Are you making your salon marketing harder than it needs to be?

Hello, Phil Jackson here from Build Your Salon, bringing you the tools you need to master to build the salon business you deserve. And today I want to talk to you about the one thing I think you might be doing to make your marketing much more difficult. Welcome. Today we start with a small potted history lesson. Who remembers MySpace? MySpace was one of the first social media platforms, certainly the first one to make it really big, and it was founded in 2003. By 2006, MySpace had overtaken Google as the most popular website on the planet. Something else happened in 2006 though, and in 2006 Facebook opened its doors to the outside world. So Facebook had been a social media platform specifically for academic institutions, and in 2006 they threw open the doors and let other people join as well. And of course the rest really is history. Facebook overtook MySpace, and MySpace in fact now is not on anybody's radar as far as social media marketing is concerned. So why the potted history lesson? Well, what I wanted to communicate to you is that a company that we think of as truly innovative – Facebook, this behemoth, this enormous presence in our marketing lives – we always think of as very innovative, but in fact it wasn't that original at all. The idea had already been done and done well and done successfully by someone else. So how does this translate to you and your salon, and more specifically your marketing experience? Well, what I wanted to get across to you is that you're making your life much harder than it needs to be by trying to reinvent the wheel, by trying to come up with something truly innovative and enormously creative. Every single cycle in your marketing plan is damned hard work. So what I want you to do is start looking at your marketing process and reviewing your progress, and then we'll do some rinse and repeat. Let me give you an example. At the beginning of every marketing campaign, I have a meeting with my senior management team. And we set out the budget that we're going to spend on a marketing campaign, what that marketing campaign is going to look like, how we're going to communicate the campaign with our team, how we're going to communicate with our customers, and also what success looks like.

So how much we need to get back from that marketing effort to make sure we can say, yes, it was something that really worked. Then we run the campaign. Normally our campaign cycle is six weeks. At the end of that six weeks, I will meet with my senior team again, and we'll have what I call a debrief meeting. And essentially what we're trying to find out is whether the campaign worked. Was it successful? Did the customers enjoy it? Did the team get on board with it? Did we get the results that we needed to, to call that campaign a success? Or if not, was there at least enough promise that we might want to run that cycle again? So we may not have hit the targets that we wanted to, but are we fairly confident that with some tweaking we could go back into that marketing effort and get better results next time? If the answer is yes, then we simply put it on ice until the right time to run through that cycle again. I've got a very close up example, and that is our recommend a friend scheme. So I run my recommend a friend scheme over August in the salon. So it's over a one month period every single August. I have run almost exactly the same campaign for the last five years now. It's all run through email. So I email out to my customers that we're looking for new customers and this is the reward they can get for recommending people. And I follow up through email as well. So the whole thing is automated. I haven't even changed the wording of the emails for three years because it just delivers excellent results again and again. Why would I want to change that? And we've even got to the stage now where our regular customers know it's coming. So in July, they will hold back from recommending customers because they know the August promotion is nearly there. So stop trying to reinvent the wheel all the time and start reusing stuff that worked before. If you've been following me for a while, you will know that my firm belief, if your business is in the under £200,000 turnover bracket, I firmly believe that all of the answers to your problems are already in the business. Find the stuff that's working, debrief properly, and then next year, dust it off and put it back into your marketing plan again. Of course, I'm not saying we shouldn't come up with innovative stuff as well. All I'm saying is that the bones of your marketing plan could be done for you before we even get to January.

I hope that's been useful for you. If it has, please don't forget to subscribe because I do a broadcast like this every single week. And I would hate you to miss out on the content that I'd love to share. If you've already subscribed, I will see you again next week. Take care.