Like all businesses, hair and beauty salons compete with each other. But the right salon promotional ideas can break that balance. As a salon owner, you could lose customers if you can’t find a way to become better known or stand out. You won’t be able to gain new ones either.
Salon promotional ideas allow new people to visit your salon and old customers to keep coming back. Some of them include offering referral discounts, networking at events, giving away promotional items, and launching Facebook ads. You can also contact a salon marketing company to help you out.
If you’re new to the concept, we can show you how to get started. This article covers some of the best salon advertising ideas that you can try.
Best Salon Marketing Ideas to Try
There are many salon marketing ideas that a business can use to get its name out there. To ensure that you get the best results, we’ll be curating the most effective methods for you. Some of these marketing ideas include:
Referral Discounts
When a hair salon does a good job for its current clients, those clients are always eager to recommend them. They’ll tell their friends, their family, and their neighbors, bringing many potential clients to the beauty salon. However, this process takes time, especially when there’s nothing in it for the customer.
As a salon owner, you can speed up this process by offering referral discounts. This salon promotional idea could come in many forms, such as $10 off the customer’s next visit. When you do this, you encourage your customers to bring in new clients.
Network at Local Events
There’s always a place for word-of-mouth marketing in an era where online marketing is prevalent. Instead of posting ads on your social media channels all the time, you could personally go into town. Parties, yard sales, and other social events make the best locations to meet new clients.
When you meet these new people, you can make small talk and then ease into the services that you offer. You can then offer them your business card, take their email addresses, or use other salon marketing ideas. If you can’t make this habit, then try to do it at least once a month.
Start a Loyalty Program
Customers, especially returning customers, appreciate being recognized. It would be bad if you treated 3-year-long salon clients like people who visited your salon for the first time. Treat them differently, much better than your newer salon clients; this is the essence of the loyalty program.
Loyalty programs are a great salon promotion idea as they foster loyalty in your older customers. You can do this by offering discounts on every visit, offering them promotional merchandise, or any other special treatment. Just make them understand that you care about them and appreciate their longtime patronage of your hair services.
Contribute to Community Projects
This is one of my favourite salon marketing ideas, as it doesn’t involve much marketing. All you need to do as an actual store owner is to participate in these community events wholeheartedly.
It speaks volumes when members of the community see you participating in Mother’s Day community celebrations. If it’s not yet Mother’s Day, you could volunteer at the local schools or the veteran’s home.
Register with Yelp
Yelp is a mobile app that makes it easier to spot local businesses and discover the services that they offer. As the owner of a local salon, Yelp should be part of your marketing strategy. Get your business registered, take a picture of your storefront, and encourage your salon clients to leave good online reviews.
You might be wondering, “Who uses Yelp these days?” Yelp, on the other hand, is the salon software for advertising to millennials. Approximately 90 million users of this software are smartphone owners, a big chunk of whom are millennials.
So, if you’ve been looking for good hair salon marketing ideas, Yelp is a good place to start. It’s one of the few hair salon marketing ideas that won’t cost much but still remains effective.
Give Away Promotional Items
Everyone loves free stuff, regardless of whether they’re going to use it. When they see these things in their homes days later, they tend to remember the person who gave them to them.
This is what makes promotional items one of the most effective salon marketing strategies. Its effects are doubled when the promotional items are branded to reflect the salon.
As such, you should get your hands on items that you can offer to your salon clients. It could be a mousepad, a pen, a notebook, a coffee mug, or other simple items.
Promotional items don’t have to be expensive to work. However, you need to choose items that your clients are more likely to use. This way, they can remember your hair salon whenever they do so.
Create Geo-Targeted Ads
Sometimes, salon promotional ideas have gone awry when a New Jersey customer tries to book an appointment in a Washington salon. This is the case when local businesses invest in Facebook ads and Google ads, without a geotarget. These advertising ideas would be ineffective because they would attract more clients who would not be able to visit.
What good are potential clients who won’t become new salon clients? So always ensure that your ads are geo-targeted to your location and other areas in the vicinity.
Ask Your Customers to Leave Reviews
There’s nothing wrong with shamelessly soliciting salon reviews; after all, you’re a business owner. In this age, where online shopping is slowly taking over, online reviews are becoming very important. Most online shoppers are willing to use a service or a product when the reviews are more positive than negative.
So, you should encourage your current clients to leave a positive (and honest) review for you online. They could do this on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. If you’ve got a Trustpilot page, you can also tell them to leave reviews for you there.
Advertise with Your Works
Many hair salons have magazines lying around for when customers visit. This makes it easier for the customers to pick what hairstyle they want to try.
Well, you can turn this salon service into good marketing for a hair salon. Simply replace the generic hairstyles with styles created by you or your staff. This way, when your salon customers visit, they’ll be going through styles you’ve personally handled.
