Simple Hair Salon Advertising Ideas for Sustainable Growth
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If you have opened a hair salon and got high-grade professionals to work for you, you’ve done an amazing job so far. But, how are people going to find out about your service and come for an appointment? Advertising is a sure way of attracting clients to your salon. In this article, you will learn about the types of advertising and a couple of hair salon advertising examples.
There are numerous techniques for attracting clients and it is sometimes hard to determine how much advertising is enough. Some rely on flyers and friends recommendations only, others go all out on several different methods and spend a lot of money. Neither case is necessarily good or bad, if you have taken the right approach — effective advertising should be systematic.
All advertising techniques can be grouped into online, offline, and referral campaigns. Further, we will discuss the most important techniques and give you recommendations as to how you should advertise beauty services more effectively.
Steps to take before launching an advertising campaign
It’s important that you base your campaign on facts and don’t invest money at random. So before you spend any money on advertising, there are a few things you need to do:
- Analyze your clientele and define segments of your target audience;
- Define what kind of advertising is more effective in your case;
- Draft the text of your advertisement.
When you have the facts and a hair salon advertisement sample ready, you can go to a marketing agency, but you can also set up a campaign on your own.
You will find more detailed information about launching ads for salon services later in this article.
Offline promotion methods for beauty salons
We’re used to seeing ads on TV, billboards, and hearing it on the radio. That’s what big corporations do. But if you don’t intend to compete with the industry giants like Johnson & Johnson, you should focus on the promotion techniques that can give you measurable and quick to achieve results.
Outside view and sign
First things first, you should attract the people who pass by your salon every day, on their way to work or when taking a walk. Look at your salon from a third party perspective: is it easy to notice? Does it look good? If you were a potential client, would you go inside? Interior design and the sign plays a major role, in this case.
It’s a good idea to hire an interior designer. A high-level specialist might cost you quite a sum of money, but their work will pay off. Just think about it, you pay once, but a great looking salon will be effectively advertising your services for years.
Promotion banners and stands
Banners and hair salon advertising stands are a must for new beauty salons, but they are also rather beneficial for salons that have been around for a few years. Think of all the directions from which clients might approach you, and place banners and stands in the passageways.
And once again, the design plays a big role here, as well as the contents. The banner should include a list of your services, contacts, and a few lines about your business. Tell your potential clients why they should choose you over any of your competitors — it’s an important detail that can make a world of a difference for the efficiency of this advertising technique.
Advertising flyers
Flyers aren’t old fashioned! It a great, low-cost option with a high return on investment. Hire someone to hand out flyers on the busiest places near your salon, if just for a few weeks after opening your beauty salon.
Flyers are also a good way of attracting clients to well-established salons during special deals and holiday offers.
Other beauty salon advertising ideas
We’ve already mentioned billboards, TV, and radio ads, but if you don’t have any acquaintances who can offer you a 90% discount, this kind of advertising would cost a lot of money. And to make the ad worth the money, in addition to the airtime, you would need to pay for a specialist to create good content for a banner or a promo clip.
If you haven’t tried all the working, cheaper methods, we suggest you leave the more expensive stuff for later.
Online promotion methods for beauty salons
The Internet has become an essential part of most businesses today. Even the more conservative businesses like banks and real estate agencies have migrated to the World Wide Web. They understand that it’s a relatively easy and cheap way of attracting a lot of clients.
Ambitious beauty salons are not an exception. If you want to win over more than just the next door neighbors, it’s time to learn about online promotion techniques. The basic ones are quite easy, too.
Instagram
The social media app was created for sharing beautiful pictures and photos, and many specialists would agree that is the most efficient and cost-effective way of beauty salon advertising.
Create an account on Instagram and start posting pictures of your work, with the client’s approval, of course. Invite clients to follow your page, too. They would love to see pictures of themselves and share them with friends.
You can attract new clients all the time with this method. Study this technique closer or hire a specialist, if you want to use Instagram as a promotion tool on a more permanent basis. You will need some time to accelerate, but it will soon give you a steady flow of clients.
Promoting your salon on Facebook is one of the most effective techniques to date. It gives you great opportunities to fine-tune your advertising campaigns based on target audience data and it can be relatively cheap.
At the very least, you can create a Facebook page and invite your clients and friends to follow it. Upload photos of your clients, behind the scenes of your the working process, post tips on how to take care of yourself, news about your salon — there are countless hair salon advertising ideas.
You can go further and use Facebook’s advertising tools. On your own or using the help of a professional, it’s up to you. Although, you might be unjustifiably disappointed with the tools if you don’t know how to use them right, so getting help from a professional might be a better option.
Facebook and Instagram often go hand in hand. Since these to companies merged, they have the same ad manager, and a lot of businesses find it convenient to use both platforms at the same time.
You can find more information about Facebook promotions in this article.
SEO promotion
Hair salon advertising in search engines is one of the oldest advertising techniques and you might be wondering whether it is still a credible method. Is it worth investing money into SEO promotion? It definitely is.
SEO is a powerful tool. It needs time to take effect since getting to the top positions in the search results is not an easy task. It also requires a lot of attention so you don’t lose the top positions. Yet, with a good approach, it can become your permanent tool for attracting clients.
Contextual advertising
SEO and contextual advertising often go hand in hand since they both aim at search results. Contextual advertising is a type of targeted advertising — the paid ads you see on the first page of search results or on websites with related content.
