6 Reasons Your Salon Social Marketing Stinks (and how to fix it)
6 Salon Social Marketing Strategies Every Plan Needs to Include
What could be more exciting than having a free marketing tool powerful enough to bring new clients in the door? And what could be more frustrating than going weeks, months or even years without getting that marketing channel to work?
The truth is, very few beauty professionals are getting the results they want from salon social marketing for one simple reason: there’s no actual strategy in their social marketing plan. Here are six common salon social marketing fails and the strategies to fix them.
6 Salon Social Marketing Fails and Fixes
1. Lack of Local Followers
Even the most brilliant salon social marketing campaigns will fail if you don’t have a sufficient number of local followers. To increase the number of followers your social profiles can potentially reach:
- Add social icons to your website
- Email clients with a campaign specifically asking them to follow you on social media
- Use giveaways (e.g., people who follow your social profile and share your updates with their network are qualified to win a salon gift card)
- Ask clients to check in online when they arrive for an appointment (if they haven’t followed your page before, they can do so now)
2. Lack of Social Network Reach
Even if you have a lot of local followers, your salon’s updates will only have limited reach unless your followers like, comment on and share your posts. Social algorithms are geared to limit the reach of posts unless they prove their worth through follower responses. Contests and giveaways are one way to incentivize engagement, posting great content that is actually worth sharing is another.
Are you sharing content on your social networks that actually engages and interests your followers? It’s worth noting that engaging content – content your followers will respond to with likes, comments and shares – are probably not going to be updates that promote your salon or your services outright.
3. Lack of Direction
Whether you are new to social marketing or your profiles have been online for years, if you don’t know what you want to get out of your social marketing efforts, your results are likely lackluster. The idea of setting specific social marketing goals and measures might not sound very exciting until you can trace new clients, event attendance, retail product sales and other business-building results directly back to campaigns you ran on social networks.
4. Lack of Best Practices
All social platforms have their own set of best practices and guidelines. Failing to understand the primary strengths of each platform as well as the rules (written and unwritten) that its members expect brands to follow can severely limit your success or even land your profile in the penalty box. For each social network where your brand is represented with a profile page, you should know:
- Size and standards for background images and profile photos; for instance, some networks prohibit putting a website URL or phone number onto a background image
- What type of content to share; for instance, content brands share on LinkedIn may be completely dissimilar to some of the content they share on Facebook, which will be completely dissimilar to the way they share images and content on image-centric sites like Instagram and Pinterest, and so on
- Optimum size and shape, and standards for images shared within the news feed or as sponsored posts; for instance, while you can share a photo with lots of text on your Facebook profile in general, if you want to sponsor a particular post or run an ad, your image can be no more than 25% text
The more detailed your specific approach to each network becomes, the more likely you are to achieve the goals and get the results you want from your social marketing efforts. A lot of platforms fall under the general category of “social networks” but that does not mean that the tactics you will use on one will be the same as those used on any of the others.
5. Lack of Search Optimization
Social networks can be an effective referral source for new clients, especially when your own clients follow and share your updates and send their friends and colleagues your way. You might not be aware that your salon’s social updates can also appear in search results on Google, Bing and other search engines.
Optimizing your social updates for search by including keywords and phrases that real people might use when looking for a business like yours can extend the utility of social marketing even further. Let’s say you own a salon in Tacoma, Washington. some of these types of keywords that can land your social media updates in search results are:
- Salons in Tacoma
- Tacoma salons that carry specific retail brand or product
- Salons in Tacoma, WA that offer specific type of service
6. Lack of Strategy Integration
This brings us to a final salon social marketing fail, that of “doing” social marketing in a way that is isolated from your salon’s overall marketing strategy. Social marketing does not stand on its own; it is most effective and best used when campaigns are executed across all channels (website, email, SMS, in-salon, community networking, etc.)
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