Starting a spa or salon requires pre-marketing and digital marketing. The methods used for digital marketing for salons & spas bear similarities to those used for other industries, but the social media used differ, as does the approach.
Knowing Your Target Audience
Your salon won’t fill its styling chairs unless you target the right segment of customers. That means if you specialize as a colorist, you create relevant content revolving around that topic, not haircuts. If you want to build a client base of young, hip, high schoolers and college students, advertising in the newspaper won’t land you many clients. Placing ads on YouTube or TikTok will work much better.
Creating Visual Interest
Marketing a spa or a salon relies heavily on the visual elements of photos and videos. Rather than telling customers that you could offer them the ideal haircut, color, or style, show them. This process uses Instagram, YouTube, and Pinterest to build a following and create on-post discussion activities.
Digital Costs Less, Reaches More
Print became cost-prohibitive for new businesses and existing businesses long before the advent of mobile phones on interstitial advertising. You can advertise for much less money using digital marketing than you would spend on print marketing.
Local Reach Made Easy
You might equate digital marketing with wide-reaching online advertising. While you do reach a large audience, all of the major search engines adopted a local results-first attitude a few years ago. Bing and Google prioritize local businesses that implement high-quality search engine optimization (SEO). This means even if a major salon chain pays for placement, your properly optimized local business can top the organic placement. Internet users typically choose the organic result over the paid placement.
Global Reach Achieved
You also gain global reach by using digital means. While your small business probably won’t branch out to an international one, who knows? People will likely come to your location though, your town or city, for vacation. By starting a blog that uses high-quality SEO posts, you can gain readership throughout the world. This can place them in your styling chair when they visit.
Digital Offers Multiple, Overlapping Strategies
Of the ten most common types of digital content, most overlap. You can combine the use of the following content types to extend the reach of your digital marketing campaigns:
- Blogs,
- Podcasts,
- Emailers,
- E-books,
- Infographics,
- Quizzes,
- Social media posts,
- Visual content,
- Whitepapers,
- Webinars.
For example, you can create a quiz to help the reader determine their hair texture. This helps them better communicate with their stylist no matter they live. Using a blog, you introduce the quiz and how it helps the reader and their stylist. In an email message or newsletter, you feature a snippet of the blog and a screenshot of the quiz that links to the quiz. This involves your readers and helps you add to your readership. That’s because readers typically share quiz links with friends and family. Re-using and re-packaging existing content makes it go further and reach new customers.
