The Most Efficient Salon Marketing Ideas You Need To Try

Do you want to attract new customers to your salon? Do you want customers to view your services as worth paying extra for?

If this is your goal, use the salon marketing ideas in this article to promote your salon business.

The hair and beauty salon arena is saturated with local businesses. So, running a successful salon business involves more than offering great service.

To stand out from the crowd, salon marketing is imperative, but finding fresh salon marketing ideas can be a real challenge. This article highlights ideas to help grow your beauty and hair salon business.

Salon Marketing Through Branding

Maintain Consistent Salon Branding

The physical appearance of your brand should be consistent across all marketing platforms. There should be a uniform color scheme for all your marketing platforms, making your salon business identifiable online and offline.

It’s not only about colors. Everything about your hair salon tells customers what your brand is about. So it’s important to know your salon’s unique story and choose salon marketing ideas that represent your brand well.

What impression would you like your salon to give?. Choose a theme to represent that. You can try salon themes like edgy, calm, wacky, artistic, indie, or abstract.

Consistent branding may not seem important, but, it separates you from the crowd and helps clients see how different your salon is. This adds value to your brand enabling you to charge higher prices.

When people see the differences in your hair salon, they tend to tell their friends about your business. This boosts your word-of-mouth marketing. Maintaining consistent branding is one of the most important salon marketing ideas to expand your business.

Digital Salon Marketing Ideas

Add Service Pages And Keywords To Your Salon’s Website

 Having a website is a key marketing tool. Existing clients get to praise your salon online. When new clients search google for a hair salon they are attracted by these reviews.

This salon marketing idea is important, as people usually find everything via a Google search.

The best way to have your salon website show on Google search results is to add service pages and keywords to your salon website.

Use these service pages to describe the various services you offer. Try to create individual pages for each of your main salon services. Ensure the title of each page is the name of the service described on the page. To reach a broader audience try linking your social media accounts to your website.

Doing all this helps Google understand your salon website’s relevance. This causes Google to show your website when people search for related words.

Google Ads

A salon website that is optimized for search engines may still not appear at the top of Google’s search results. What can a salon owner do to ensure the salon’s website is SEO optimized for top ranking?

One can use Google’s ad service to run paid search campaigns. Google Ads are pay-per-click search engine results. These appear when people do a Google search for relevant keywords.

This means if someone searches for a hair salon located in your area Google will show your salon website at the top in an ad form. A normal search engine result and a Google Ad differ. A Google Ad displays the word “Ad” in green under the ad title.

This salon marketing idea enables you to target people who do not know about your salon but are looking for the services you offer. This empowers you to reach only serious clients who are ready to pay. You only pay when people click on your ad.

To reduce the number of people who click your ad without becoming customers, only show it to those likely to book you.

To do this you can set the ad to be visible only to customers within a certain distance from your hair salon. The ad can also be set up to be visible based on certain words customers use when searching for a salon.

When setting up a search campaign, be as specific as possible. Explain your services. Include what makes your beauty or hair salon different from competitors in your area, and a link to your contact and gallery web pages.

Blog All About It

Designate a blog section on the salon’s website and publish high-quality content that will appeal to potential clients.

Include SEO best practices in the writing process, ensuring that your article/ blog has a higher chance of ranking on search engines like Google. As potential clients read your blogs and gain interest in your hair salon this means more profits for the business. You can touch upon different topics of interest, write a blog about new trends in haircuts, birthday gift ideas, or wedding gift ideas, and also include your services.

Not only do blogs help drive traffic to your website, they also help with lead generation and establish your authority as a beauty professional.

Here are a few salon Blog Ideas:

• Recommend helpful hair products and tools
• Give beauty advice
• Give makeup tutorials
• Give skin care tips
• Give hair styling ideas

Email As A Salon Marketing Strategy

Communication is an important factor in the survival of relationships. This is also true for business relationships. So If you run a salon business it’s important to maintain meaningful communication with your clients. How can you do that?

Email marketing is a great way to keep in touch with your customers. Email marketing is necessary because there is no guarantee that clients will check your social media content.

One can send clients personalized emails to inform them of deals and other offers. The benefit of email marketing is that clients tend to re-book more often.

