Unlocking Salon Success with Powerful Lead Magnets

Whether you're looking to focus on a different set of services, grow your business overall, or just grow your profits, inevitably we all need new clients. So the smart business isn't one that just focuses on delivering amazing results for their existing clients, they're also keeping one eye on the future. Stay tuned for the easiest, quickest way I know to build your list of amazing new clients. All on Build Your Salon Hello, hello, hello my salon friends. Phil Jackson here, your queen of salons. Coming in your eyes and ears with another dose of Wise Owl Wisdom. How on earth are you? Achingly well, I hope, as we steam towards the end of February, heading into March. How was February for you? Patchy, I think we're going to go, is the word that I'm using across my clients. But did you have an amazing storming February? Generally, the pattern seems to be that either January or February will be a bit tricky for most salon and clinic based businesses. It's pretty rare that people have an absolute stormer in both. So what's your pattern? Is it a pattern? Are you starting to see that these things are settling down a bit in the last two or three years and we're starting to get a little bit of predictability to those peaks and troughs? Either way, though, what I've said in my introduction is that it's not enough for us just to steer a steady course with our existing clientele. It's not enough just to deliver amazing service to the people that are on our books already. A smart business is one that has its eye on the future, that is looking around for sources of new clients. So this is particularly important if you want to see some change and some growth in the next few months or across the next year or two. If you're looking to pivot the business into a different area, if you're looking to grow your profits and you don't feel that your existing clientele can get you there, we're going to have to work a little bit harder. And this is the biggest problem that I see in the salon business at the moment when it comes to marketing. I think we're getting pretty good at marketing to our existing clients. I think we're very good at using social media. And I've been saying for a long time that I don't think social media is a great source of new clients. I think it's a great source of existing clients teaching them about the services that they may not have come across, deepening our connection, building that relationship with our existing clients.

I think social media is fantastic, but I don't think it's a great way of getting new clients directly. I don't think people go from scrolling, laughing at videos of dogs doing stupid things to suddenly booking a hair or beauty or aesthetic treatment. I just don't think that happens particularly often, but I do love it when you prove me wrong. So if that's the case in your business, reach out and let me know. We could share your story on a future episode of the Build Your Salon podcast. I also think we're getting to grips with email marketing. Not nearly enough, my darlings, and there is no excuse anymore. I would love to do an episode if it would be useful to you, actually reach out and let me know. I'd love to do an episode on using AI for email marketing because all of the excuses that you have about not sending powerful, persuasive emails to your existing clients have gone. OK, it's just too easy to get a really good job now. Now, I'm not suggesting for a second that AI has taken over. It still needs a bit of human touch at the end. But to break the back of email marketing, I don't know a better tool out there. It's easier than it's ever been to send brilliant emails to your list. But I don't think that's enough. I think we need one eye on the future. And that means building a list of people who aren't yet customers. And where people go wrong is they think that social media is doing this for them by building a following, by building your audience on social media, that somehow we've taken care of your future clientele. And you haven't for two reasons, really. The first is, as I've said, I don't think social media works particularly well for persuading people to book a new service now. I don't think it persuades people to jump ship and go to a different salon or a different aesthetic clinic. The other thing is that it's the list that you don't own. OK, you don't own your social media following. And there are hundreds, thousands of stories out there of businesses that have invested a lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of money in building a social media audience just to have it taken away. Either by somebody hacking their account and not allowing them access to that audience anymore. Or one of Mr. Zuckerberg's cronies or lynch men who are out there doing horrible things to salon business owners, taking accounts away, freezing accounts, not allowing you to post anymore. Because you don't own the list, there's very little you can do. And people rant and rage and say how unfair it is and how this shouldn't be allowed. Ultimately, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, these are private businesses. They can do as they damn well please, as long as it's within their terms and conditions.

