Do you need a salon blog?

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 might just be able to take something off your to-do list, because I want to ask you whether you really need a salon blog. Welcome! Social media has replaced a lot of things in our modern lives. The rules of English grammar, warmth, and authenticity in our human relationships, the need to research something before we pass it on, have all gone by the wayside. But one thing that I predicted would decline, and it hasn't, I was wrong, is blogging. There are still millions of people around the world who share their thoughts by regularly updating a blog, and I see lots of salon owners trying to build that into their online marketing strategy as well. A few of them get some good traffic and decent audience for their blogs. A lot more, to be honest with you, struggle. They struggle to be consistent, they struggle to create high-quality content, and I don't necessarily think the blog will ever do any harm, but it's certainly not doing an awful lot of good. And I think there's an argument for taking a step back and figuring out whether this needs to be a continuing part of your online marketing strategy. I suppose, ultimately, the question is whether the benefits outweigh the costs and the time that you have to dedicate to it. I think if you enjoy the process, that can be a large part of the argument run at one for you. If you enjoy creating blog content, it kind of doesn't really matter whether you're getting any traffic at all. You just enjoy doing it, so why not? I do think you need to figure out whether a search engine optimisation and online presence on the search engines is important to your business. I do believe everybody should have a website and should have a presence when their name is Googled, but where you fall in those rankings may or may not be important to you. If lots of your new customers find your details through Google, then probably a blog is a good idea because it helps with search engine optimisation. It gives Google more content to index, and Google loves up-to-date, regularly updated, high-quality content. That said, if you run your business entirely from social media, and you don't invest any time and money in updating your website at all, and Google isn't important to you, then you may decide a blog can go by the wayside.

I do think a blog is a really useful tool for repositioning your salon as well, though. I think if you've got high-quality, well-researched, beautifully written blog content, I do think that helps with your perception as a consummate professional. I do think it positions your salon slightly differently to someone who doesn't have that kind of researched, up-to-date content. That said, blogging can be really hard work, and there is nothing worse than coming across a salon blog that hasn't been updated regularly. So if you can't commit to updating regularly, I kind of wouldn't bother at all. That said, I do think I have a way where we can use Facebook and its funny little ways of promoting content to our advantage. I do think you can cut back on the amount of blogging you do and actually not harm yourself in the process. Let me explain. So when we put a post on Facebook, let's say we're putting a post on Facebook to promote our blog. When that post goes out on our Facebook page, it will be shown to a small percentage of your Facebook page audience. And that percentage over the years has got smaller and smaller, and I don't see that reversing any time soon. Well, we can play that to our advantage, because if we're sending just a small amount of your page to your blog, it wouldn't hurt then, in a month's time, to promote the same blog with a new post on Facebook, because the chances of you catching the same percentage, the same few people out of your Facebook page audience, are actually very small. So we're not going to sicken our audience by continually promoting the same blog posts. So once you've got a library of blog posts together, we can promote those in perpetuity. What we call this process is creating evergreen content. And this is where I absolutely have found my niche. You will not find many blog posts, even on Build Your Salon, around Easter or Mother's Day or Christmas promotions, because that's not evergreen content. It doesn't make sense for me to promote that content all the way through the year. So I try and make sure my content is as relevant the day that it's been filmed as it will be in 6 months, 12 months, 18 months time.

That way, I can promote my blogs through Facebook, and it will still make sense for me to be doing that all the way through that process. There are some bits of software that can help you. I've used two. I used to use one called Meet Edgar. And what Meet Edgar does is collates your Facebook posts. So when you put a Facebook post through Meet Edgar, you also add it to a category. And Edgar will build up a library in these separate categories. What runs alongside is a schedule for sending. So let's say your blog post library has 15 or 20 posts in it. You could tell Edgar to post one of your blog posts every Friday at 7 in the morning. And if it hasn't got any new content, what it will do is dip back into your library and choose one of your old posts. So that evergreen content gets recycled and recycled and recycled. Obviously, the bigger your library, the less chance you have of very repetitive posts. Very similarly, I'm now using a piece of software called SmarterQ. And SmarterQ does almost exactly the same job for almost exactly the same price. So sign up for the free trials on both and give them a spin. Actually, there's one other strategy for blogging, which is for advanced users only. If you make sure you have a Facebook pixel installed on every page of your website and blog, we can use the traffic that is being picked up by your blog to start retargeting through online marketing. What do I mean by that? Let's say we have a blog and we've put a blog post out there, which is all about, I don't know, let's say fat freezing therapies. And you've picked up some traffic through Google and through your Facebook posts. So now what we have is a number of people who are interested in having their fat frozen. What we could do if you've picked up a Facebook pixel when reading that blog, what we could do is build an audience inside Facebook and then start marketing to those people and start marketing services which are absolutely relevant to them. You will have been victim to this all the way through. Every time you order something on Amazon, all of a sudden Amazon is starting to pop up with related products recommended for you in your Facebook feed. If you go to, let's say, ASOS, the online clothes retailer, and have a look at a certain pair of shoes, miraculously, the next day it will appear in your Facebook feed until you buy the damn things.

This is called retargeting. It's simple to set up, much easier than I'm making it sound, but a very powerful way of using targeted content, blog content, to then target your marketing efforts. I hope that's been useful to you. If it has, don't forget to subscribe. If you've already clicked subscribe, I will see you again next week. Take care.