Here are a few examples of Salon Email Marketing:

• Sending a thank you to a new client
• Sending birthday greetings (without having to check the calendar)
• Sending reminders about hair product inventory
• Sending a reminder when a client hasn’t been in for a hair appointment in awhile

Avoid sending generic or sale mails. These go directly to spam or get deleted by clients.

Personalize your emails by using content such as staff images, stories, etc. This helps your clients feel more connected to you. Be sure to include email marketing in your list of salon marketing ideas.

Social Media Salon Marketing Ideas

Social media is easily the most used salon marketing idea. Social media for salons usually means Instagram and Facebook. Both social platforms function differently but are great for salon advertising.

Salon Advertising Via Instagram

Instagram is great for promoting your brand. It’s a form of free salon advertising that shows off your business via your posts, photography style, and filters and colors you use. This is a great way to attract clients by showing off a portfolio of your work.

Facebook Ads

Some beauty salon owners have had little success with boosted posts on Facebook. However, if done right, Facebook ads are useful for salon marketing and attracting new clients.

What does one need to do to benefit from Facebook advertising?

Here are 5 points to keep in mind to get it right:

• Use friendly and personalized language
• Use short video clips instead of still pictures
• Run time-sensitive promotions and include a call to action button.
• Use Facebook ads manager to keep track of the metrics and analyze the numbers as frequently as possible
• Change the text copy and creatives timely. This optimizes your ad campaign and helps you get more clients.

A great feature of Facebook advertising is that it allows you to target audiences based on interest. For example, one can target an audience with an upcoming birthday via an ad that reads, “Treat Yourself!” Or try targeting persons that are engaged with an ad that reads, “Let Us Pamper You for Your Big Day!”

Social Reviews

Today, people tend to buy a product or service only after reading online reviews. This is especially true of salons since customers want to ensure they will be interacting with welcoming people.

So ask your happiest customers to create reviews on platforms like Yelp, Google Reviews, and Facebook, to name a few.

When a client takes the time to leave you a positive review online, two things tend to happen. First, by leaving you an amazing review they’re publicly vouching for your salon which makes them feel more connected and to you.

Second, the review acts as social proof for your brand thus making potential clients more likely to patronize your salon business.

Designate A Selfie Area In Your Salon

People love taking selfies and a hair and beauty salon can benefit from this trend. Set up a mini photo area within your salon and encourage your clients to post pics on their social media platforms.

A selfie area is a fun experience for your clients. Ensure the lighting for your selfie area is good. Use a neutral wall or a personalized background with your salon logo and social media handle.

Include props like a hashtag cutout or image in the background to promote your salon. Ask clients to use the same hashtag when posting so that all the posts will appear under it.

Encourage customers to take and post a few pics before leaving the salon. After all, it’s when they feel and look their best that they’ll be willing to share.

Salon Marketing Via Video Content

Video is one of the most popular communication tools today. Viewers spend millions of hours of their time watching Youtube and other social media platforms. Using this salon marketing idea is sure to give you a boost in customer bookings. Here are two types of videos to use.

A Salon Tour Video

Your current clients know and trust you. This trust relationship is important for a salon to be successful. It is developed through interaction and communication.

To help cultivate such a relationship with potential customers create a video that shows you, your team, and your salon. Post it on social media and embed it on your salon’s website.

An Explainer Video

People prefer to watch interesting shorts rather than long videos.

A short engaging video or mini shoot during a customer’s session helps you connect with prospective clients. Be sure to get the customer’s permission before filming and uploading.

Depending on your budget you can hire a salon marketing agency to produce and edit the video for you. Otherwise, you can ask a friend to record the video with a later model smartphone.

Upload it to social media and on your salon’s website. This marketing idea is sure to impact your conversion rates of website visitors into new clients.

Campaigns And Loyalty Programs

Referral Discounts

Try offering referral and loyalty discounts. For example: refer 1 new customer and get 20% off your next appointment.

Or consider teaming up with local businesses for referral schemes. For example: refer 1 new customer to (name of salon) and get 20% off goods at (name of local business).

A ‘refer-a-friend program is an inexpensive marketing tactic for a salon with a small marketing budget. This salon marketing idea is great for retaining current clients while using them to bring in new ones.

