My top 5 marketing tips for an AMAZING salon business

There's no point in being shy, darling. It's not time to hide your light under a bushel. I don't even know what a bushel is. Here are my five tips for marketing your salon business. Hello, hello, hello, my salon friends. How on earth are you? Achingly well, I hope. Phil Jackson here, your queen of salons, coming in your eyes and ears with another dose of wise owl wisdom. So, how's the summer panning out for you? Is everybody a bit happier now we've got some sunshine? Is everyone feeling a bit better spending some money? Have our customers started to loosen their purse strings just a little? I hope so. And if not, maybe it's your marketing that could just about persuade them. Now, I have always struggled to understand why salon owners don't like marketing because I love it and I always have done. I'm a marketer at heart. But I know lots of people struggle. So, I've put together five little tips just to inspire and motivate you to take your marketing a little bit more seriously. So, a few little bits that you can implement in your business nice and quickly in order to get a firmer grip on how we go to market. And the first tip, the first call to arms, if you like, the first point of consideration for you, my loves, is to broaden your view of what marketing actually is. There is an obsession in our industry with social media marketing. And I'm firstly not hugely convinced that we need to be doing as much social media as we're doing because I don't believe that social media is actually that good for our business and our industry. I don't think it delivers the results that we think it does. So, what I see is people struggling in their businesses. They're either not busy enough or they're not making enough profits. Either way, they've got a marketing problem. And they think that they need to lean harder and harder into social media. I need to do more on Facebook. I need to do more on Instagram. I need to be on TikTok. And God knows where else we need to be. And honestly, I don't think that's the problem at all. I think if we could just open our eyes a little to the marketing opportunities that exist away from social media, we could lean into some of those. And to be honest, probably do really well because the rest of the industry is obsessed with social media. So, if you start looking particularly at offline marketing, I mean, God, when was the last time anyone did any of that? It's a very uncrowded place to be. So, I would start really having a look at the marketing pillars that you have in your business. And if you only have one social media, and by the way, Facebook and Instagram does not make two marketing pillars.

It's one marketing pillar, social media. If that's the only one that you have in place, you've really got to look elsewhere. So, start looking at other online opportunities. So, your website, your blog, your SEO, all of those good things. And also, I'm going to talk in a minute about email marketing because I think that's really important. But also start looking at some of the offline opportunities. Do we need to start looking at billboards, posters, maybe magazines, local newspapers, those kinds of things, radio advertising? Do we need to start looking at sponsorship and PR opportunities? There's a big world of marketing away from social media. And in fact, I don't even believe that social media is making us that happy either. So, lots of reasons to broaden your view. Tip number two, let's just jump into it. It was actually tip number four, but we're going to come straight into email marketing. And I adore email marketing for a number of reasons. Firstly, it's hugely profitable because compared to, for example, carrying out ads on Facebook or Instagram, it's really, really cheap. So, your rate of return tends to be much, much higher with email marketing. But the second thing that I think email marketing has absolutely slayed is it's the list that you own. Because when you're marketing on Facebook or Instagram, you don't own that audience. You might have 10,000 followers on Instagram. They're not your followers because Mark Zuckerberg and his ivory tower at Meta HQ can turn your account off like that. And it happens. And lots of people get very, very upset when their social media following gets taken away from them. But it was never yours in the first place. So, you're borrowing somebody else's audience when you're marketing on social media. Your email list, however, you can take with you from platform to platform. It's yours. You own it. Until people either unsubscribe or die, you can keep sending them marketing emails. So, if you're not sending email, then you really, really need to look at it. I do have a book on this on Amazon, actually, called The Hairy Book of Email. But if not, there's plenty of training out there.

