Building your brand is all about trial and error. Throughout your career, you might have tried various marketing techniques, with varying degrees of success. Some might work for your peers, but not so well for your business. So how do you find the best marketing style for you? Get comfortable and enjoy some marketing myth-busting with Booksy to guide you through what to avoid in your marketing strategy.
Let's be clear. Local business groups are gold dust. Get involved, network with like-minded individuals and you'll become much richer in knowledge, connections and potential collaborations. But try to avoid advertising your skilled services on buy and sell pages. As much as you can find a great bargain for home furnishings, upcycling projects or retro video games, they do come with the 'bargain-hunting' mentality, and promote buyers to offer a their preferred amount over the asking, thus making your fairly priced services, a tough sell.
Instead, focus your time on local community pages to let the local community know you're there, show off your business' unique selling point and high quality of your services.
Particularly when you're launching your business, you might be thinking, 'I need to reach as many new clients as possible' - and new clients are always a wonderful thing. But the most important thing is to make sure that your clients keep coming back - hello strong cash flow forecast!
If your aim was to only have new clients in each month, consider how much money and time would have been spent marketing to each of those clients. If you didn't focus on the in-salon experience, the product upsells, the community engagement, do these new clients establish a bond with you, or are they likely to jump ship to the next salon when they see an offer for the same service elsewhere?
Provide the very best experience for your clients, show appreciation on social media and consider promotions for customer loyalty, and these customers will become your biggest brand advocates, not to mention, those routine cut and colours will have a firmer place in your cash flow.
Oh, Instagram. Algorithms, hashtags, IGTVs. You and your ever-changing ways sure do make it difficult for business owners to keep up to date. You may have heard all sorts of ways to 'beat the algorithm' and truthfully, there's a lot of varying advice around there about how many times to post on instagram, when to post and so on. But without any paid advertising behind your posts, sadly very little of your audience is going to see it.
So focus on growing your audience, rather than worrying about when or what to post. Ultimately, if you have a great connection with an audience that cares about what you post, they'll support you by liking, commenting, saving and sharing your posts - increasing the chances of it being seen by others.
Again, your loyal customers (who are now your IG followers) are your biggest brand-fans! Mention it to your customers when you have them in for their next treatment, let them know there are exclusive offers or incentives mentioned on social, and also show the love to them - show off their makeover/treatment/new-do and tag them, thank them for their loyalty and visit - thats building a connection with very little effort - not to mention, showing off your skills to the potential new clients that come across your profile!
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