Beauty Salon Marketing

A friend of mine is a business consultant who works with some of the biggest companies in the world. He taught me a simple trick to make planning (marketing planning or business planning) much more effective…

Start at the end and work backwards.

Remember those puzzle books you had as a child - where you have to draw a route through a complicated maze? I remember one, where Winnie the Pooh was outside the maze, and his jar of “Hunney” was at the centre - “Help Hungry Winnie get to his Hunney!”

There’s a trick to solving the maze quickly. If you start from the outside, you go down many false starts and dead-ends before you find the right route. But if you start at the centre and work your way out, you’ll often get it right first time.

So how do we apply that to creating a marketing plan, or business plan, for your salon or spa? Let’s use a simplified example to illustrate the process.

After the Christmas rush, January and February are often quiet periods for many salons. So let’s imagine that you want to run a promotion for Valentine’s Day to get some new customers.

Now let’s make it more specific (adapt the numbers to suit your salon or spa business). Let’s say something like, “I want my salon’s Valentine’s Day Offer promotion to bring in 10 new customers in the week before February 14th.”

Now ask yourself, “What would have to have happened, just before that, for that to be true?”

Take one step backwards from your end goal - how many enquiries would you need, to generate 10 new client-bookings? Let’s say that, on average, you convert two-thirds of the new-client enquiries you get into confirmed bookings in your salon. That means you would need to generate 15 enquiries, to get 10 bookings.

How far in advance do new clients make bookings? Let’s say it’s two weeks. So, to get 10 new bookings for the week before Valentine’s Day, you need around 15 new enquiries in the last week of January and the first week of February.

Now ask yourself the question again, “What would have to have happened, just before that, to generate 15 new enquiries around the beginning of February?”

Take another step backwards from your end goal - what marketing and advertising methods could you use to generate 15 new enquiries? Let’s say you’ve used leaflet distribution before, and on average you got a 2% response rate - two people phoned you, for every 100 leaflets you sent out. So, to get 15 people phoning you, you need to send out 750 leaflets.

And let’s say that those enquiries from your door drop would come in over a week, from the day the flyers were first pushed through your potential customers’ doors. To get 15 enquiries around the beginning of February, you need to send out 750 leaflets in the third week of January (roughly speaking).

Now ask yourself the question again, “What would have to have happened, just before that, for me to be able to send out 750 Valentine’s Day Offer promotion leaflets in the third week of January?”

How long does your printer need to print those leaflets and deliver them to you? How far in advance do you need to book the leaflet distribution service? How long will it take you to put your offer together, write the leaflet, design and lay it out, run it past trusted friends to see what they think, refine and correct it… and so on. Keep working backwards, and repeating the question, until you get to the start - the day you need to start planning and preparing for the promotion.

Phew, sounds exhausting just thinking about it all! But once you’ve tried the process a couple of times, you’ll soon get the hang of it. For promotions like this, we recommend our Toolkit owners start preparing about 4 weeks in advance (though, of course, they have the advantage of having a library of pre-written, tried and tested adverts). For a big event, like getting things organised for the Christmas rush, we recommend they start preparing 8 weeks in advance.

The advantage of using this method - starting at the end and working backwards - is that you are much more likely to get a realistic marketing plan for your promotions, with important steps and deadlines clearly laid out in a realistic, achievable time-frame.

It’s a lot easier for Winnie the Pooh to get to his “Hunney” when he has a clear, step-by-step map!