There's plenty of free training on email marketing. If all you're doing is emailing once a month with some kind of newsletter, it's a start. But you can definitely do better. And I really want you to start tying email into your marketing campaigns. Tip number three. If you feel like you're doing everything marketing-wise and not getting the results, I'm going to challenge you with a little phrase, which I have kind of stolen or invented. I'm not even sure. Are you really going new salon crazy? Because there are lots of people entering the marketplace. And think about the marketing, the pitch of marketing that you had when you very first opened the doors. You were in the newspaper. You were sponsoring the football team. We had a bubble machine outside our salon. We were handing out flyers, stuffing them under people's windscreen wiper. For everything we could think of to get our names out there. That's when you can say you're doing everything. If you're not doing new salon crazy, if you're not operating at that level, don't pretend you're doing everything. And actually, a lot of that stuff was kind of fun too. And it got us noticed for all sorts of different reasons, away from social media. So start having a think about whether you're actually doing everything possible before we start saying that marketing isn't working in your business. My next tip is to get your messaging right. And this is hugely powerful across all marketing pillars, getting our messaging right. So for a long time, and I'm sure you've heard people talk about the features and benefits of a service or a product. So the features are things like the ingredients or the process that we go through, that very mechanical kind of selling. And for a long time in our industry, that was the only kind of selling that we did. And I think it was because the way that our manufacturers sold to us was in that very mechanical way. They were selling on features. And what we weren't very good at was translating that into something that our customers actually wanted. Then we started looking at benefits. So we started looking at what these ingredients, these services, these processes were actually going to do for our clients. And we started marketing on those instead, and we got a bit better at this. We got a bit of success with this. And our manufacturers did help us with the marketing too. But the next level beyond that is what we call the transformation. And this is the messaging that you need to be emphasising. Let me give you a very tiny, glib example from the hairdressing world.

So Weller came up with this five-sided molecule, which was supposed to give us longer-lasting reds that really shone. And it was this very mechanical way, talking about this P5 molecule. Now, I can tell you lots of things about my clients. And one of the things I can tell you is that they couldn't give a shit how many sides a molecule has in a hair colour. They were not interested at all. So we started talking about the benefits, this longer-lasting colour, this colour that shone. That's not the transformation, though. The transformation is when things get really impactful because we communicate that transformation using the words that our customers would use. So, for example, are we going to get a red that turns heads? Are we going to get our husbands to notice us for the first time in 10 years on Valentine's Day? Are we going to be the envy of our friends? This is what we call the emotional transformation. How is my life going to change because of this product or service? Get that right in your marketing messaging and it will sing, it will fly, and your customers will love you for it too. They feel that you understand them, you get them, you've connected with them. And my final tip is to reduce the workload for you by recycling your marketing. If you have a tried, tested promotion that delivers great results, don't just chuck it out when it comes to your marketing plan for 2025. Reuse it. I've been reusing the same recommend a friend program in my salon for at least eight or nine years now. Even the wording of the emails has not changed because it still delivers fantastic results. If it ever gets to the time when it doesn't deliver those results anymore, then we'll refresh, we'll review or maybe replace it with something else. But in the meantime, August is recommend a friend month in my salon and will be for the foreseeable future. So don't feel that you have to keep reinventing the wheel all the time because you're going to tap into new customers each time you relaunch. You're going to have new followers, new customers that haven't seen that promotion from you before. And also, for example, my recommend a friend one, it's a feature on my client's calendars. They enjoy seeing that come back again and again. So recycle your marketing, even and even though I'm trying to get away from social media, recycle your posts.

Bear in mind that Instagram is showing your post to about one to two percent of your followers each time. So the chances of the same people seeing the same post, if you reuse it six months later, are very, very slim indeed. So recycle your content, make life easier for yourself. So I hope that's been useful to you. What have I missed? Reach out, let me know. You know I love hearing from my salon owner friends anyway. Also reach out if you'd like to feature as a guest on one of my guest episodes. I'm starting to run out of guests a little bit now and thinking about maybe stopping the guest thing altogether unless I can get some good names put forward. So if there's someone you'd like to hear from, reach out, let me know. Phil at buildyoursalon.com. Also reach out with your questions for my Ask Me Anything episode. And I try and do one of those every month too. Just seven short days until I'm coming in your eyes and ears again with another dose of Wise Owl wisdom. And until then, take care. Sit down and see what's going on with the queen of salons. Hair, beauty, and more successful tips for business owners. All on Build Your Salon.