Salon Marketing

The Ten Key Elements of Effective Salon Marketing.

Introduction

What is marketing? In simple terms, it's just communication. Everything that we do when we are communicating with both our teams and our clients comes under the heading of marketing.

It is basically straightforward, so the question is, what's the big deal? On some level we all understand that communication with clients and potential clients is absolutely essential. The problem is that there is a multitude of ways to do this and many of them are very expensive.

Many of them are also very ineffective: it is said by marketing experts that around 80 percent of all marketing activity is very ineffective. So, if this is the case, should we even consider marketing our business? This is a valid question.

The answer depends upon our objectives: if we want to attract new clients, launch new services, increase our prices on an ongoing level and grow our team then we need some sort of marketing strategy.

Of course the marketing strategy will be different depending upon the size of the salon as well as the size of the town. In a small town with 10000 potential clients and seven or eight salons, the marketing strategy of any given salon will have to be aggressive.

The typical salon will lose approximately 25 percent of its client base over a year, due to people moving and deaths as well as others being tempted to try a new or different salon. So for a salon with 1000 clients, to just maintain this number, they would need to attract 250 new clients. This is why marketing is so important.

The first thing that should be looked at in any sort of business is the core business. Is it the way you want it to be? Ideally, you should be striving for excellence and definitely a quality that you are proud of and that you want to sell. If this is so and you use effective marketing as well, you should see acceleration in the growth of the business.

The following companion articles will discuss in depth what can be called the ten key elements of effective marketing. Marketing strategy is similar to a fingerprint in that it is unique to your business: as such, any of these points should be adapted to suit the needs of your business.

The ten key elements are as follows:

1. Grading clients

2. Targeting clientele

3. Unique vs price

4. In-salon marketing systems

5. Branding

6. Lead generation

7. Advertising

8. Buying media

9. Testing and measuringv

10. Planning an annual marketing strategy