How To Market A Hair Salon [+ Free Downloadable Template]
How do you market a hair salon? It’s a pretty big question that might overwhelm you as a salon owner or manager. You might be thinking, where do I even start?
To make the process as simple as possible, we’ve laid out how to market a hair salon in just 6 steps!
Psst…if you stay until the end you’ll be able to download our Free Digital Marketing Strategy Template to help you out even more.
How To Market A Hair Salon In 6 Steps
Run an audit of your current marketing activities
The first step to marketing your hair salon is to look at what you’re currently doing in terms of marketing. This can be absolutely anything, from whether you have run Google Ads to if you’ve simply made a post on Instagram.
This is an important starting point, as it will tell you where you need to focus your marketing efforts, and could give you some hints as to what hasn’t worked well.
As a salon marketing agency, this process is very thorough. However, as a salon owner or manager, if running long audits simply doesn’t fit into your schedule, a quick brain dump of your marketing activities will do.
In our Free Salon Marketing Strategy Template, you will simply tick a yes or no box that can be done in just a few minutes.
Consider your hair salon’s marketing objectives
Leaving your audit aside for now, let’s now delve into your salon’s marketing objectives.
You may be thinking, “well, my goal is just to increase sales and that’s that.” Whilst that’s absolutely fine, there are other general marketing objectives that you might not have thought about yet. Here are some examples:
- Building brand awareness
- Launching new products and services
- Enhancing your customer relationships
- Open salons in new locations and grow are loyal customer base there
Now that you know your general end goals, you can start to think about the objectives you need to achieve to get you there.
Our advice is to keep your marketing objectives SMART:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Realistic
- Time-Bound
An example of this would be the following:
“Increase online bookings by X% by the next quarter.”
Develop clear buyer personas for your hair salon
We now know what we need to do, but who are the people we are trying to reach?
The best way to establish who your audience is is to consider your ideal customer. In other words, think about who your buyer personas are.
So how do you do this?
A buyer persona takes into account many factors, including their background, demographics, and psychographics. You’ll need to think about their age and gender, but also their personality and lifestyle.
To catalyse your brainstorming process, look at your existing customer information, for example reviews or customer data.
At Green Shoot Marketing, we use a discovery process to help you establish your marketing objectives and buyer personas, so there’s no need to do these steps on your own!
Establish which platforms your buyer personas are using
Establishing your buyer persona will now enable you to discover the digital platforms that you will find them on. Put simply, you’ll want to know how best to target your audience.
We can use the example of social media marketing. Many businesses who skip this step will end up wasting time and resources using social platforms that their target audience aren’t using. However, since you’re here now, we’ll tell you how it’s done.
Let’s say your target audience is aged 36-45. People in this age group tend to use Facebook the most, followed by Instagram and Twitter. However, this age group is less likely to use Snapchat or TikTok.
Therefore, your social media efforts should be focused primarily on Facebook and Instagram. The same goes for other platforms; you need to understand the best way to target your buyer persona.
Quality over quantity. It’s best to do one marketing channel really well instead of wasting your marketing budget on several mediocre campaigns. Take a look at your audit and consider what worked, and what didn’t.
Plan how you will utilise the following marketing channels
When it comes to digital marketing, there are a few channels which are most commonly used. As we explained earlier, only utilise the platforms that make sense for your target audience.
Once you know which platforms you want to use, you then have to integrate how you will use them into your marketing strategy. The beauty of digital marketing is that there a multiple ways to use each channel:
Email marketing
When it comes to email marketing, the first thing you’ll want to do is develop your mailing list. After all, there’s no point sending emails out if no one is going to read them. How will you do this?
Next, you’ll need to think about what kind of content you’ll send out. Will this be weekly newsletters, promotional emails or booking updates?
Social media marketing
As discussed, you’ll want to determine which social media platforms your target audience are using.
But another important aspect of social media marketing is organic and paid socials. Would it make sense to use some paid ads to reach a wider audience?
SEO
Has your website been optimised for SEO? By this, we mean can your potential customers easily find you using a quick Google search?
Will your target audience read blog articles?
PPC
If organic searches aren’t going to give you the best results, then paid search advertising can get you to the top of the search engine results page.
But when it comes to PPC, there are a number of strategies you can choose from. Will text or display ads resonate with your audience more? Could retargeting help you to convert your website visitors?
Track the success of your salon’s marketing activity regularly
So, your digital marketing efforts are up and running. But how will you know if you’re hitting those marketing goals and objectives we spoke about?
The key is to track, track, track! You should be tracking your success regularly, at least once per month. How much traffic did that blog get? Did your Google Ads get conversions?
By reporting on this data, you will learn what works, and what doesn’t. You’ll use these learnings to adapt and improve your marketing efforts constantly.
It really isn’t a case of setting up some campaigns and letting them run forever. There will always be ways to optimise and improve, so tracking your success should be a constant cycle.
At Green Shoot Marketing, we provide monthly reporting to ensure maximum ROI on your digital plan.
How To Market A Hair Salon: Summary
- Run an audit of your current marketing activities
- Consider your hair salon’s marketing objectives
- Develop clear buyer personas for your hair salon
- Establish which platforms your buyer personas are using
- Plan how you will utilise the following marketing channels
- Track the success of your salon’s marketing activity regularly
Download Your Free Digital Marketing Strategy Template
If you’ve digested everything we just explained and are ready to start your strategy, we invite you to download our Free Digital Marketing Strategy Template.
We’ve made the process simple by giving you prompts to help start your salon business’ strategy.
If you have any questions, we’re always happy to help. Contact us here and we’ll lend you a helping hand.
