind of clients he needs to attract, and adequately assesses his capabilities and readiness to participate in the process of promoting a business via the Internet. Advertising will not become a magic pill if you do not have a strategy, the product is not in demand, the staff is rude, and you yourself refuse to track where visitors come from and help the marketer. Otherwise, our capabilities are almost limitless.
Strategy is the foundation of all future sales
Strategy is the foundation on which the entire process of promoting a beautiful business online is built. Strategy gives a complete picture of your business, its place on the Internet, competitors, strengths and weaknesses. It is in working on strategy that new and hidden sales channels are discovered and a clear understanding of how and where to move further comes.
You can order a strategy from an agency or try to do it yourself. Below I will describe the main principles of work.
1. Make a comparison
Take a critical look at your business and compare it with your competitors. You won’t be able to cover all beauty salons. Take the main ones – 5-10 salons in your area. If you have all the necessary services, including SPA, and there is an economy-class hairdressing salon nearby, it cannot be considered a competitor.
Make a table: describe the services that you and your competitors offer, and their prices. List your advantages and disadvantages in comparison with your competitors. This table will allow you to clearly see your strengths and weaknesses. For example, you will understand that only your salon does cavitation or that your competitors have significantly higher prices for haircuts. You will then use this in your advertising.
Make a separate table on how competitors are presented on the Internet - website, social networks, advertising, etc. Ideally, it is worth making a large summary table, right down to the texts of advertisements for all sources. But this is painstaking work, which is better to entrust to an agency. You need to understand what advertising calls competitors use, their promotions and activities, how they are presented on social networks. Write down at least 10-20 for yourself and see how you can stand out from the crowd, what strengths of the text you can adopt to promote your business on the Internet.
2. Decide who can represent your salon
The composition of specialists is important for a beauty salon. And a good specialist can attract a lot of new clients. Pay attention to whether your competitors can distinguish themselves with a “star” composition. How do they present their specialists? And who works for you? This will help you understand which specialists can represent your salon (for example, answer questions in SMM and give recommendations), and which ones can be made into “stars”.
3. Explore the information environment
This stage will help you understand what people, your potential clients, want. Read forums, discussions, reviews of other salons and write down key points. This is an important point that can open up completely new horizons for you. For example, you will learn that no one in the area does quality massage or a good cosmetologist is needed. This is the information that you will later use in advertising and in developing and promoting your business, including online.
4. Determine your place
Based on the data obtained, it will become clear how you can stand out in the market and optimize business promotion on the Internet, how you will communicate with clients and position yourself. We build a coordinate system for our clients, on which we outline the territory where competitors "play" and where we can "play", then we determine the strategy, tone of messages, etc.
5. Decide what services to promote
Write down which services you will promote first. Write them down in a table and immediately give a description opposite — what advantages should be used in advertising creatives. For example, knowing that there is no good massage therapist in the area, we will put massage in the line of flagship services and write down the main advantages of massage in our salon. Later, promotion of the master (PR through people) and loyalty programs for clients will be added to this point. But these are all separate topics that we will talk about later.
6. Build a customer map
Knowing the main services you want to sell, you can build a map of your customers. Make a list of services, and from each of them, branches on the people who can use them. First, write down those you are sure of. For example, you know that your main clients on LPG are women from 19 to 60 years old who live in nearby houses. And back massage is preferred by men 35-55 years old, and so on. For each target audience, write down where they can be on the Internet, what they are interested in, what they like and read, what sites they can visit. This way, you will get a voluminous map that can be expanded further. And from the main clients, make more branches and think carefully about who else you can sell this service to.
Working with the audience is a creative and exciting process. For example, when we developed such a map for one large sports complex, we included students from nearby universities in the audience who go to the swimming pool after university. And female students went to the sauna in groups. These people were not in the complex until we started showing them ads. You can always open new sales channels. The main thing is to think broadly, test and competently give the right people the right and timely information about yourself.
