Advertising Beauty Salon

Advertising Beauty Salon

By Greg Milner, the Beauty Salon Marketing Guy

Advertising a beauty salon is just one part of your overall marketing mix.

When you advertise, you are marketing. The local newspaper or Yellow Pages are just another medium to carry your marketing message. And like any other form of marketing – direct mail, radio, in-store promotions, pavement sandwich boards, TV – you still need to work out what your message is before you do anything.

Why advertise? For a couple of very good reasons.

a) Because all businesses lose customers from time to time. They move out of your area, they get a better offer from a competitor, or – rather inconveniently for both them and you – they die!

b) Because just by bringing in new customers, you get a percentage of them referring their friends and family to you.

Now, there are only TWO kinds of customers – the ones you already have, and the ones you haven’t met yet.

You wouldn’t advertise in the press to announce a special offer to your existing customers, would you? No, simply because you already know their names and addresses. So direct mail is much more efficient to carry your message to them.

The purpose of advertising is to get the attention of those people you don’t know yet, who might become your customers.

But apart from the different types of media you will use to carry your message, the message itself still has to have some bare essentials in it. First, your message has to contain a great answer to this question:

“Why should I, your prospective customer, do business with you as against any and all your competition?”

When you have a great answer to that question, you’re well on your way. (The Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit contains a complete chapter on this subject, as well as pre-written beauty salon advertising that is proven to get results.)

You can find a great answer to that crucial question quite easily. One of the best ways I know of doing this is what I call ‘Claiming the High Ground.”

Here’s what I mean: Do you truly believe that your salon is the very best in your area? Or, are your therapists the most experienced? Maybe your salon is the ‘Friendliest’.

I once wrote an ad for a salon that contained a caption under her photo. It said “Perth’s Number #1 Beauty Therapist.” At first she was shocked. “You can’t say that!” she cried. “What if somebody complains?”

“Nobody will,” I said. “And even if somebody does, so what? The worst that could happen is a lot of publicity, which can only benefit you, not your competition.”

Claiming the high ground is easy. You can literally claim it for just about anything you choose. Why? Because nobody else has!

But the one, crucial thing your ad MUST have is a compelling OFFER. An offer is NOT a discount. All that does is cut your profits. No, an offer is something which offers massive perceived value to your customer, while costing you little or nothing. And you can do this easily, by giving away treatments, for example, that you would otherwise charge for, to get your new customer in the door and cement a relationship with them.

You’ll find some great examples of compelling offers in Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit, but here’s what one Toolkit owner said after she ran an ad she got out of the Toolkit:

“After placing many ads in local newspapers with not much response and sometimes NO response, I am so delighted with the results from my latest ad, applying the Marketing Toolkit advice. Twenty eight replies, 11 bookings and 17 gift vouchers bought, only 2 cancellations!! An amazing result. That is 26 new clients coming to my salon. I am very happy. The ad cost $260, and I should take $1820 from the number of clients, these are 26 new clients though which is fantastic, and already I have had excellent feedback and people buying products etc. Pauline Dudgeon, owner, Janesce Skin Solutions, Armadale, Victoria.