And one of those will be that they can take your account away at the drop of a hat. So what's the list that you do own? Where can we start building an audience of future clients? Our email lists. Now, email has got a little bit old and fusty. It's got a little bit stinky and a little bit Miss Havisham sat around being covered in cobwebs for a lot of years. I don't think that's the case anymore. I think it's having a bit of a renaissance for the reasons that I've outlined already. I think emails becoming more powerful. I think it's becoming a lot more persuasive. And I think actually, thanks to some of the regulations that have come along, I think the email inbox is a less cluttered place than perhaps it was five or six years ago. So what can we be doing to build our list of future clients? And this whole segment is taken unapologetically from my Get Paid Properly programme. Let's hear about that first, shall we? Let me guess. Your appointment book is full, but your bank account isn't. How long are you going to let that go on for? Isn't it time that you got paid properly? My Get Paid Properly programme isn't just another course. It's your roadmap to boosting your profits, increasing your takings, finally getting rewarded for the hard work that you do. With nine straightforward modules, my foolproof pricing spreadsheet, and I'm even throwing in a one-to-one coaching call to answer any questions that you have about the training or anything else that's getting in the way of your incredible success. Head to getpaidproperly.com forward slash podcast and you can save £100 on your sign-up and get that bonus coaching call with me. The programme is backed by my signature 90-day no-quibble guarantee. Take the training, take the coaching call, and if you don't feel you know enough to confidently set your prices profitably for the future, I will coach you myself until you do. Head to getpaidproperly.com forward slash podcast, lock in that saving, and finally take strides in the direction of getting rewarded for your hard work. All on build your salon. So how do we go about building a list of future clients? How can we get the details of somebody who hasn't been in to the salon yet? Well, a few people will appear on your list as if by magic, especially or particularly if you have online bookings switched on in your business

because some people will register for online bookings, may even go as far as booking an appointment, and then cancel the appointment they've never been in. You've got their details, but they've never actually spent money with the business. So we have what's called a warm lead. We've got people that have heard of you, they've started to build a relationship with your business, but they haven't actually spent any money yet. Other things that we could be doing to build those lists are things like competitions. And we used to do this a lot in the old days, back in the 1800s when I was running my salon. We used to run competitions with our local newspaper, and people would enter in exchange for us donating a very generous prize. Some of the T's and C's were that we got the client details. We could market to those people later. But ultimately what I'm talking about is something called a lead magnet, which is horrible marketing speak. But essentially what I'm talking about is something which we call gated content. So something which has some value to your ideal customer, which they're willing to swap their details for. So they're not spending money with us, but they're willing to hand over their email address or even sometimes their physical address in exchange for this little diamond that you're going to give them. And what could that look like? Well, before we jump into what it's going to look like, let's jump into something that I skimmed over very quickly there. Because we're talking about reaching your ideal future client. And that could be really important to your business if you're looking to change the way that you do business. So for example, I have somebody who I was working with up until quite recently, who had built a very strong clientele on massage, but wanted to move into more of a facial business. So the existing clients that that salon business owner had weren't going to get her to the place that she wanted to be. We needed some new clients. We need to build a database of future clients so that my customer would have been confident and able to switch off a few of those appointments available for massage and know that we could market to this future list of clients. So if you're looking to pivot the business, we've got to have a really clear idea about who it is that you're trying to reach. Sometimes it's more of the same. Sometimes we can look at the people that are spending money in our business, perhaps the best people that are spending money in our business, look for the commonality, look for the type of profession they have or the places that they live or the kinds of ways that they spend their money in different businesses.

Perhaps they've got things in common that we can start tapping into. We can target other people that have those characteristics as well. Sometimes, though, they don't exist in our business at the moment, and we need to come up with a new ideal client. So it may be that your existing clientele sees salon visits as enough of a priority to come in six times a year. That may not be enough for your ideal future client. You might want people that are coming into the salon business every month, and that's going to be a very different client to the one that you have at the moment. So get a really clear idea about the type of client that you're trying to reach. And it could be something as simple as service based. So, for example, one of the lead magnets that I put together when I was running the salon was around hair extensions, talking about the type of things that hair extensions were useful for, the kind of people that were good for hair extensions and those that it might not be suitable for, the different types of extensions available. So it was a bit of a step-by-step hair extensions 101, if you like, which people would find valuable if they were interested in hair extensions. So they would opt in, give me their email address in exchange for my guide. Well, guess what I've got then? I've got a list of people, an email list of people who I know are thinking about having hair extensions. How valuable is that to my hair extensions business? So sometimes it's ideal for us to figure out who is going to be a future customer for us, who's going to be an ideal future customer for us, or we can go service based. And what are we going to swap? Well, it could be something as simple as the 101 that I've just outlined on a particular service. Sometimes I see this, for example, in hair removal and perhaps comparing and contrasting the different types of hair removal, whether that be sugaring, waxing, lasering, electrolysis and so on. Perhaps it's a step-by-step guide on how we can prepare ourselves for a particular type of appointment. Sometimes it's just the pros and cons or a checklist. Sometimes it's a little bit of at-home advice. So how to look after your skin, how to look after your hair. We had one, for example, which was about coping with fine hair, because what that gave me was a list of people that I know had a particular struggle that I could tap into with my marketing. Now, here's somewhere that people go wrong. They wait too long to start making an offer to that future clientele list. What they want to do is start nurturing, start building that relationship, start positioning themselves as an expert. And that used to be the case. It used to be something that we would drop people onto our list and then we would send a sequence of emails,

