How to create your hair salon business marketing strategy.

Marketing is one of the most important aspects of a business. To market effectively, you need a good strategy. Creating a good strategy can be tough, but we are going to walkthrough the steps of you can create an effective marketing strategy for your salon.

How to create a hair salon marketing strategy

1. Pinpoint your business identify 
2. Determine customer base
3. Identify your budget
4. Decide how you want to advertise

Pinpoint your business identity

Pinpointing your business identity is the first step in establishing your marketing strategy. 

Your business identity is essentially just as it sounds, who you are as a business. 

Identifying your business identity will give you an idea of the topics and information you want to market. 

• What should you look for in your business identity?

When searching for your business identity, one of the main goals is to make yourself unique. 

This will help you when marketing by making your brand more memorable to those you are marketing towards. 

But what should you look for in your business identity? 

You should look for one of two things. 

1. 1. 1. A unique service you offer

When running a salon, you have the option to offer a large range of different services. 

If you can find a service that not many salons offer, especially in your area, that can become your business’s identity. 

For example, if you offer a specific hair beauty ritual (which is common in Asia but no so much in the US), your salon can become known as the salon that offers authentic rituals.

1. 1. 1. A special customer rewards program 

Many salons offer customer reward programs, whether they are offering coupons or a sort of punch card type service. 

If you can identify a special customer rewards program that is unique to your salon, then that can also become your brand identity. 

For example, you could offer a program where you offer free hair coloring after 10 visits, leaving your ads to be something like “Joe’s hair salon, the only salon in town that offers free hair coloring after 10 visits”.

Determine your customer base

When operating a salon, you are going to have a customer base that determines where your money comes from. 

Identifying your customer base is going to your next step when you are planning your marketing strategy. 

By identifying who your customer base is, you then build your marketing plan to focus more specifically on this group.

This will help you make the most out of your advertisements and will hopefully allow you to bring in more customers for the money you spend.

• What is the customer base for a hair salon?

The best way to determine the customer base for your hair salon is to start with very unspecific criteria and slowly become more specific. Here is an example:

It’s fair to say that the customer base for a hair salon is primarily women, as they are the ones who use salons most frequently. 

Now that you have your first most basic criteria for your customer base, you can now pick your next criteria to narrow it down some more.

When advertising for a hair salon, you are not going to want to advertise to children, as they obviously have no money to spend and salons generally aren’t high on their list of wants. 

Teenagers, however, do have money, and many do frequent hair salons. 

This narrows it down much more, as you know you are advertising to women over the age of about 16. 

After this step, you can narrow down your customer base with any more criteria you think may apply such as income or location.

Once you are finished, you have your official customer base and can now include it in your marketing strategy!

Identify your budget

Now that you have your plan for advertising ready to go, you have to decide how much you can spend on advertising. 

Identifying your budget is an important step as it will allow you to make a plan as to where and how you want to advertise. 

For example, if you have a fairly low advertising budget because you are currently focusing on expanding your inventory, then you will want to focus more on advertising that doesn’t cost much, such as through social media. 

On the other hand, however, if you decide that you have a significant amount of money to spend on advertising, then you can pursue more costly modes of marketing such as television advertisements. 

The key to deciding between the two is to identify how much you can spend. 

From there you can decide how you want to advertise as well as how long you want to advertise for. 

• How much should you spend on marketing?

Most successful hair salons spend between 3% and 7% of their total sales on marketing their business. 

This range allows them to get some advertisements out there without spending too much. 

Although this range may seem fairly low, it does focus fairly heavily on the less expensive side of marketing such as social media marketing. 

We recommend following this range to give your business the boost it needs while also ensuring that you have enough to cover your other costs. 

Check out our article on budgeting HERE!

Decide how you want to advertise

Now that you have established your business identity and customer base, you have to decide how you want to market your business. 

This step works very well with the last bit of research, as once you have identified who your customer base is, you can try and market to them directly. 

For example, if you have decided that your customer base is women over the age of 16 and younger than the age of 40, you can focus your business marketing more on social media. 

By using social media sites such as Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and even sites like Facebook and Snapchat, you are much more likely to reach customers who are in this age range!

The great thing about social media, besides of course the fact it can help you reach your customer base more effectively, is that it is completely free, which can help you save on marketing costs. 

• How else can you advertise your hair salon?

Outside of social media, there are some other channels of marketing that you can use.

Blogs 

Blogs are another good way to reach a younger audience, which is most likely going to be your customer base. You can blog about your salon and the features and benefits you offer.

Email campaigns 

Although these may not be as efficient as some other forms of advertising, email campaigns are still a great way to reach customers with promotions that you are currently running. 

Word of mouth

Word of mouth advertising is incredibly effective; the only problem is that it can be a bit tough to control.

However, if you are to offer referral discounts, or in other words, a discount for customers based on how many other customers they have referred to you, is a great way of encouraging people to refer your business.

In Conclusion

All in all, the creation of a marketing plan for a salon is an important process that if done correctly, can make advertising much easier. 

By determining your business identity, customer base, budget, and mode of advertising, you can create a fantastic marketing plan. 

This plan will guide you on your path to expanding your business by drawing more customers in and expanding your cash flow. 

If done well, your marketing plan may only need minor adjustments throughout the years, instead of having to completely start over to meet your business’s new needs. 

All In all, if you can follow these steps, your marketing plan for your salon business is going to be flawless. 

Related Questions

Should you hire a firm to handle your salon business marketing?

Although this will vary depending on who you ask, our answer would have to be no. 

When advertising your salon business, your goal is of course to get customers in the door to improve the cash flow you have coming in. 

When doing this, you also want to keep costs as low as possible, as if you end up spending a significant amount of money advertising you may not make enough money back to justify that advertising in the first place. 

Marketing agencies are notoriously expensive, especially for small businesses that don’t have a lot of money to spend at the time. 

Not only that but with the popularity of social media and sites like Instagram and Pinterest, which both thrive off of picture sharing, advertising has never been easier!

This is especially helpful because not only are these sites free to use and run a page on but because they thrive on picture sharing, they are perfect for a hair salon whose services rely on making things look good. 

You can also learn marketing tips from professionals online through sites such as Youtube! 

For all of these reasons, we would steer clear of hiring a marketing agency to handle your advertising.

What should you include in a cost breakdown for a salon?

When creating a cost breakdown for a salon, you are going to want to include all of the recurring costs that a salon will face. 

You also may want to include some of the other occasional costs that may arise.

These costs include, but are not limited to, the following: 

• Technology 
• Wages
• Salon space 
• Taxes
• Utilities 
• Equipment maintenance 
• Marketing 
• Beauty products
• Website maintenance 

All of these costs are going to be associated with your hair salon. 

The best way to manage these costs is going to be to identify how much they are going to be and how often they are going to occur. 

This will give you an idea of how much you are going to spend annually and how many customers you are going to need to keep up with these costs. 

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Looking to start your own Salon? Get the documents you need to get organized and funded here.

Please note: This blog post is for educational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Please consult a legal expert to address your specific needs.