marketing tips
How to really boost your Salon Website
Are you still stuffing your salon website articles with as many keywords as possible to get high traffic and higher rankings on search engines?
If your answer is yes, then let me tell you something very important. When you just focus on keywords and not on the quality of your articles, then the desired results will most certainly elude you.
Here is how to boost your web presence by imposing quality content in your website:
- Good web copy engages your visitors and turns them into customers! At the very least it will turn them into loyal visitors who will visit your website again and again. It is very advisable to not recycle content from brochures, mission statements, other printed marketing material. The message on print material is focused on your company and not your target audience. A good salon or spa website should not just be about YOU, instead it should be about YOUR CLIENTS and how you can help them.
- Make your articles relevant to the products and services you provide. Don’t fill your articles with fluff and unnecessary information that will only end up distracting your clients. The title of your article should always be in sync with your article. For example, if your latest article is about the Spring and Summer Hair Styles, then include content that describes these styles. Arrange the write-up in a proper structure and make sure that your readers can easily find out what they are looking for.
- Be sure that your website is not mis-selling or mis-leading. Never promise anything that you can’t deliver! Remember, your website content is the platform through which you are going to communicate with your customers. Your content, may it be videos, images or text, should be closely related to what you offer. However, it’s important that you don’t go overboard with your marketing messages.
- Always keep your website content fresh and unique. Update your website with related videos, images and articles at least a couple times a month. You can write about the new products you offer, services you added, rules and regulations, etc. For example, do your hours change during the summer months? Let your customers know about it via your website before hand. The new changes will be visible immediately and your clients can make adjustments in their own schedules.
- Your website content must be informative and easy to understand. Articles and product or service descriptions should always be written in a clear and understandable way so that the facts are conveyed to your readers very easily. If your readers are not able to make out what you are trying to say, they will not stay on your page for long. This will result in increased bounce rates and ultimately a lack of business.
5 Salon Website Tips
Your website must highlight the unique features of your salon and on how the products and services you provide will benefit your customers.
This can not be accomplished by keyword stuffing. Your website will naturally rank higher in search traffic and get more traffic if you implement the tips we outlined in this ‘How to really boost your Salon Website’ article.
If you need additional website help, don’t hesitate to call us at 320.961.4732 or click here to send us an email.
We can help you to get your salon website to rank higher!
Promote Your Business Services Online
Promoting any kind of business offline could be one of the most expensive costs as popular advertising billboards and famous TV commercials hold a large investment to market business products or services. Promoting your business online is one of the cost effective ways, and it can be done from your salon or even from the comforts of your home.
Because the ease of use and its many advantages, online promotion is increasing its popularity from day to day. To expand your local outlets and to explore your product and services, it’s important to start promoting your own business online.
These listed tips help you promote your business online:
Create a promotional blog site: Promoting your services thorough blogging is a free service and is implemented by many marketers.
Sign up for social networking sites: As social sites are extremely popular you can take advantage of them in business publications. You should include some of the popular social networking channels like Facebook, Twitter, Xanga, Digg and so on.
Write articles related to products or services: Start writing quality and informative content that is useful to your website and blog readers. You can even submit various articles on different social sites and get relevant backlinks to your site.
Use quality images: Including attractive and relevant images and putting a backlink to your website can bring lots of traffic to your site.
Make use of targeted keywords: While writing articles on blogs or for other sites to get backlink, be careful in choosing relevant and quality keyword. Research well in identifying target keywords and use them in your business promotions.
Make use of free online tools: There are many free online tools that help in promoting your business products or services online.
Here are some tips to promote your salon online for free:
- Interact in online discussion groups
- Sign up for online press releases
- Submit your articles to directories
- Make use of affiliate programming
Are you thinking about purchasing advertising space on the web? Identify the best network, if you’re thinking of buying online advertisements and get a list of your target audience. You can even consider professionals advice to attract your target audience.
If you need help promoting your online services online click here to email us or call us at 320-961-4732.
Fall Marketing Tips for Salon Websites
Fall is a great time of year to look over and make changes to your salon website.
The days are getting shorter and we spend more time indoors, searching the internet. Did you know that in the past year 76% of people searching for local businesses used an Internet search? Try searching for your own salon with Google. Does your business show up on the first page? If not, we can help you get there. We offer local SEO packages to optimize businesses like yours so you will not miss those customers looking for your salon on the Internet. Give us a call at 320.961.4732 today to find out what we can do for you.
Fall Tips for Salon Websites
Does your Salon website suffer from these common flaws?
1. Confusing and Cluttered pages – Many websites have too much information on a single page. Your salon website should be clear and easy to read. Your visitors should instantly know what your website is all about.
