Social Media Won't Get Your Salon Busy - How to STOP wasting your valuable time

Am I really going to sit here and tell you that you're wasting your time on social media? Yes, I am, because I don't think it's helping your business as much as you think, and probably not in the way that you think either. 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. Hello, hello, hello my salon friends. Phil Jackson here, your queen of salons. Here, coming in your ears again with another Build Your Salon podcast, coming in your eyes over on YouTube as well. How on earth are you? Achingly well, I hope. Here we are, hanging on to August by our very fingernails, just about to plunge into September. I asked on a previous episode for people to send me reasons why I should love the autumn, and I have to say, I haven't been convinced yet. No one sent me anything over that's made me go, oh my goodness, yes, let's go for autumn. But summer's still hanging on beautifully over here in the UK at least. Though I did notice that the morning wasn't quite as light when I got up this morning. I do think the days are starting to close in just a little bit so that I can notice them now, which is filling me with gloom. So reach out, let me know how to face the end of August, beginning of September, with a smile on my face, ready to embrace autumn in all its gorgeousness. I'm sure there's a reason. Somebody very waspish said that I don't like autumn because that's when my birthday is. But I will tell you now they're wrong. That was an awful, cruel thing to say, my darlings. I don't have a problem with ageing at all. Never wanted to be younger than I am. I just want to be fabulous for the age that I am. So I don't care that I'm turning 49 this year. I just want to look like a fabulous 49. Anyway, what are we talking about today? Well, I'm going to sit here and try and convince you that you don't need to do so much on social media, which feels a little bit like biting the hand that feeds me, given that most of my business is built on social media. But I do think that salons perhaps they have unrealistic expectations of what social media is going to deliver for them. I think they're disappointed with the business results they're getting from social media. And the way they're handling that disappointment, my dears, is to push harder into social media, to post more content, to come up with more stupid dances that are going to stand out and so on and so on.

So how do we get ourselves in this pickle in the first place? Well, what we've got is a huge number of salon businesses that rely on one pillar for their marketing. So the only marketing they're doing is social media marketing. And that is extremely dangerous. You don't have to do an awful lot of research. You don't have to dig very deep to find a lot of influencers over the years who have lost everything because they have lost their social media accounts. Or there are stories of social media influencers that can't turn a dime. You know, they've got loads and loads of followers, loads and loads of impact online. But turning that into a business, monetizing it has proved to be a real struggle. So I think we should be using social media. Absolutely. But use it to feed your email database. Use it to feed your other marketing efforts. And actually, I think the reason we've got ourselves into this pickle, it's actually it's a two pronged thing. Firstly, I think salon owners have huge FOMO. We hate the idea that we're missing out on anything. And because we see everybody else doing this on social media, we feel that we need to be there as well. And I don't think that's necessarily the case. And I will come to the reasons why shortly in this episode. And the other reason I think that salon owners lean into social media is because they think it's free. And it's not free. Firstly, anything that takes your time is not free because your time has a value to it. And if you're not valuing your time, my darling, well, we need to have a very different conversation because it's about time that you took the amount of time you have very, very seriously. And where you spend your time very seriously as well. And we all know that social media is designed to be a time vacuum. It's designed to absorb as much of your attention as is humanly possible. But creating content takes a lot of time as well. Take it from someone who knows. I promise you that you don't need to be doing as much content as you think, because I don't think we're coming at it from the right direction. The other reason that social media isn't free, and this is not my theory, this is not my expression, but it's bloody genius. Whoever did it, in fact, if you know who came up with this, then please hit me up, let me know, put it in the comments on YouTube or find this video wherever you're getting this broadcast and let me know. But somebody very clever once said, if you're not paying for the product, you are the product.

