Beauty business promotion on the Internet
For the portal Beauty salon director launched a series of articles on the promotion of beauty business on the Internet. The first article in the series:
Beauty salon is the business that wins when it comes to online advertising. You have in your hands all advertising opportunities and even more – from Instagram to loyalty programs and advertising.
All you need to do is to understand how to use them, in what order and how much to pledge funds. Eva Katz, an expert of the magazine, the owner of the Tokki social promotion agency and the managing partner of the Internet sales agency 5 o’click (Moscow), will start a series of articles on how to promote your salon and become a brand on the Internet.
Plans and objectives
Every business owner is interested in profit. It is good when an entrepreneur understands exactly how many and what clients he needs to attract, and adequately assesses his capabilities and willingness to participate in the process of business promotion 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 of the hamit, and you yourself refuse to track where visitors come to you and help the marketer. Otherwise, our capabilities are almost limitless.
Strategy – the foundation of all future sales
The strategy is the foundation on which the entire process of promoting beautiful business in the network is built. The strategy gives a complete picture of your business, its place on the Internet, competitors, strengths and weaknesses.
It is in the work on the strategy that new and hidden channels of sales are discovered and there comes a clear understanding of how and where to move forward.
You can order a strategy from an agency or try to do it yourself. Below I will describe the basic principles of work.
Make a comparison
Take a critical look at your business and compare it with your competitors. You won’t be able to cover all the beauty salons. Take the main one – 5-10 beauty salons in your area. If you have all the necessary services, including spas, and there is an economy class hairdresser nearby, you can’t consider it a competitor.
Make a table: describe the services that you and your competitors have, the prices for them. Write down your advantages and disadvantages compared to your competitors. This table will allow you to clearly see your strengths and weaknesses.
For example, you’ll find that only your salon has a cavitation or that your competitors have a significantly higher price for haircut. This is what you then use in your advertising.
Make a separate table on how the competitors are presented on the Internet – the site, social networks, advertising, etc. Ideally, you should make a large summary table, up to the texts of advertisements on all sources. But this is a painstaking job, which is better to entrust the agency.
You need to understand what kind of advertising appeals are used by competitors, their actions and activities, as they are presented in social networks. Write for yourself at least 10-20 and see how you can stand out against the general background, what the strengths of the text can be adopted to promote business on the Internet.
Decide who can represent your salon
For a beauty salon the composition of specialists is important. And a good master can attract you a lot of new customers. Note whether your competitors can distinguish themselves with a “star” composition. How do they represent their masters?
And who works for you? This will help you to understand which specialists will be able to represent your salon (for example, to answer questions in SMM and give recommendations), and from which you can make “stars”.
Explore the information environment
This step will help you understand what people, your potential clients, want. Read forums, discussions, reviews of other salons and write out 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 not give a quality massage or needs a good beautician. This is the information that you will later use in advertising and in the development and promotion of business, including the network.
Determine your position
On the basis of the received data it will become clear how you can profitably stand out in the market and optimize the promotion of business on the Internet, how you will communicate with customers and position yourself.
We are building a system of coordinates for our clients, where we describe the territory where the competitors “play” and where we can “play”, then define the strategy, tone of messages and so on.
Determine which services to promote
Write down what services you will promote in the first place. Write them down in the table and give a description of what advantages you should use in advertising creations.
For example, knowing that there is no good massage therapist in the area, we will take the massage to the line of flagship services and register the main benefits of massage in our salon.
To this item later will be added promotion of the master (PR through people) and loyalty program for customers. But these are all separate topics that we will talk about later.
Build a customer card
Knowing the basic services you want to sell, you can build a map of your customers. Make a list of services, and from each of them branches for those people who may need them.
First, write to those you are sure of. For example, you know that your main clients on LPG are women aged 19 to 60 who live in the nearest homes. And back massage is preferred by men of 35-55 years old and so on.
To each target audience, write down where they can be on the Internet, what they are interested in, what they love and read, what sites they can visit.
So you will get a large map, which can be further expanded. And from the main customers to make more branches and think well to whom else you can sell this service.
Working with the audience is a creative and exciting process. For example, when we developed such a map for one large sports complex, we enrolled students of the nearest universities who visit the swimming pool after the university. And the students went to the sauna by companies.
These people were not in the complex until we started showing them advertising. You can always open new sales channels. The main thing is to think broadly, to test and give the right information about yourself to the right people.