This is a salon marketing idea that’ll instill more confidence in your customers. Salon clients are more confident when you’ve got experience with a hairstyle than when you’re a total newbie.
You can also go the extra mile with this advertising idea and post these pictures on social media. This will show the world what your hair salon is capable of and get more customers interested.
Start a Salon Blog
If you’ve got a salon website, owning a blog could be a great way to generate leads for your website. Blogs can also help you establish yourself, and by extension, your website, as an authority on many things. Owning a blog these days is easy and free too; you can even start with the Blogger platform.
Now, the next part is setting up things to blog about. There are many things that you can blog about in the beauty industry. You can pick some from the list below:
- You can provide tutorials on hair styling.
- You can also offer advice on how to care for the hair.
- Offer 5-minute hair styling tips.
- Recommend beauty products that people should use.
- Offer skincare advice.
Use Social Media Hashtags
I am sure that we’ve all had some experience with using and creating hashtags on social media platforms. Hashtags are phrases that people tie to various topics and issues on social media platforms. When other people click such phrases, it links them to that topic.
Simply put, you can use hashtags as one of your marketing tools for your salon promotions. So, whenever you upload a new hairstyle from your salon on social media, you can create a hashtag for it. You can then spread this hashtag to your followers on social media.
You can also print this hashtag on store merchandise or even put it on your store windows. Many salon clients will see these relevant local hashtags as an easier way to connect with you on social media.
Hire the Services of an Influencer
If you’re not popular enough to get your business name online, you can hire someone who’s popular to do it. Influencer marketing isn’t anything new, but the numbers have shown that it’s nonetheless effective.
Search for a social media influencer that would best advertise your hair salon. It’s best to choose influencers with content relating to what you do or people whom your target audience is interested in. So, it wouldn’t make sense to choose an influencer that talks about guns when your target audience doesn’t watch gun shows.
You could also make this more effective by doing your influencer’s hair, painting their nails, etc. This way, your audience will see what you are capable of when the influencer brings their attention to it.
Offer Local Coupons
Online coupons are a familiar concept for online shoppers, as they allow them to get discounts. Coupons are not meant for only online use, however, as you can still use them locally. Everyone enjoys discounts whenever they can get them, so offering local discounts will bring customers.
You can share these coupons with your salon receptionist or through your local newspapers. You can also put the coupons in the magazines that your clients read when they visit your salon. Even though it’s not online, an offline coupon still works to find a salon promotional idea.
Allow Your Customers to Make Online Reservations
The internet has brought about many changes to the salon business scene. One of these prominent changes exists in the area of making reservations. Instead of new clients meeting a salon receptionist to book, they can do this online through an online reservation system.
This is one of the best salon promotional ideas around, as it offers a lot of convenience to clients. This way, they don’t have to waste time visiting hair salons when they can make their reservations online. In the end, a potential client will prefer online booking to physically visiting other local businesses.
Ask Your Customers to Leave Their Email Address
Email marketing is an effective advertising technique, and the stories of its success are everywhere. The hardest part of this marketing strategy is collecting viable customer email addresses. Once you’ve gotten your hands on these email addresses, it’s smooth sailing from there.
You can use email addresses to send messages and other marketing information to your customers. You can send coupons through email addresses, generate sale appointment reminders, or even send a birthday message. With an email address, you can invite new clients to visit you whenever they wish to get a haircut.
Record Yourself Working and Upload It on Instagram
Social media offers some of the best marketing ideas for small businesses. It offers a low-cost yet effective medium for advertising with a wide audience.
These days, people upload pictures or videos of whatever they are doing on Instagram or other social media platforms. They upload videos of getting their kids ready for school, making meals, or even doing something as mundane as going to work. The most popular videos these days are how-to videos.
These videos show you how to get things done, from mowing your lawn to repairing your roof. How-to videos are the guilty pleasure of many internet users, as it’s very relaxing to watch an expert at work. Even though most people won’t try those videos in real life, they’ll acknowledge the instructor’s capabilities.
Such videos are some of the best salon advertising ideas out there. With these videos, you can show your skill in the beauty business. You can show potential clients how to style their hair, how to cut it expertly, and other beauty skills.
Utilise Facebook Targeted Advertising
Facebook is the most popular social media platform worldwide, with the highest number of users–more than 2 billion. Salon owners who are looking for more clients can never go wrong with this social media platform. It’s the perfect place to find users of all ages, from kids to teens to adults.
Facebook is well aware of its advertising potential, which is why it provides numerous services geared toward it. One of these advertising ideas is their targeted advertising service. This service allows salon owners and even podiatrists to find their target audience by interest.
With this salon advertising idea, you can set the location in which you want your ads to appear. You’ll be able to set the desired demographics for this ad, such as age, gender, job title, and other features.
