In the competitive salon and day spa industry, marketing can either make or break your business. That’s why it is so important to have continuous, effective marketing in place. The spa industries fluctuate from season to season and a good marketing strategy can help you make more during the good times and get through the down times. Check out these fresh marketing ideas to jump start and keep your business going.
1. Refresh Your Website
Have you done a website update or refresh lately? You might want to look at your site if you haven’t recently. It’s important to make sure your website is up to date with the latest trends and correct information, because this will become a high traffic area for potential customers.
Mobile Friendly
Recent studies have shown that more than half of digital traffic online now comes from mobile devices and through mobile apps. If you don’t have a mobile friendly website, you could be missing out on a significant number of clients. The benefits of a mobile friendly site are endless:
- Streamlined experience across devices
- Positive ranking signal
- Faster download speed
- Improved user experience
- More flexible and cost-effective than app development
By optimizing your website to be mobile-friendly in formatting and content, your SEO content will be more effective, and your site will rank higher in search results when possible customer search using your keywords and phrases in their search.
Online Booking
Anyone running a business that relies on scheduling customers knows how painful managing appointments over the phone can be. An online system that allows clients to book, cancel, or reschedule online makes the process much easier.
Online booking is available 24/7 so customers can book whenever it’s convenient for them. They don’t have to deal with the time and frustration of being put on hold or leaving a message when calling your spa. Instead, they can quickly see appointment availability when they need it.
Linking to an external website can seem like a simple and affordable solution. However, those are pretty much the only advantages – and it can be inexpensive. With an online booking tool on your own site, both branding and user experience can remain consistent throughout the entire process. Your customers only interact with your company, not someone else’s.
Opening Hours and Pricing
When people are coming to your website, they are coming to look for more information. If you don’t have your hours and pricing on your website, there’s a good chance they will look elsewhere for a spa that does have it on their website. Why? Because it is convenient!
We’ve talked about in previous articles, taking away the extra effort from customers by making small changes. Adding hours and pricing to your website is quite simple and an easy fix to taking away an extra step from customers and keeping up with your competitors.
2. Organic and Paid Traffic
Organic traffic converts visitors who arrive to your site via search engines – without you directly paying for this pathway. By clicking on organic listings that appear in search engine results pages, users are trafficked to your website through their own natural initiatives. Whereas paid traffic from search engines arrives to websites when a user clicks on an advertisement placed on a SERP for a given search term. This ad is created and paid for by a company seeking to appear first in search engines. Let’s dive into paid and organic ideas that your spa should be using!
Business Profiles
There are a few different profiles that are important to have for your business. One of the most important and easiest ones to set up is your Google My Business (GMB) Profile.
Google My Business provides you with the ability to list your business location on Google Maps and local search results. You can display important information about your business, including the opening/closing times, contact details and/or a link to your website. More recently, Google has also released a new feature allowing you to post a link to articles or upcoming events.
How to Optimize Your Google My Business Page
After you’ve set up and claimed a GMB page for your business, the next step is to include as much information as possible on your GMB listing as possible. The way people search is changing, and information needs to be accessible instantly. If you haven’t set an accurate business address, then it won’t be easy for people to physically find you. If your business isn’t easy to find, then people will go somewhere which is. It’s as simple as that.
Add Posts to your Google My Business
To add a post, all you have to do is go to your GMB account and create a new post. You will be able to upload an image, write up to 300 words of text or an event title, which should include the start/end date.
The post option gives you great flexibility to promote events, share your content and promote your products or services, highlighting when you are running special offers. The post will last for 7 days before you will need to replace it with a new post. Google will email you a reminder to do this.
Social Media Profiles
A 2018 study by Hootsuite tested the SEO results of articles with and without social promotion. Their results? Pieces with top social shares received a 22% boost during the experiment. What does that mean? That social profiles do play a role in your search rankings!
In fact, social media profiles are often amongst the top results in search listings for brand names. Social channels can clearly feel more personal than web pages, and they are a great way to get a sense of a company’s personality before you even provide your service.
3. Customer Review and Testimonials
If you are not putting time into receiving and responding to reviews, boy are you missing out! 90% of shoppers read at least one online review before deciding to visit a business. If you don’t have a good number of reviews, and positive ones at that, you can bet your potential customers are going to other spas.
Getting More Reviews
There are a few different ways that your business can get more reviews and they mainly involve reaching out to current and past customers. Consider sending an email to customers after they make a purchase. You’re most likely to get a review when the purchase is still top of mind. You could even offer a reward to customers that do leave you a review. For example, send out an email stating if they leave a review, they’ll receive 10% off their next appointment!
This may seem obvious but give them a reason to leave a review! It may be something as simple as writing a personalized thank you note, but that gesture will go a long way in making your customers feel appreciated.
Where to Ask Customers to Leave Reviews
Businesses should strive to get business reviews on business review websites that are going concerns, review sites that people know about and that are relatively friction-less. These are sites that customers are familiar with and that potential customers will see. The top three sites you should be focusing on include:
- Google My Business
- Yelp
Why not just ask for reviews on a business’s website? Well, asking customers to leave a review on a business’s website seems a lot more inauthentic and unknown than simply asking consumers to leave reviews on a trusted and known review site.
Bonus – Email Marketing – It’s Not Dead!
Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to reach and engage your audience. Using email, you can attract and retain customers with personalized messages that promote your content, brand, and product. You can segment contacts and use personalization techniques to deliver messages that customers can’t ignore.
Driving traffic to your website
With email marketing campaigns, you can send users to your website. Along with your email content provide CTAs (Call-to-Action’s) within the emails that take the users to your website. These CTAs could lead users to your contact, sign up, or download page where the users engage and take actions.
Email campaigns are inexpensive
Creating email campaigns is cost-effective. It’s not like paid advertising where you have to pay for every click. Through emails you can present your products or services to your customers without paying for it.
Creating email campaigns also doesn’t take that long. You can spend a day creating content for your emails. Then set up a schedule for sending them out in the future. By doing so you don’t have to keep creating various messaging or spend time sending it to every lead.
We know this can be a lot of information to take in! That’s why the experts at Blue Atlas are always here to help. The marketing world is constantly changing and can be quite competitive! Which is why it’s so important to keep fresh marketing ideas constantly flowing through your business. If you need some help managing these tasks or just have some questions give us a call! We are here to help!
