Spa marketing ideas

If you are looking at marketing strategies for your spa, you have come to the right place! This article gives lots of different strategies for you to implement.

Managing a spa is no easy task and aside from the logistics of managing day to day operations, you also need to think about marketing your spa and both how potential customers are going to find you, and how to keep your existing customers. So if you are thinking of ways to market your spa you have come to the right place!

Website

This is an easy place to start –a website forms the pillar of any good marketing strategy for a spa. No matter where a potential customer sees your spa for the first time, there’s a pretty good chance the first thing they will do is check out your website, and if you have a site that is outdated visually, has no personality or looks awful on a mobile, there is a good chance you will lose them pretty quickly!

So if you haven’t got a website, or it is outdated this should be the first area you address with your marketing strategy for your spa. If you want some tips on your 2021 website strategy then have a look at our recently published article.

Google My Business

More and more customers find their spa using an online search engine such as Google. And when searching they will often type in a hyper local search term (such as ‘beauty spa in Tunbridge Wells’). A well optimised website may well be found, but if you can back this up with a well optimised Google My Business profile you will also be found on the Google Map listings.

Setting up a Google My Business profile is not difficult – if you head to https://www.google.com/business/, you can get a listing for your spa, and then by filling in as much detail as you can and attaining customer reviews, your visibility will improve. There is more to it than that, but get the basics right and you will start to benefit from improved visibility for hyper local Google searches.

Build relationships with other local businesses

Working in partnerships with other local complimentary businesses is a great marketing strategy for a spa. If you can form great relationships, both your businesses will benefit as your marketing will go that much further. Here are some ideas for partnerships you can build with other local businesses:

• Hair salon – Hair salons and spas are extremely complimentary businesses and by combining your marketing efforts, running joint events or perhaps even merging, you can create a whole new customer base for your spa, and indeed for the hair salon you choose to partner with.
• Spa products – Selling spa products can be a tremendous upsell, and if you start to partner with your suppliers they may well promote your spa and share your content on their website and social media channels which is great for brand awareness.
• Local health and wellbeing experts – Whether Personal Trainers, Pilates/Yoga instructors or life coaches, local health and wellbeing experts could be tremendous ambassadors for your brand.

Join a networking group

Local networking groups are fantastic at building relationships with other local businesses and could be a powerful string to your spa marketing strategy’s bow! There are lots around and not only will you likely pick up customers from a networking event, you will also likely end up with a whole host of local brand ambassadors who will talk about your business wherever they can as well as sharing your content and recommending you on social media.

Create a referral scheme

Creating a referral scheme would be a good addition to your spa marketing strategy. Word of mouth is still the most powerful form of advertising and you can help nudge these referrals along by creating a referral scheme for your spa. You should be able to harness the power of your salon software to push and promote your referral scheme.

Create a loyalty scheme

When creating a marketing strategy for their spa, owners and marketing managers will often fall into the trap of thinking more about how to get new customers than retaining their existing customers. It is much easier and cheaper to retain existing customers than to gain new ones, and by keeping existing customers happy not only will they keep coming back but they will also refer you on to new customers who if in turn you keep happy will refer on to more new customers, and assuming you keep all customers happy this cycle keeps exponentially continuing!

One of the best ways to retain your existing customers is to create a loyalty scheme for your spa that rewards your customers coming back time and again. Building this brand loyalty should be a key aim for the marketing strategy of any spa.

Harness the power of social media

Social media should be an important part of your spa marketing strategy as the influence of social media on customers continues to grow. There are many ways you could utilise social media for your spa, here are a few:

• Why not do a giveaway on social media? A like and share contest will increase page likes and mean your content goes further.
• Publish visual content – images and video get much more engagement on social media.
• Show off the personality of your team – social media is ‘social’ (it’s in the name) so make sure this comes across to visitors.
• Run Facebook Ads and when you do, make sure you are targeted with your demographics, that you track user behaviour and use retargeting ads wherever possible.

Have a review strategy

How important are reviews? Very as you can see here so hopefully this demonstrates just how important it is to have a review strategy for your spa. If you are strategic with it, you can utilise your salon software to encourage customer reviews after they visit. Automating this helps ensure leaving reviews is always in the mind of your customers.

Ensure brand consistency

Brand consistency throughout your communications is really important and is often something that is lost as spas jump from one marketing activity to the next. A marketing plan for your spa should lay out clearly all the marketing activities you will be doing over the course of the year and as part of this think about all the collateral for your marketing and make sure this is up to date and consistent, so if a customer looks at your website, an advert in the local paper, your social media channels or even the inside of your spa, all design and messaging is aligned.

Online booking

As more and more customers shop online (something that has only become more prevalent during the Covid-19 pandemic), offering online booking has become more and more essential for any spa and if you do not already have this facility, it should form part of your spa marketing plan. If you think your spa could benefit from online booking, have a look at our website for more information.

We hope you found this a useful guide and there are some actionable ideas here to help you with your marketing, but if you need any more help and input we have a great deal of experience supporting spas with their marketing strategy so please don’t hesitate to get in touch, we would love to hear from you!

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