2. Copy is too small – This is a very common mistake made by many website developers trying to give a site a sophisticated look. We recommend text fond of 14pt or larger. Why not make the text easy to read for your visitors?
3. Lacks objective – Every page of your website should have a very clear objective. Some good examples are: prompt your visitor to make a phone call or submit an email address, give easy to follow directions to your salon or ask visitors to try a new product or style.
These are but a few of the many things that need to be addressed when designing a new website or overhauling an existing website for a salon or any other business for that matter.
Give us a call at 320.961.4732 or click here to send us a no strings attached email.
What we can do for your salon…
1. Website design and hosting
2. Local SEO to help your salon get more leads
3. Pay per click advertising – Adwords account setup and management
4. Website improvements, changes and optimization
5. Website tracking setup so you can track your salon website traffic
Remember, optimized salon websites generate free leads 24 hours a day, every day of the year!
How to make the most out of your Email List
First of all, let’s explain the term Email List - according to wikipedia, it is a special usage of email allowing distribution of information to many people. It’s a list of email addresses that your business might use to notify people of your sales and events. Many people use them to sell their products and services.
Email Marketing for Salons is another form of online marketing.
A great and easy method to use for email marketing is an email service provider like Aweber, Constant Contact, and Mail Chimp. There are many other email service providers to choose from, some are free other charge others charge a fee depending on how many emails you send, how many subscribers you have and/or how often you use the service. For a list of some of the more popular email marketing services see below.
Email Marketing Services Sign Up Form Templates
Why should you use Email Marketing?
Your email list should consist of people who are interested in what you have to offer. This provides a much more valuable advertising audience than a mass media advertising message. People are on your list because they choose to hear from you. Email marketing for your Salon or Spa may be the most powerful and underused method of online marketing available. It has the advantage of being much more personal, since the messages are being sent to individuals that already know about you.
Building your Email List
In order to make this form of online marketing work, you need to start building a list of email addresses. The more, the better! The most common way to get email addresses is having an email sign up form right on your website. All of the website services mentioned here provide the capability to create your own sign up forms along with instructions on how to add them to your website. The higher up on a web page you place your sign up form, the more people will see it.
Another great way to get your clients on your email list is to simply ask them. Have an email sign up form on your counter or separate stations and include a link to your Newsletter sign up form in all of your regular emails.
Creating your Email Messages
When setting up your email marketing campaign for your salon or spa you will usually create several follow up email messages at the same time, to be sent out automatically over a period of weeks or months, after a person signs up. This is an easy and inexpensive way to stay in contact with your clients at a regular basis.
Email marketing services also provide the ability to send what they call broadcast messages. These broadcast messages are emails that can be set up, created and sent to the email list just as follow up messages. The only difference is you sent out the broadcast message right away, usually with pertinent, time sensitive information. You might want to use broadcast messages to inform your email recipients about a local event or fundraiser, your weekly special or addition to your salon or spa.
Advantages to using Email Marketing Services
- Email marketing services will help you get your emails past spam filters.
- Provides you with a better managed email list for easier editing and searching.
- Email services offer auto responders. This makes email marketing extremely automatic and efficient.
- Many of the providers offer free email marketing webinars and online guides to help you create successful email campaigns.
Here are some of the most popular Email Marketing Services:
Aweber Communications - Sign up for just $1 for 30 days. Free learning tools.
Constant Contact - Grow with Email Marketing. Free trial.
MailChimp - Easy Email Newsletters – Get started with a free account.
Icontact – Email Marketing from Vocus
Vertical Response - Marketing for your growing business
With Email Marketing it is easy for you to connect with your clients and customers!
Facebook Offers for Your Salon or Spa
Facebook is introducing a new feature that could help your Salon or Spa get the word out about your specials, sales and promotions.
It’s called Facebook Offers!
Facebook Offers for your salon is not only important to promote your local business, it will also provide an incentive for your clients to ‘LIKE’ your Facebook Salon or Spa page. Many salons don’t understand the importance of Facebook. A business page on Facebook is basically a mini website where you tell your ‘friends’ what’s happening in your Salon on a daily basis. But that is not always enough to provide much benefit to you or your visitors. Creating an offer that appeals to your clients and potential customers can get you more ‘friends’ and ultimately more sales.
Get more friends with Facebook Offers
Do people see my promotions and offers if they are not subscribed to my Facebook page yet? No, that’s why you want to promote your Facebook page online and offline to get more people to like it. Only people who have liked your page will see your page items, including offers.
To create your Facebook offer, go to your business page and click on the “milestone, event, …+” tab on top of the status bar. This is where you normally enter text, photos, video, etc. Click on ‘offers’ and enter your description. Keep in mind, the better your offer the most likely to get responses. Make your offer extremely attractive and you might just get a huge amount of exposure.
