5 Salon Marketing Ideas for September

September can be an amazing salon month. People come back from their holidays ready for a fresh start and the salons that have something ready for them clean up or maybe September's a bit of a struggle for you and you could use some marketing inspiration for Autumn. Either way, today I've got five concrete marketing ideas you can put into action this week. Build your salon. Hello. My salon friends, Phil Jackson here, your Queen of Salons coming all over the internet with another dose of My Wise Owl wisdom and here we are right at the end of August, September staring us in the face. A few weeks back I did an episode getting your business ready for Autumn and a few of you got in touch about it. Actually three of you, let's not say a few, let's not over egg the pudding darlings. But you wanted something a bit more practical, a bit less theory and I did say you should do some marketing, but people wanted specifics. So today we're getting very specific. I have five specific things you can go and do this week to start filling your books for the autumn. I've tried to make it so that we've got something for those salons that do very well in September and some that are for people that struggle a bit in September. So you can pick whichever one suits you. I genuinely love it if you did at least one and then reach out and let me know how you get on before we get stuck in a final word from our August sponsors. Pretty Data. Make sure you never get blindsided by a number you should have been watching and trust me, I nearly lost my business missing the VAT threshold for nine whole months. This is the tool I wish I'd had in place back then because Pretty Data watches your numbers in real time and tells you where you stand the moment you ask. Instead of finding out months too late, you can start your free trial at Pretty Data Dot co and the link is in the show notes. So here we are facing autumn, ready to start doing some marketing. Here's the hard-won belief underneath all of this. The salon year has a rhythm and September can be one of its biggest beats. If the summer's been quiet, some people have been away, routines have been all over the place. Then September arrives, everyone wants to feel sorted again. Lots of people have a new term, a new season getting back into routines and that instinct to reset is a very powerful marketing wave that you are going to ride all year and it costs nothing to catch it. We just have to be ready. My first idea actually is the simplest and the cheapest money you'll ever make. Sitting in your booking system right now is a list of people who used to come to you and have started to drift away. They haven't necessarily fallen out with you, but life got in the way and life over the summer can definitely get in the way. They are far easier to win back than it is to get a new client because they already know you and they used to like you. So we're going to pull that list this week, anyone who hasn't been in for a few months and send them a warm personal message. The reason I want you to do this in September is sometimes people get a bit embarrassed. Sometimes people intend to book, intend to come in and then life gets in the way. Best intentions go by the wayside and we end up with a lost client, not because you did anything wrong, but because they just feel a bit, once they want to spare their blushes so it's easier for them to go somewhere else. So how we're going to phrase the message this month, which would be slightly different, is around, I know that summer can be really chaotic. Let's get you back in the swing of things. I would love to see you back in the salon. Maybe here's a promo or an offer to tempt you back through the door and here's the booking link. So we frame it around the fact that we've missed them, acknowledge the fact we haven't seen them, but it spares all their blushes. They get to just think, yes, it has been a busy summer, hasn't it? And they've recognised that and I'm back on track. But what matters is how personal you can make it. Don't just send out 85 emails expecting people to respond, a text message, a WhatsApp message, something from you to them personally. I know it takes a long time, but honestly each one of those could be, the uptake on these things tend to be much higher if we can make it personal. So I promise it's time well spent. Idea number two, we're going to frame September as that reset. You don't necessarily need a new service to market in September. What we can do instead is wrap what you already do in the language of the moment. So people aren't buying a haircut or a facial in September. They can start buying that feeling of being sorted again after a messy summer. So talk about it that way. We're talking about the autumn colour refresh after the sun's bleached everything out or that skin reset after a summer of sunscreen and late nights and salt water and chlorine. Getting the brows back in shape, sorting yourself out before party season creeps up because it's closer than anyone thinks. They're the same services you've always offered. But we can frame them around that reset feeling that lots of people are craving at this time of year that reframing is free. And it's the difference between people scrolling past something that they've seen before and something that makes them think, yes, that's what I need. The salon understands me. Idea number three, and this is one that I don't see a lot of people doing and it's actually something for you hair guys more. Though you beauty people are very clever. I'm sure you can come up with something and it's the idea of launching your own collection. You don't need to wait for your manufacturers to put a collection together. So what we used to do is sit down twice a year. So we used to do a spring summer collection, an autumn winter collection and just select a few colours that we were going to try and emphasise a little bit more in our work. So this time of year maybe the blondes, the bleachy blondes that we've been doing over the summer would just warm up a little bit and we'd start to introduce some of those toffee tones. Or perhaps we bring in some of the warmer, richer colours or some of those gorgeous coppers and reds that we don't see during the summer months and we'd start to build a collection around it. Try and make sure