There are a lot of beauty salons out there, but having a marketing plan is the first step towards ensuring that yours stands out for the right reasons. With so many approaches to marketing, a marketing plan is there to guide you, acting as a roadmap. It’s there to help you understand your target market, find business opportunities and allocate your resources wisely.
A marketing plan can also help you to measure business success, highlighting if your marketing efforts are achieving your desired results. Instead of marketing and hoping for the best, you can market your beauty salon with a clear plan. With a marketing plan, it’s a lot easier to stand out to customers as a beauty salon worth paying attention to.
Start By Assessing Your Beauty Salon’s Performance
When it comes to marketing your beauty salon, you need to start by assessing your business’ performance. This will give you a good idea of where your business currently is, and where you hope it will be in weeks, months and years. Think about how many appointments you have per month, and how many you would like to have. Consider which marketing efforts have worked in the past, and which you should avoid this time. Think about how many new clients you gained and what your turnover was, and if there’s room for improvement.
It’s also a good idea to look at your current standing online, including how many social media followers you have, your average number of website visitors and what customers are saying about you. This information will give you an insight into how potential changes could impact your business, and how you could boost your growth over the coming months.
The Role of Market Research in Marketing Your Beauty Salon
It’s impossible to market your beauty salon without carrying out a good amount of market research.
- Look at Current Treatment Trends – As a beauty salon owner, you need to think about what customers are looking for. For example, PlasmaPen is a relatively new device, and it’s one that a lot of people are interested in. This will help you to ensure that you are offering popular, sought after treatments. It will also help you to know which treatments to focus on as part of your marketing strategy.
- Understand Your Target Market – Understanding your target market, the type of customer you want to appeal to, helps you to tailor your marketing efforts to them. Instead of marketing and hoping for the best, you can market your beauty salon knowing exactly what your target customer is looking for. Think about their age, gender, possible income and customer behaviour. Their purchase habits, brand preferences and what they look for in a beauty salon can be used to ensure that your marketing efforts are likely to engage them.
- Analyse Your Competitors – It’s always a good idea to look at your competitors – including their services, marketing techniques, customer reviews and prices – to identify gaps in the market. This gap could be the perfect way for your beauty salon to stand out by doing something different. With a lot of beauty salons out there, it’s easy to get caught up in doing exactly what everyone else is doing. By analysing your competitors, you can see what’s working for them, and where improvements could be made.
Set Yourself Clear Marketing Goals
Marketing goals are important because they provide direction and focus your efforts, serving as a benchmark for measuring success and optimising your marketing tactics.
- Short Term Marketing Goals – These are the goals that you want to achieve in the next weeks and months, such as gaining new customers or adding more services to your offerings.
- Long Term Marketing Goals – These are the goals that you want to achieve over a longer period of time, and they tend to look at the bigger picture. A long term goal could be to create a recognisable brand, or to solidify yourself as an industry leader.
All of your marketing goals should be SMART; Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely. These goals are clear and within reach. They can also be tracked, helping you to know if your marketing efforts are working as well as they should be. Once you have long term and short term goals in place, you have something clear to work towards.
Conduct a SWOT Analysis
Performing a SWOT – Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats – analysis is a good way to gain insight into your beauty salon. By evaluating your strengths and weaknesses, you can identify areas for improvement and make the most of key opportunities.
- Strengths – Consider what your beauty salon excels at. This could be having skilled staff or offering a unique product range, and focus on enhancing those strengths.
- Weaknesses – Acknowledge any weaknesses, such as using outdated technology or the salon needing a refurbishment, and work on improving them.
- Opportunities – Identify potential opportunities, such as appealing to a new demographic or adding a new treatment option, such as PlasmaPen.
- Threats – Make sure that you’re aware of any potential threats to your business’ success, such as competition from other beauty salons or regulatory changes, and decide how to reduce these threats to ensure that your business continues to thrive.
There is no denying the importance of analysing your beauty salon’s current standing in the industry, and determining where improvements to marketing could be made. Start by setting SMART goals and conducting a SWOT analysis, and then move onto other areas of marketing, which we will look at in Part 2 of our blog.