For your clients to redeem your offers they click on the ‘Get Offer’ link in their news feed and your promotion or special sale will be emailed to the person’s primary email address. They can then print out your offer and bring it to your salon or spa.
A huge bonus to using Facebook Offers is that whenever someone clicks on your offer that persons friends will all get notified in their own news feed. Helping your salon or spa spread the word about your promotion to countless other potential clients. Friends of your business page can also share your offer by clicking on the Share Offer link underneath the story and choose a sharing option.
At the time of writing this article, Facebook offers are only available to a few local business pages. If you don’t see it on your own page yet, don’t worry, it will eventually be available to all business pages.
Have you tried Facebook Offers for your salon or clicked on someone else’s? Leave us a comment below.
5 Important Website Do’s
Many websites for salons and spas look pretty, but they fall short because the websites are poorly built and are missing important pieces. Don’t get me wrong, a visually pleasing website is nice to have. Just remember that there are other aspects that need to be considered in order for your customers to find you and successfully use your website.
Do Fill Your Salon Website With Good Content
- All content for your website should consist of relevant pictures, text, and links. It’s most important that your website consists of what your salon and spa visitors are looking for, and it must contain value to your visitor. Good content also helps give search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo more information about your business, which helps your website rank higher in search results.
Do Get Rid Of Unnecessary Clutter
- Every page on your salon website should be simple to read, with defined headers and sub-headers. Don’t overwhelm your visitors with too much information on one page. Keep in mind, simple websites are much more favored by visitors than complicated, sophisticated looking websites.
Do Have Clear Site Navigation
- A good website makes it easy for your visitors to find the content they are looking for. Clear site navigation is a result of careful planning and categorizing the website content. Your main menu should categorize the main functionality, like contact, about, services, etc. Sub pages, pages that are one level below the main pages, should categorize the information. For example, your salon or spa website might have sub categories consisting of the various services you offer.
Do Include Contact Information
- Your contact information should be included on every page, not just the contact page. If you depend on people calling, you must make your phone number very easy to see. Make your contact phone number large so it stands out and include it in as many places as possible. To make your phone number clickable for smart phones just wrap your phone number in a link like this: 
Do Optimize For Search Engines
- Your Salon and Spa website needs to be created with meaningful, unique and accurate titles on all pages and paragraphs. Your images should be include html alt tags and titles. Use hyperlinks that point to other pages within your website, like this link to our 3 Inexpensive Marketing Tips. Link to other websites that are relevant and useful to your visitor.
There’s much more to a successful website, but every salon and spa website must include these 5 Important Website Do’s.
Does your salon or spa website follow these guidelines?
Leave us a comment with a link to your website, we would love to take a look.
How to get more interaction for your Salon Facebook page
Fans of your Salon Facebook page only see your page if they interact with it. If you can’t get your fans to like and/or comment on your posts, they will stop seeing your updates in their newsfeed. Facebook algorithms keep track of what posts you like and will then show you stories it thinks you’ll be interested in. It also takes into account how much you interact with photos and videos.
The Average Facebook Page Is Only Seen by Less Than 10 Percent of Its Fans
Brian Carter from allfacebook.com shares some interesting findings:
“I was fortunate to get into a beta test program with the Facebook page analytics service PageLever and speak to founder Jeff Widman. One of the most fundamental and important revelations is that pages don’t reach many of their fans: •Posts from pages with 10,000 fans reach 30 percent to 40 percent of their fans. •Posts from pages with 100,000 fans reach 20 percent to 30 percent of their fans. •Posts from pages with 1,000,000 or more fans reach 10 percent of their fans.”
After all the time and effort you have poured into your Facebook page, this probably isn’t something you want to hear. Luckily there are a few things you can do to improve fan interaction for your Salon Facebook page.
Add regular updates to your Facebook page
The best thing you can do is to try to keep your fan base interactive with your page from the moment they LIKE your page. Post your status updates regularly and do mix it up. Add pictures, videos, questions, updates, quotes, jokes and whatever else you can think of. Tell your followers what you want them to do and ask questions. “Click like if you love this hair style!” or “If you could change one thing about your hair, what would it be?”.
Give the people what they want to see and try not to oversell your business. Only one in every four posts should be about your service or the products you sell. Learn all you can about your followers and if you’re ever in doubt about the approach your taking, ask your fans.
Newly liked Facebook pages are shown for a while, but if your fans don’t interact they will stop seeing posts from you.
How do you interact with your fans on Facebook? Please leave us a comment below.