there's something in there for everyone. So if you've got someone who is a cool skin tone, what could we give them that would be part of the collection as well. Or perhaps bring in a few shapes and some different styles that you've seen and we would start to talk about our inspiration. So places that we'd seen these kind of colours or these kind of shapes. Then as the time goes on, as the autumn starts to wear on and we've got our own examples, we can be marketing that as well. It just shows that you are trying to move your clients on a little bit. It gives you an excuse to have a different kind of conversation rather than just doing the same stuff month in month out because most of the time we'll lose a client, particularly in hair, not because you've done anything wrong, but because they're bored and they feel like you haven't got any fresh ideas. So it's a really nice time to bring some fresh ideas together, translate that into beauty. I don't know what that would look like. Nails, I can see there's a really clear analogy. If you stock makeup, we can start putting collections together. But what we would genuinely discontinue some colours from our stock each autumn and each spring and bring in some fresh colours. Again, you don't have to stock everything all year round, it just helps move that conversation along and shows that you've got some fresh ideas. It's also a really lovely team meeting. And trying to get their ideas and their creativity flowing can be a little bit of a challenge, but once they get into it, they love seeing their ideas translating into your business. Idea number four is around having time for you. And this one depends on you knowing your clients really well. But if your salon is a family salon, most parents spend the whole summer running around after kids out of routine, chasing their tails. September is back to school, back to normal, back to routine. And finally they might have just a little bit of time to spend on themselves. That's an opportunity for us because it means we can start marketing the slightly longer salon visits. Perhaps we can upgrade those massages to a full body massage or we can look at the longer colour services, the full head foils, the balayage, figure out what you could add on to an appointment for a facial. This is great because if September isn't an awesome month for you, this is going to fill up more column space. So rather than chasing little appointments, we chase the slightly longer appointments and emphasise that this is time for themselves. Also, if you haven't run it this year already, we're squeezing this in. I know we've got too many solutions now. I promised you five, but here's a bonus one, we'll call this, we'll call this B, shall we. Birds of a feather flock together. If you haven't run your recommended friend promo over the summer, if it's easier for your existing clients to come in during September, it's probably easier for their friends as well. So it might be a good time to run that recommender friend promo. So have that as four B. And then idea number five, get ahead on courses, which lead up to the end of the year. So we're heading into September. That means a 12-week course that starts in October would take people up to the end of the year and that gets you through a bumpy month, maybe even a bumpy quarter and can get a bit of money in earlier to help with that cash flow. So think about things like a three-month skin transformation or for trichologists you could do 12 weeks of in-salon scalp exfoliation, LED light therapy, maybe some nutrient infusions and support that with some home care or a 12-week block of laser hair removal. The problem is most courses, people want to start them when they don't have the money. By marketing it now for an October start, they've got the whole of September to budget for a course. Maybe if you're smart, we could even split the payment. So they pay for the course in September on October start in October and it takes them up to the end of the year. So those 12-week courses could lend themselves really nicely. Also if you haven't got lots of salon space in September where we could pre-sell, get the money in ready for them to start in October. October can be a funny month. Sometimes it's okay, sometimes it can be a bit meh. Usually for us it was the poorest of the Q4 months. God, look at us thinking ahead to Q4 already. So there we have it five and well, five and a half ideas. Please don't try and do them all at home, all at once rather, that's the quickest way to end up doing none of them or just everything turning into a hot mess. The idea is that each one's small enough to actually happen. So pick just one and if you're not sure which make it the first one, make it messaging. Messaging your lapsed clients is the quickest path to quick bookings. Book out an hour this week, put it in the diary and do that single thing properly. What have I missed? What are you doing in your salon to keep yourself busy through September? Let me know how business is going. These podcasts rely on your feedback telling me how things are out there. I've got my coaching group, but that's a very small section of our huge industry. I want to hear what's going on with you. So reach out and let me know. Also, do me a favour. If you're listening on Apple Podcasts, please, I'm going to keep banging this drum until I've got enough reviews. Please can you give me a review? It just takes you two seconds to do and I promise you it will absolutely make my day. And it's the quickest way to help us make sure that we've got people hearing about my wonderful wise owl wisdom, knowing exactly what to do and when. All year round is one of the three things I build with my owners in my One-to-one Ultimate Clarity program. The link for a free strategy call is beneath. We work together for 90 days and put together your five-year plan, your profit and pricing strategy, and a 12-month marketing plan. So September's an ideal time to do it before the craziness of Q4 gets underway. The link for that is in the description below. I would love to be chatting to you about whether one-to-one is right for you. That's me for this week. That's me for August. I will catch up with you in September when we're back to our usual rhythm of two episodes a week. Have a wonderful weekend, and until we speak again, take care.