And that's how social media works. Social media is provided to us free because we are the product. We are the recipients of the sponsored posts and the advertising. That's why they want our attention for so long. So how are we coming at this from the wrong angle? Well, you're thinking it's the best way to reach out and get new clients and get yourself busy. And I think that's inaccurate that you're starting with the end of the process. So let me describe how I feel a marketing process should happen. And then I'll explain to you where you're going wrong by jumping straight into social media. So the first thing that we should have in our marketing process is a target, a goal. What are we trying to achieve with our marketing? Is it an increase in client frequency? Is it that we want to see an increase in turnover? Is that we want to retain people in the business longer? What are we trying to achieve? And usually that will be a financial target. There'll be a financial reason. So how we get to there is that we identify the gap. And I do this with my salons all the time in my simple salon marketing program. But let me clarify, for goodness sake, Phil, get through this fog of words and tell us what we need to be doing. OK, let's say we're looking at September and you know from your goal setting that you need September to turn over £20,000. You're looking at September at the moment and you have the value of future services for September from your salon booking software is £12,000. We have a gap of £8,000. And the only place that we can bridge that gap is through marketing. OK, some of it might get filled up during the month with last minute bookings or whatever. Let's say £3,000 is going to happen from last minute bookings. So we've got a gap of £5,000 that we need to fill with our marketing efforts. So that's the goal. Our goal for our September marketing is to bridge the gap of £5,000. Then we go into the market. So who are the clients best placed to help us bridge that gap? Is it our existing clients, in which case we're looking for additional services or increased frequency? Is it new clients? Is it trying to get lost clients to come back into the business? Who is best served to help us bridge that gap? And then get really clear. So we've got an ideal salon client in mind. What's the ideal client to help us bridge that gap? Is it 50 people willing to spend £100 with us? Is it 500 people willing to spend £10 with us? Get a picture of who it is that we're trying to appeal to. Then we build the kind of promotion. So if we want 50 people to spend £100 with us, how do we make £100 extra spend feel like a no brainer? What do we need to put together? What services, what products do we need to include?

What extra benefits can we build that will be tempting to that ideal client? And then the last stage is media. How are we going to reach them with that marketing message? Is it with social media? Is it with email marketing? Is it posters in the window, flyers through people's doors? We've got all these different marketing platforms available to us. And I'll bet if you go through that process properly, goal, market, message, media. I'll bet at least five times out of ten, the answer is not social media. Social media is not a good way to get hold of your lost clients and tempt them back into the salon. It's not a good way to get your existing clients to upsell and try additional products and services. Social media has a place and of course you have to be there in the same way as you have to have a website. So you have to be on Google. You have to have a Google business listing. We need to be in these places, but not to the level that you think. We need to have a social media account with some relatively up to date content. It doesn't mean you have to be posting five, ten times a day. I reckon three times a week would be plenty to show that you've got a social media account which is active. So don't use social media as the be-all and end-all, the one marketing pillar in your business. Social media is great for nurturing your existing clients. It's great for maintaining that sense of community, for pulling people into your tribe. But don't use it as a way to reach out to new clients. Because your new clients aren't there looking for a hairdresser or an esthetician or a beauty therapist. Your new clients are on Instagram looking for photos of their loved ones, for stories. They're there looking for videos of people shampooing rugs and malleting cars and coming up with novel ways of using an air fryer. They're there to be entertained, not to be told about beauty services. So it's no wonder so many of our one-pillar marketing campaigns, our social media campaigns, are failing. It's not the right media for the message to reach our ideal customer. So yes, you need to be there, but not as much as you think. I hope that's given you a bit of permission to ease up a little bit. I hope it's given you a bit of permission to stop beating yourself up that you're not posting several times a day, every single day, trying to build with this one particular marketing pillar.

If it were me starting over again, if it were me trying to hit goals in my salon business these days, I'd be using social media purely as a way to build my email list. Because social media comes and goes, my God, can you imagine if you put all your eggs in one basket on Clubhouse those few years ago? If that was your one marketing pillar that you were going to build your business on? Where would you be now? What would you be doing now? But if we can use social media as a way to build our email list, when these platforms come and go, even the mighty Facebook and the behemoth that is Instagram will one day be no more and will go by the wayside. But your email list, that's with you forever. And we can take that list wherever we go. So I hope that's been useful to you. I hope it's been inspirational for you. I hope it's given you permission to post a little bit less, to start using social media as a marketing tool rather than just a massive time suck. And it's given a bit of direction to your campaigns as well. If there is a topic you would like me to discuss on the Build Your Salon podcast, if there's anything you'd like me to answer in my Q&A sessions, reach out phil at buildyoursalon.com. I would love to hear from you. I literally adore getting emails from my salon owner friends. Just seven short days until I'm coming in your ears again. 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.