In the case of contextual advertising, though, it’s not as easy as it may seem. A contractor would probably suggest you use this type of beauty salon advertising alongside SEO, but it’s more beneficial to them than you. The beauty business is a very competitive field. You would have to be a high-quality professional and think outside the box to achieve a lower price on an ad. It’s not impossible and yet it’s hard to achieve.
We suggest you use the cheaper methods first (e.g., Facebook и Instagram), and set up contextual advertising later. Plus, be careful to choose reliable, highly competent contractors, otherwise, you risk losing your budget.
Promoting your beauty salon in portals and catalogs
It’s not a method that can give you clients straight away, and therefore businesses usually underestimate it. Although, in a long-term perspective, portals and catalogs can give you an additional flow of clients, as well as amplify your website position in the search results.
Search queries like “beauty salon catalog” or “beauty salons in x city” can help you find a website where you can add your salon to the list for free. And if you are going to use SEO promotion, it would probably be done by a contractor anyway.
Articles in online magazines
Online magazines and media platforms are easier to get into, compared to a printed publication. And the best thing about it that you can often do it for free.
What you need is a high-quality article that would be interesting for the public to read. Free materials might be beneficial to your business, especially if the publisher allows you to use a link to your website in the article. But, of course, if you have a beauty salon advertisement sample and want to post as an ad, you would need to pay for it.
Experience shows that 3-4 month of regular work with media portals will give you good results, especially if the work is done by a professional.
Adding your business to Google maps
This method is aimed more on increasing the effectiveness of your advertising. If your salon isn’t a two-story building in front of a subway station, people would need to find it somehow. If you add your salon to Google maps, it would be easier to find, and that directly influences the number of clients you get, as well as their attitude towards you.
Beauty salon referral campaigns
A recommendation is the best reward clients can give you. You get new loyal clients without spending a penny from the promotions budget. But you can also set up referral campaigns to encourage clients to share information about you. Here is how they work.
One-time deals: Bring a friend along
It’s the most simple type of all hair salon advertising examples. From time to time, offer gifts to clients and their friend, who brought with, to one of them or both. If you can offer a gift to both, the conversion rate will be higher.
What kind of gifts can you offer? It can be a discount, a cosmetic product, additional services or even a bonus from your affiliates. Possibilities are endless, you just need to experiment, and with the right approach, this method can significantly increase your clientele.
Affiliate programs
A more complex technique is a continuously working affiliate program. If you have loyal clients that would gladly bring you new ones in exchange for certain benefits, a system like that can become a powerful tool for your business.
Some salons base their marketing on affiliate programs. It’s not an easy task, but you should definitely start working out a system for encouraging recommendations from your clients.
CPA networks
It’s a whole other method of attracting clients, somewhere in between an affiliate program and traditional online advertising. In essence, this method presupposes a webmaster who is paid for every actual client they have attracted.
Sounds good, right? Many salons aspire to advertise beauty service through CPA networks for attracting clients, but not all of them achieve good results. This method works only in a well structured and organized businesses that have their target audience analyzed through and through, results of numerous promotion campaigns, and a clear understanding of why clients use their services.
Otherwise, it wouldn’t work. Good webmasters don’t take jobs with unclear input data, and less experienced specialists wouldn’t be able to help you much. Moreover, webmaster services cost up to 25% of the price, which makes this method quite expensive.
A few more tips and tricks for beauty salon advertising
It’s important and quite understandable that any salon business would want to find the perfect recipe for effective advertising, that works for you, most importantly. But for an ad to work, it requires a systematic approach. From an outside perspective, it might seem easy: post to social media and wait for people to come to you. On practice, advertising requires more in-depth knowledge of certain tools, and here are a few major suggestions for you on how to save money and attract more clients.
- Hire at least one good marketer. Sure, one specialist might not be a pro in every single advertising technique, but even a good understanding of basic Facebook, Instagram, and media tools would be enough to start a campaign.
- Along with a marketer, you need a good designer who will make your adverts look attractive. You absolutely have to show clients a good design since visual information is so important in the beauty business.
- If you use contractors, aim for professionals, but keep it inside the budget. If you need more money, it’s better to cut down on one channel of advertising, rather than using contractors who would just waste your money.
- Mind that most techniques and methods need time to start producing significant results. For example, Facebook and contextual advertising require about two weeks to take effect, while for media and SEO it’s closer to a few months.
- Prepare to support an ad campaign for as long as it’s needed, as well as its budget. And once again, it’s better to use one or two channels systematically, than start a few and then complete all of them at the same time.
- Spare enough time to learn everything you can about your clients and systematize this information. You can also account for the data you get in a salon management system. Then, you can retrieve information needed for effective beauty salon advertising and expect higher results than most of your competitors.
- Measure the effectiveness of adverts. It might be harder for a salon owner to use statistics and analysis rather than a more creative approach, but you do only have two options. Either you work it out and improve your productivity or get stuck in one place.
A good salon management system can help you set up and measure hair salon advertising campaigns, as well as gather and analyze information about your clients. We’ve created Beauty Pro so that it would account for all beauty business processes and make them as easy as possible.
As for attracting clients, Beauty Pro will help you analyze the results of promotion campaigns, the effectiveness of your budget, and allow you to set up a multi-level system of recommendations. Moreover, Beauty Pro:
- Automates client management and appointment booking;
- Simplifies inventory management and salary calculation;
- Reduces the time needed for most tasks;
- Reduces human error, which is especially beneficial to your financials.
Download our free 14-day demo version and our specialists will help you set up Beauty Pro for your salon.
