5 Salon Marketing Mistakes (and how to fix them)

The salon industry is cutthroat. Here’s 5 of the most common salon marketing mistakes you don’t want to be making.

Salon owners come from many different walks of life, not all of them may have experience with building effective marketing campaigns. The road to success for many is often paved with these common salon marketing mistakes.

Read on as Timely fills you in on the most common salon marketing mistakes. Learn to avoid them, or learn to fix them…just don’t ignore them!

Ignoring customer reviews

The reviews your customers leave are not only a reflection of your good work, but also your most effective marketing method when attracting new customers. It’s a huge salon marketing mistake to ignore online reviews. Regardless of how nice your social media or website looks, people will always want to hear what other customers have to say about their visit. It adds a level of transparency to your business that can’t be replicated.

Often salons get discouraged by one negative review, and then give up. That’s a mistake! Deal with the negative feedback, and then outweigh it with 10 more positive reviews!

Make sure that you’re asking each of your customers to leave a review of your salon after each of their sessions. With a feature like Follow-up Messages, you can set up an automatic SMS or email to remind your customers to leave a review. You could say something like, “We loved seeing you the other day, hope you enjoyed yourself. If you have a spare minute please leave us a review on Facebook”.

Set it to send a day or two after a client’s session, rather than bugging them while they’re trying to pay up and leave.

Lack of social media presence

Although this goes for many types of businesses, it’s especially true for salons that are trying to build up their client list. You absolutely need to have a profile on at least Facebook and Instagram. These are the most applicable platforms for the salon industry.

Twitter, Pinterest, and Snapchat are also worth looking at, but don’t create accounts that you aren’t willing to keep up to date.

Social media pages give you the opportunity to show off your stylists skills by posting pictures of their work with relevant hashtags. Social media is also a great outlet for posting information regarding discounts and other deals. Just make sure that you’re not doing the bare minimum when it comes to your social media pages. Constantly update them with new information, pictures, and videos.

Not training your staff to up-sell

Whenever you have a customer in your salon, it’s your job to make sure that they are taken care of in every possible way. That includes ensuring they are informed about all your products and services that they might be interested in. It’s a common salon marketing mistake to not train your staff as salespeople.

Up-selling isn’t about pestering your clients with products they don’t need, it’s about making sure they know about everything you offer. Take time to sit with your team and discuss the importance of product knowledge. Your clients are already coming to you because they like at least one of your services. Chances are, they’ll like the rest of what you offer as well. They may just not know about it, or why they might need it.

Getting on discount sites

Many salon owners consider discount sites like Groupon to be a great idea, but it really is a salon marketing mistake in the long-term.

What happens is that you receive an influx of customers that are there to take advantage of a specific deal. Once that deal is done they move on to the next salon to take advantage of the next deal. They don’t build relationships with your stylists and don’t become the regular clients you’re after. What’s worse is the influx of customers will take up a lot of your booking slots, and they aren’t even paying full price.

As an alternative we’d suggest running a ‘word of mouth‘ campaign where you use your existing client base to refer their friends. You’ll get much more genuinely interested clients that already have a relationship with your salon (through their friend) and are more likely to become a regular. It’s these regular clients that will keep your salon in business for years to come.

Not building a marketing calendar

This is a very common salon marketing mistake. Many salons push out marketing material or special deals at random times throughout the year, and have significant gaps throughout the year with nothing going on. This causes spikes and lulls of clients in your salon, which makes it harder to plan ahead for your business.

You need to sit down and schedule your plan for the year, ensuring that you have some type of marketing endeavour going on at all times. It will result in an organised and efficient marketing effort, and much more consistent business.

For inspiration, check out our business guide: ‘Marketing Ideas from the Salon Masters‘

Start fixing those mistakes!

Don’t feel too upset if you caught yourself making a couple of these salon marketing mistakes. What’s important is resolving them as soon as possible, and putting systems in place to ensure that they don’t happen again. Remember, Timely has great salon marketing features to help you get it right!