Hair salon marketing plan

If you know need a marketing plan for your salon but you are not sure where to start this article is a great guide with lots of actionable hints and tips.

What is marketing?

Marketing focuses on reaching out to a large number of the right people that you would like in your salon. The aim is to communicate with potential clients to encourage them to choose you and visit your salon, share your client experience and services with them.

What is the purpose of a salon marketing plan?

It is quite simple, a marketing plan for a hair salon aims to:

• Get new clients through your doors
• Have more people knowing about your hair and beauty salon
• Create an online presence for new and existing clients to find you

Is creating a hair salon marketing plan an easy task?

When you have your story and a plan in place, it’s then all about execution and staying consistent, so yes it is an easy task when you have the basics but at times can be a little time consuming.

Where do I start?

Setting your own salon marketing goals is one of the first areas you need to look at. You will find it easier to create content and social media posts for your salon marketing when you know your end goal.

Plus remember that you should always test and measure. This way you can view your results and have a clear idea on whether you should repeat the same marketing task again.

What to consider when setting goals? Review your last year’s figures. Now this can be a little tricky if looking back on 2020, however you can still see areas you may want to address in your salon business or set a new goal for the coming year. Make sure you take into consideration the following key numbers:

• Total number of clients per month
• Total number of new clients
• Rebooking % for each month
• Average service bill
• Average retail bill
• Total revenue per month / year

Review your current online marketing presence. These days this comes in many forms, such as your salon website, salon review directories and social media platforms. The key areas to note down for the previous year in this area are:

• Money spent on averting across your online platforms
• Number of website visits
• Discovering your most popular web page

Printed salon marketing. As much as printing leaflets and writing magazine editorials seem a thing of the past they still count and should be considered for your salon marketing plan. Many magazines now have a digital presence as well as in print.

For each of the points above ask yourself what the figures were last year and what they need to be the year for your salon business to continue growing.

How many clients did you look after on average each month last year and what does that figure need to be each month this year?

What was your rebooking % on average each month last year and what does it need to be to ensure you are maximising the efficiency of your team?

Below are some areas to think about…

• How did my new clients find out about me last year?
• What did I do last year for marketing that did not go so well?
• What areas did I do in marketing last year that worked really well?
• Which of my email campaigns produced great results?
• Which of my SMS/eblasts did not do so well?

Remember the easiest way to answer these questions is to make sure you test and measure everything, the more you can monitor and track each area of your marketing, the better knowledge you will have in knowing if something was a success and produced great results for you or not.

You can easily store information such as ‘How heard’ and ‘Age group’ (as an example) within your salon software on your client record card, this also then becomes a great tool for marketing purposes. Being able to pull certain age groups or clients that found you from Google can enable you to market to them in the future to promote new services and home care.

When you have gone through each of your KPI’s  then you have your goals set.

You are now that bit closer to creating great posts, emails and content which relate to your KPI’s and are now better prepared to reach your end goal.

Executing my hair salon marketing plan

When putting any marketing plan to practice you will find that it can be very time consuming, which is why many salon owners struggle to keep up with the schedule after a month or two.

There are some great tools you can use to ensure you follow your marketing plan throughout the whole year but most importantly save you time. If you can do this, trust me you really will benefit and see some great results.

Top tips for your salon marketing plan

• Always be at least one month a head of schedule, this will prevent any last minute packing or letting your marketing slip.
• Use platforms such as later.com to schedule posts for the future. No more setting reminders or squeezing in a social post 11pm at night. (later.com is a free platform you can use to schedule posts up to 30 days ahead)
• Use salon software that has a great marketing suite, automate as much of your salon marketing as possible through SMS and email. Your software system should easily be able to populate the text with your clients first name using something like a merge field. This will keep your SMS and email marketing customised with personal messages and avoid your it looking generic.

What are you waiting for?

Now that you have great insight into what is involved with creating your very own salon marketing plan for this year, why not put some time aside and get stuck in!