In order to achieve success in today’s world, it is imperative for spa businesses to make use of digital marketing channels to establish a successful spa brand. Without digital marketing, spas and salons will struggle to gain new clients, keep current clients interested and will begin to fall behind their competitors and the general digital world that evolves every day.

Digital marketing has endless benefits for spas and salons and today we are going to walk you through 4 useful forms that will help you and your spa!

Social Media Marketing

A social media presence is of paramount importance. With more than a billion social users, it provides a platform for significant visibility for a wide range of customers. Social media platforms provide an outlet for creativity and brand awareness that will have the attention of your target audience. Let’s continue to dive into why social media marketing is so important for your spa and salon:

You Get to Tell Your Story and Spread Brand Awareness

Having a business online presence on any of the social media platforms, like Facebook or Instagram, is a great way to interact with your target audience. It allows you to really connect with them on a personal level, as well as allowing them to become aware of what your brand represents.

Potential clients and even current clients will be able to better understand your brand and story behind your salon or spa. They can see your strengths, what you have to offer and most importantly they can interact with you! It’s a way for you to creatively build and spread your brand on the biggest platforms available!

Without social media, you miss out on reaching hundreds to thousands of potential clients! Social media should not only be a suggestion for your spa but a necessity!

You Can Learn About Your Competitors

We know that we can use social media to boost our own brand and business! However, don’t forget you can also use it to learn about and keep up with your competition!

Facebook Audience Insights and Twitter Analytics can give you some good insights into which other brands your audience follows on these social networks. When you find potential competitors that are doing well – you can take a dive into what they are doing. What kind of posts are they creating? What is their engagement like? How are they interacting with customers on social? You can find much of this information just by clicking around your competition’s social profiles.

Now that you’ve gathered all that data, it’s time to analyze it in a way that helps you understand where you stand compared to the competition. A SWOT analysis is a great tool to help you think clearly about all this information. In a SWOT analysis, you take a hard look at your business and the competition to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. This all allows you to analyze how to compete with your top competitors!

Google AdWords Advertising

Digital marketing is all about reaching potential customers in the right place with the right message at the right time. Using an advertising platform can help you to achieve this, but it can also be a huge waste of money if your campaign is using irrelevant keywords or reaching the wrong audience. So, let’s make sure you know how it works and the benefits.

Google AdWords is a pay-per-click online advertising platform that allows advertisers to display their ads on Google’s search engine results page. Based on the keywords that you want to target; businesses pay to get their advertisements ranked at the top of the search results page. Since the platform runs on pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, you have to pay only when a visitor clicks your ad. The Google AdWords marketplaces work like an auction where people bid for clicks. Apart from money, Google also considers the quality score to ensure that the people clicking on the ads will have the best possible experience if they do decide to take action.

If you don’t have the expertise, it can be hard to navigate which is why Blue Atlas is here to help if you need it! Now, let’s go over some more benefits if you aren’t convinced enough yet.

 Google Ads Are Faster Than SEO

This is arguably the biggest advantage of using Google AdWords to reach your audience. Launching PPC ads,  you’ll start to see the results immediately. Having a SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategy is always a good idea, no matter how big or small your business is, but it takes a good amount of time.  Search advertising helps to bridge the gap between organic SEO and a social media campaign, aka Google AdWords, by bringing in immediate traffic and helping you to reach your audience instead of having to wait long periods of time for your keywords to actually start ranking.

AdWords Are 100% Measurable And Scalable

One of the biggest benefits of running a Google AdWords campaign is that, like most aspects of digital marketing, it’s fully measurable. This becomes even more powerful when you combine Google AdWords with analytics and other tools.

AdWords being measurable is so important because you can keep track of whether or not your campaign is being effective. For example, while driving traffic to your business website is a step in the right direction, it doesn’t achieve anything unless people are actually taking action. You can achieve a high click-through rate and a low bounce rate, but your advertising campaign won’t mean anything unless you also achieve a high conversion rate. This also means that you can scale your spending up or down based on how well your campaign is performing!

Email Marketing

Did you know? Email marketing can be a powerful tool for your salon and spa when used to its full potential. Well, now you do! So, let’s get started on boosting your open rates and increasing your salon revenue!