This ad service also allows salon owners to target their audience based on their purchase behaviour and device usage. There’s also an option to include people based on their hobbies and interests. This way, your ad will be shown to individuals that have a higher chance of patronising you.
Start a Flash Sale
One of the hair promotion ideas that you should try is a flash sale. A flash sale is just a regular discount that’s offered on a product or service. Unlike regular discounts, however, flash sales are only available for a short period of time.
This short availability is what makes them special, as people take notice of things that’ll expire in no time. After all, it makes sense to pay attention to a discount that will expire in minutes rather than one that will not.
If you’re a new business, flash sales are an interesting way to get your name out there. While they aren’t perfect for creating loyal salon clients, they’ll make people visit your salon. When new clients come, you can work on making them loyal clients.
Flash sales don’t necessarily require you to own a website, as social media platforms work just fine. You can try your flash sales on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram—wherever you have a good audience.
Offer Birthday Promotions
Who doesn’t enjoy receiving gifts on their birthday? I know I do. These days, it’s customary for banks, social media platforms, and other institutions to send birthday messages. So, it’s not that special anymore.
If you want your beauty business to stand out, you’ll need to be different. One way to do this is through a birthday offer. So, ask your salon clients what their birthdays are and send them personalised offers on their birthdays.
Besides being a way to offer exceptional customer service, you’ll also gain loyal customers. Birthday offers can include free sessions on their birthday or discounts on their usual haircuts.
You could also go a step further and decorate your shop when they visit or sing them a birthday song. Birthday promotions are very vast and can involve a lot of things, so get creative. It all works as long as you show your salon client that you care.
Offer Business Cards
Business cards are one of the oldest tricks in the book, as they were popular during the pre-internet era. A mistake that many business owners make is to ignore this marketing idea in the present. Offering business cards to potential clients is one of the best marketing ideas for a salon.
These cards should contain useful information like your business name, your mobile number, and your salon’s address. Make sure they are also well-designed, as no one wants to accept an unappealing card.
Host Client Appreciation Events
A client appreciation event is nothing more than a mini-party where you show your salon clients that you care. Every great business got to its current point because of its customers. So, it’s only natural to say “thank you” in some way.
There are many ways to host a client appreciation event, and some of them include:
- Offering gourmet snacks or drinks after a haircut.
- Offering free tutorials to customers on simple ways to style their hair.
- Hosting a little dinner where you invite your loyal customers.
- Engaging in wellness events, such as hiking, yoga, or meditation seminars, with your clients.
Client appreciation events are some of the best salon promotional ideas out there, as they improve the business-to-client connection. This free service also strengthens the reputation of your hair salon, allowing it to gain some renown in your locality.
Partner with a Charity
Funding a charity or partnering with one has always been one of the most humanitarian things around. Doing it always gets the approval of the public, and that’s why it’s one of the best salon promotional ideas.
So, as a small business owner, you can contact a local charity and express your decision to partner with them. This would get your business name out there, and you might even make the local news. You can partner with your local charities for a fundraiser, a bake sale, or other events that they might have.
Final Thoughts
If you want to stand out from the competition, you’ve got to make your salon stand out from the crowd. There are many salon advertising ideas that you can try, and this article covers some of them. Don’t make the mistake of only sticking to online methods, as offline methods are still effective today.
Whether you’re a local business or a modern salon with an online presence, this article will serve you well. From the many options on our list, you’ll be able to find some salon promotion ideas that will work for you. If you want to know which salon promotional ideas are best for you, contact us for 15 minutes discovery call.
FAQ
How Do I Promote My Salon with Salon Marketing?
You can promote your salon by using an online reservation system, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and other ad services. You can use hashtags to tag your salon services on social media platforms and offer promotional items to your customers. There are many salon promotional ideas you can use, and this article covers most of them.
How Can My Salon Marketing Idea Make My Salon Stand Out?
Your salon marketing idea can make your salon stand out by drawing the attention of customers. It’ll make people who haven’t tried your salon services want to do so. It’ll also announce you on social media, cementing your image as an expert.
What Salon Promotional Idea Will Make My Customers Happy?
Many salon promotional ideas can make your customers happy, like promotional items, discounts, and birthday coupons. You could also host a client appreciation event to show your clients that you care about their patronage.
If you can host a flash sale on Twitter, why not? It’ll make many potential customers happy.
How Do I Upsell My Salon Service?
You can upsell your salon service in many ways, and one of them is by offering discounts and other promotions. You can also offer referral discounts for new customers and start a loyalty program. Nothing upsells a hair salon like a loyalty program that allows you to enjoy perks for visiting regularly.
What Are the Top 5 Salon Promotional Ideas for Local Businesses?
The top 5 promotional ideas for local businesses include participating in community activities and partnering with a charity. You can also offer promotional items, host client appreciation events, and get registered on Yelp. All of these services and activities will undoubtedly raise the profile of any local salon.