perhaps five or six emails over the next couple of weeks, positioning you as the expert, making sure that they knew you were the go to before we finally made an offer. But what I've come to realise over more recent years is that there's a reason that customer opted in. And the reason is they're not getting that expertise elsewhere. So if somebody has to opt in to find out about hair extensions, guess what their stylist is not talking about? Hair extensions. So there's an opportunity there. So what I would do is move people from opting in to the lead magnet into making an offer really quite quickly, which they'll either there would be some people who are opting in for the lead magnet who are ready to jump in. They've already decided this is what they want. And your advert has come along at just the right time to tap into that. Let's make an offer really, really quickly. Now, if they don't take action on it, then we can put them into what we call a nurture sequence. Then we can put them into a sequence of emails designed to deepen that connection, to build the relationship, to position you as the expert in your field. And then we can make future offers as well. Another place that I see people going wrong is they try and put too much into a lead magnet. They try and turn it into some kind of e-book, which is going to take people hours and hours to read. Unfortunately, attention spans are so short these days that that's just not effective anymore. If you want people to actually digest your lead magnet, then I would suggest it needs to be consumable in less than five minutes, probably three minutes, ideally. Now, that might mean that some kind of download is not the way to go. People may not necessarily want a PDF or a guide or a checklist. Maybe it's a short video. Perhaps it's you positioning yourself as an expert, sharing your knowledge in video form. But again, I would make that quite a short video so people can opt in, digest it quickly, and then they are on the list. So there we have it. My top tips on building your future client list. Get out there and get this done. Every other industry on Earth seems to be doing this more than the salon industry. I just don't see enough of you looking after your future clientele. And let me tell you, we need to work a lot harder in our marketing than you are currently if growing your salon business is on your radar. It's one thing for us to sell to existing customers. It's one thing for us to say, you've been coming in for this service for a while.

Did you know we also do this service? But if you're trying to move people from one salon business into yours, if you're trying to basically poach customers from elsewhere in the marketplace, you're going to have to work a damn sight harder than you are now. OK, if you're creating a new market, then that's kind of an exception to the rule. So, for example, one of my one of my clients has recently got the chair that you sit on and it does things to your pelvic floor. Now, it might be that you struggle with something that chair can help with and you didn't know there was a solution out there. That's what we call a new market solution. So you tell people about it and then they suddenly go, wow, there's a solution to my problem. I mean, I want to spend some money there. So we're creating a new market. But most of the things that we do, people are already going to. Nobody suddenly wakes up one day and goes, do you know what? I'm going to start going to a hair salon for the first time. These new clients are going to be going to salons already for hair, for skin, for nails, for tanning, for hair removal, all the rest of it. And to get someone to change their behaviour, unless they're desperately unhappy, is going to take an awful lot of effort. So we're going to have to put a lot more effort into our marketing. There we go. Lecture over. So what have I missed? What are you doing to build your future clientele? Reach out and let me know. I would love to hear from you. My email address, scrolling at the bottom of the screen, phil at buildyoursalon.com. Also reach out if you'd like to be a featured expert or a salon owner expert on a future episode of the Build Your Salon podcast. I'd love to be sharing your story with my amazing Build Your Salon audience. Just seven short days until I'm coming in your eyes and ears again. And until then, take care.