Today, in a day and age when salon customers are bombarded with marketing messages from every direction, you might think email marketing isn’t something that you want to focus on. However, email marketing still holds strong. It is important to have a strategy and content in place that your customers and prospects want to read. Trust me, they will open it and they will take action

So how can you boost your open rate and increase your revenue with email marketing? Let’s take a look:

Personalization: 

Personalized marketing is a powerful way to engage your customers. They don’t want to just be another email address on your checklist. How do you make them feel special, like you’re talking to just them? Well, a really easy solution is to include their name. How easy right! Since our names are connected to self-perception and identity, we as consumers become more engaged and trusting of the messaging where our name appears. Studies reveal that emails with a personalized subject line are 26% more likely to be opened. Here’s a few quick tips to make your email list a little more personable:

• Add your subscriber’s first name to the email content or subject line. For example, Hey John Doe….
• Email your subscribers on their birthdays. Everybody loves a freebie or a celebratory message!
• Thank clients for purchasing a product or send out personalized messages if you haven’t seen a client in a while. It will let them know you are thankful for having them as a client or just show that you are thinking of them.

List Segmentation:

One thing we’ve noticed is that most salons and spas tend to get a little lax and rely on the same designed email for all clients. It’s time you get a bit creative in this approach. The more you tailor your content to different lifestyles and demographics, the more your services will resonate with your email subscribers. This also leads to high open and click-through rates. You can create different layouts and content for several different personas that you often see in your clients. You can then create separate emails for each persona! You can use the email software you use to analyze previous open rates, design, etc., and make changes from there.

Automated Campaigns: 

Automated campaigns will make your life much easier in the future. You won’t have to worry about reminding yourself to send out that email on Tuesday at 11 AM, because it will already be scheduled. This helps in keeping your business in front of customers without too much effort on your part when you are busy running your spa or salon. A good practice would be to automate a few campaigns in the software. Create scenarios that will enhance your relationship with the client such as a welcome email, feedback after an appointment, birthday, and ‘we miss you’ emails, if you haven’t seen a client for more than 60 days. Once it’s automated, there really isn’t much else you have to do!

Website Design

Strong branding and polished website design have been key players in a successful digital marketing campaign for years now, and they still definitely are! According to Google, it only takes users 50 milliseconds to form a first impression of your website and that first impression can be just the beginning of future successful marketing efforts. A strong website design can set the first impression for visitors, benefit SEO campaigns, help build trust, encourage users to convert, allow brands to stand out among competitors and so much more.

Builds Trust in the Brand

Having strong, unique, and engaging visuals that tie in with user experience and your audience are all ways your website’s design can help build trust within your audience and potential clients.

If a site looks outdated, is confusing or deceiving, or simply isn’t easy for the eye to follow, the trust between your spa or salon and a potential client will be lost and the conversion rate will drop drastically. Guiding a user through the site with clear bolded headings that stick out, call to action statements and buttons leaves the user feeling that your business knows what they are doing and can help build and enhance the trust between yourself and potential clients. Remember, you want a clean looking website that still follows your brand! If you go off brand, this can be with colors or text styles, you may confuse potential clients.

SEO Campaigns

If you are doing any sort of SEO efforts involving  your website you know there are important SEO factors to consider. Google is now acknowledging 3 very important metrics to pay attention to that all tie back into your website.

• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – the amount of unexpected layout shift of visual content on a page
• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)– the time it takes for a page’s content to load
• First Input Delay (FID)– the time it takes for a page to become interactive

These are all things Google is looking for in their top ranking pages, so you should also look to invest in improving your websites loading times.

Additional factors website design can have an impact on and can contribute to supporting your SEO efforts you’ll find in Google Analytics include:

• Time On Page – how long a user spends on a page
• Bounce Rate – the rate at which a user lands on a page and does not interact with it and leaves
• Conversion Rate – the percentage of users who visit the site and convert

Each of these metrics are important to track and measure when focusing on your website design. Within many SEO campaigns you should be trying to target specific keywords or phrases to bring users to your spa or salons webpage.

Conclusion

Digital marketing is no longer just a suggestion when it comes to your salon or spa, it is a necessity. Digital marketing efforts and techniques can boost revenue and brand awareness through the roof if you know what techniques to use and how to use them. With the combination of social media marketing, email marketing, Google AdWords and website design, your salon or spa should start seeing a significant change in your brand awareness, revenue and clients. If you need help with any digital marketing techniques or simply have a question, our experts at Blue Atlas are ready to help. Give us a call (888)-266-7153!