Loyalty Programs

To keep customers, it is important to make them feel appreciated. Show your clients that you value their loyalty to your salon through loyalty programs. For example: After 10 appointments, give customers a discount on the 11th.

Or consider giving long-time customers the original price when the prices of your salon services increase. Let them know this is because you value their loyalty.

Maintaining customer loyalty is important in business, and a hair salon can easily capitalize on this. 

Salon SMS Campaigns

This marketing idea guarantees that your messages will get seen. SMS marketing makes it easy to set up salon campaigns for each season, holiday, special event, or promotion. It’s also useful for making product recommendations to bolster sales.

Have an open slot due to a cancellation? Use SMS to quickly let your customers know.

Expressing gratitude deepens relationships and encourages customers to continue spending with you. So consider using text message marketing to say, “thank you for being a great client“ to your customers.

No other marketing tool offers the same rate. This puts SMS marketing among the most effective ways to get your salon marketing messages to clients.

Events And Promotions

Host An Event In The Salon

A fun marketing idea that gets your name out there is to host an event in your salon. A little publicity goes a long way, and hosting events is a good way to publicize your salon.

You can try hosting pamper parties for charity, for a birthday, or bachelorette. This exposes your salon to potential customers and helps you bond with current clients.

One can also invite local businesses to borrow your salon when hosting their events. This exposes new people to the existence of your salon.

Take advantage of special days like client’s anniversaries, birthdays, Mother’s Day, Black Friday, New Years’, and Christmas. These are ideal times to host functions in your salon or to invite local businesses to do so. For example:

• For a Mother’s day event give a discount of 20% off for all mother’s hair spas.
• For Valentine’s and proms try offering teen clients a free manicure with every haircut. This guarantees an increase in customer traffic into your salon at these times.
• For customers’ birthdays and anniversaries try offering free blow dry or facial with their hair appointment. This will make them feel valued and special.
• For Black Friday, offer a free blow-dry with facial and hair appointments. This tends to attract women in their mid 20’s.

Run Time-Sensitive Promotions

For promotions to be intriguing they need to be time-sensitive, exclusive, or limited in supply. For example, you can hire a B2B PR firm to run a promotion for ’one week only’ where new clients receive a gift card or discount.

No salon owner wants to lose profit by giving too many discounts. The solution is to offer more than one service as a package, only available for a limited time. Then include the discount in the package.

Be sure to make your promotion sound so attractive that people don’t want to pass it up. When they learn about the promotion they should say to themselves “Oh my gosh, this is only available until X time. I have to get this.”

Local Ads And Community Outreach

Advertise Locally

Although we live in a digital era, newspapers, magazines, and other print publications are still among the top marketing ideas.

Salon owners can pay for a listing or an ad in the next issue or on their websites. Be sure to include the unique features of your salon. E.g. your selfie area.

Local papers love local stories. So if you have an intriguing and relevant story there is a high chance they’ll feature you and your salon. Tell the story of how your salon started or why you offer particular types of services the competition does not.

Maybe you have an expert grasp of a particular beauty topic. Why not ask to write an article for their blog and ask for a link back to your website in exchange.

Teach A Class Or Workshop

Teaching a class or workshop boosts the image of your salon and adds to the overall personality of your brand in the community.

You could host the classes or workshop in your salon. As well as partner with local colleges and community centers to offer grooming and beauty classes.

Here are a few tips for grooming classes/ beauty workshop:

• Teach a braiding or easy up-do class for at-home styling
• Teach a ’Single Fathers workshops’ to help single dads learn how to style and care for their little girl’s hair
• Teach a shaving and grooming class for teenage boys

Ending thoughts on the most efficient salon marketing ideas you need to try 

These salon marketing ideas are sure to help you retain existing customers and attract new ones.

Use a combination of these marketing strategies to maximize the reach of your advertising efforts. Be sure to take advantage of the many low-budget marketing ideas available.

Once your brand’s personality is consistent and stands out from the crowd, your salon will experience growth. Diligently use each salon marketing idea to grow your salon business. Keep at it and you will succeed.

If you enjoyed reading this article on salon marketing ideas, you should also read this one about salon slogans.

We also wrote articles about similar subjects like salon designs, salon hashtags, beauty salon logo examples, salon mission statement examples, and about writing a salon price increase notice.