SALON PROMOTIONS
HOW TO DEVELOP A WINNING SALON MARKETING PROMOTION
A well-put-together salon marketing promotion can be very lucrative for your business, but only if you create the conditions for success.
Many salon owners struggle to achieve their promotional goals simply because they have not built a campaign with all the necessary components.
A successful campaign has eight parts to it, which if followed, will guarantee a greater level of promotional victory.
The eight parts to a winning promotional campaign include the following:
- Objective
- Audience
- Offer
- Tactics
- Call to Action
- Build & Implement
- Monitor & Measure
- Key Learnings
OBJECTIVE
There is no surprise in the adage that if you don’t know where you are going, then you won’t know if you have arrived.
Take this a step further, and for any successful promotional campaign, you need to get very specific about what your goal is.
- Do you want to attract more clients to your salon generally? If so, by how many and over what time frame?
- Do you want to increase sales of a treatment or product? If so, what is the number of unit sales you’d like?
- Do you want to introduce a new staff member and help them build their clientele? If so, how many clients would you like to attract? For what service(s)?
- Do you want to upsell or cross-sell to your current clients? If so, what are your target metrics?
- Do you want to hold an event for your current clients and encourage them to introduce a friend who is new to your salon? If so, how many clients do you want at your event and how many ‘new’ friends would you like to attend?
The list of possible objectives for your promotional campaign is endless. Just be sure to choose only one objective for your campaign and get very specific with it. Make sure it is SMART. Specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely.
AUDIENCE
The objective of your promotion will determine who you are targeting for your campaign.
This may seem obvious, but it’s critical to get clear on who it is you want to expose your promotional marketing to. That way you will not waste a cent on marketing to the wrong people.
Consider your objective and decide if it’s current clients or prospective clients who are the target of your campaign.
If you are targeting your current clients, are you targeting all your clients or a subset of your clientele?
If you are targeting prospective clients, what are their demographics? Are they women with mature skins or teenage girls with an acne problem?
Be sure to get crystal clear on who you are targeting for your promotion and success can only follow.
OFFER
Once you know what your goal is and who you are targeting to achieve your goal, it’s time to create your promotional offer.
This is the ‘deal’ that you will offer your target audience along with the terms and conditions.
It’s critical at this point to think creatively about what your offer might be.
Step into the mind of your target audience and consider what would appeal to them.
Quite often a discount is a popular offer but consider a ‘value package’ that will give your target audience the opportunity to experience more of you and your salon.
Ultimately your offer will be guided by your objective and what you believe will inspire your target audience into action.
TACTICS
You are now ready to consider how you can best reach your target audience with the offer you have created.
This is where marketing magic will start to happen.
If you do your thinking and planning in the earlier steps outlined, you will reap greater rewards with the right offer extended to the right people and by reaching out to them through the right platforms (tactics) to attract their attention.
Consider the following examples when planning the tactics you will use:
- Does your target audience hang out on Facebook and/or Instagram?
- Are they more likely to respond to a printed flyer they find in shops around the area?
- Would posters around the salon be the most appropriate place?
- Perhaps an in-salon event would be an effective way to reach them?
- Would an email campaign be their preferred method of receiving your promotional material?
There is a myriad of tactics you can select to reach your target audience.
Be mindful too that the budget you have available to spend on your promotion will play a role in what you decide.
Sometimes spending less is more and working on the premise of trial and error until you know what works and what doesn’t is a sound approach i.e., doing fewer things better and learning without blowing your time, energy and budget.
Once you know what has worked and what hasn’t, then you can confidently put your spend where you know you will get the best results.
CALL TO ACTION
A call to action is a must for any promotion.
It tells your target audience what you want them to do once they have been exposed to your marketing.
- Do you want them to pick up the phone and make an appointment?
- Do you want them to call into the salon and make a purchase?
- Do you want them to click through to your website and book online?
Be very specific about what you want your target audience to do and be sure that the call to action appears on every piece of marketing material.
BUILD & IMPLEMENT
At this point in the process, you are ready to build your campaign material and set it live into market.
The tactics you have chosen will determine what you need to build, e.g., a series of social posts or a flyer, poster or email etc.
The offer you have developed and your call to action will determine the content of your marketing material as well as being written in a style that is relevant to your target audience.
The next step is to decide how long you will run your campaign and at which points throughout the campaign period you will deploy your marketing material.
Let’s say you choose to offer a value bundle of treatments and products for one set price as a Valentine’s Day offer to your current clients and their family and friends.
You might decide to go live with your campaign four weeks ahead of the actual day and launch with a Facebook campaign supported by in-salon posters and an email telling your clients about the promotion.
Rather than bombard your clients in the first week with everything, it’s often a good idea to spread your campaign out across the promotional period (in this case, four weeks) and look at scheduling your activities.
For example:
- Week one – Launch a Facebook campaign (organic posts to your current fans and a paid ad campaign to reach their contacts).
- Week two – Put up in-salon posters and tell your clients who come into the salon about the promotion.
- Week three – Email your client base and continue to tell clients who come into the salon about your promotion.
- Week four – Carry on with your Facebook campaign and perhaps boost some posts and send another email to your client base letting them know that the offer is about to end.
This schedule is a simplistic version but gives you an idea of how you can spread your activities out to keep your promotion top of mind.
Just be sure that you are consistently live in market for the duration of the promotional period. That way you are being seen by your target audience consistently over time.
MONITOR & MEASURE
The importance of keeping an eye on your campaign and measuring results while you are live in market cannot be overstated.
Promotional success comes from tracking those activities that are working well and those activities that are not.
Monitoring your activities provides valuable insights into what to stop doing, keep doing or even start doing.
It may seem obvious, but why continue to run paid Facebook ads if you are not getting any sales, bookings or enquiries.
Better to pull the plug on an activity and put that money into something else that is getting some great results.
The caveat here is not to pull the plug too quickly. Sometimes activities need time to manifest into the desired goal and if you are monitoring and measuring closely, you will know if/when the time is right.
LEARNINGS
If you have followed the steps to this point, you will have gathered valuable insights and learnings that you can take into your next campaign.
It is a good idea to prepare a short post-campaign report that outlines what you did, what you learned, what you would do next time and what you wouldn’t do.
Whether your campaign was a success, or not, this report will be gold for next time you run a similar campaign. It will also save you time in the planning process.
Running a promotion is all about test, learn and adjust. Test your ideas, learn from them and adjust your activities as necessary.
Marketing is part art and part science and all the best strategies and tactics in the world can’t replace the ‘real time’ data and insights you gather by running a promotion and monitoring and measuring your results.
Have fun with your promotions. Embrace the process. Celebrate the successes and welcome the things that did not go as planned – these are the gold nuggets of any promotional campaign to arm you for your next one.
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