Common Website Mistakes Salon Owners Make
A lot of Salon and Spa owners are still under the mis-conception that the more flashy and colorful their website is, the more attention and traffic they will get. Unfortunately that is only one of many common website mistakes.
You can categorize common website mistakes into 3 areas:
1. Technical Website Mistakes - Technical mistakes are certainly important, but are less common these days due to better website creation tools.
2. Graphical Website Mistakes - Graphical mistakes are more subjective and may or may not be considered mistakes, depending on who you aks.
3. Marketing Website Mistakes - Marketing mistakes are just as important as technical mistakes and need to be addressed to bring in a steady flow of traffic.
Get a great Salon Website!
Here are some tips to help you create a great website for your Salon!
Make sure your website is up to date. Not only is it a big let down for your visitors to see outdated information, it’s also harmful to your rankings on the various search engines. With a content management systems like WordPress, Joomla! and SilverStripe, just to name three of many, it’s easy to keep your website current.
Your website should be about your Salon or Spa, with your visitors foremost in mind. The website needs to contain information about your business, but it should do so in a way that applies to your visitors. Create valuable website content that addresses your visitors needs and desires, and place your business information on your ‘About’ page.
Keep your Salon site easy to use and navigate. When your visitor arrives at your website they should immediately know what they’re looking at and how to find the information they need. Since you don’t know which page your visitor will land on, all pages have to be equally important with well defined content and search options.
Capture your visitors attention with images. Once you have their attention, the next step must be clear. If you want your potential clients to read something, make it easy for them. If you want them to call you to make an appointment, make sure your phone number is prominently displayed.
Promote your website everywhere. The old method of “Build it and they will come” is not going to cut it anymore. With millions upon millions of sites available, you have to be quite clever about your marketing efforts to show up in front of your potential clients. Include your website address/URL in all of your online and offline marketing. Consider hiring a professional internet marketer to handle your pay per click advertising and Search Engine Optimization.
Always remember to call your website visitors to action and support yourself and your Salon and Spa with testimonials.
Do you currently have a website for a Salon or Spa? Please share your URL in the comment box below. We will let you know if you’re site is a great Salon website or if you could use a little re-vamping.
Video Marketing for Salons
Using Video to market your Beauty Salon is a big deal these days.
Many of your competing salons will not bother with the little bit of time and effort it takes to create a video to market your salon. They will never realize how easy it is and how many potential clients they are missing out on.
Once you know the routine on how to create successful videos and the process to maximize your results, it’s pretty quick and easy to market your salon via videos.
Here are the most vital video marketing tips and trends:
Create videos to market your Beauty Salon
Salon Videos and Search Engines Trends – Youtube is the largest video hosting website. It is estimated that 60 hours of video are uploaded on Youtube every minute! Since Youtube is part of Google, many times videos will show up among search results. Having your salon video show on the first page of a Google search result will be a huge advantage. But how do you get your video to show in search engines? Make sure you have a relevant title, good keywords and a long description of your video.
Tips for creating your salon video – With smart phones and the many choices of cameras to choose from is easier than ever to make your own videos. To get the best quality video make sure to use a camcorder though. An external microphone and tri-pod will also be a smart investment if you’re making videos on a regular basis. Having a steady picture with good sound and the right lighting is half the battle of creating a quality video. Remember to cut out the background chatter as well.
Uploading your salon video – As mentioned before, Youtube is the obvious choice, but there are many other video sharing websites to choose from. Here is a list of the most popular video hosting services: BlogTV, Dailymotion, Flickr, Hulu, Metacafe, Myspace, Photobucket, Vimeo, Wistia and Yahoo! Video. Simply create an account, include your business name, email, website, physical address and any other information your visitors might want to know about you.
After you’re done uploading your videos to various video sharing sites, you should also embed your salon video into your own website, on your salon facebook page and other social media sites.
To attract clients online it’s important to build trust! There is no better way to do so than with a personal message via video.
How to use Social Media for your Salon & Spa Advertising
We all know that Beauty Salons & Spas are highly competitive. So, how do you make YOUR salon or spa stand out from the rest? The key to successful advertising is to stand out from the crowd and being able to give your clients an offer they simply can’t resist. Here are a few tips to help you reach the next level of salon marketing via social media:
1. Facebook Page for your Salon & Spa
It’s not enough to create a Facebook page, add the logo to your existing ad copy and hope your customers will share your page with their friends and family. You have to post to your Facebook page with relevant, fun, bold and maybe even silly content on a daily basis to keep showing up in front of your followers.
Post enticing offers for first time clients and reward your existing customers with weekly or monthly giveaways like a free pedicure or a fun make over. Take lots of pictures of your clientele (remember to ask their permission first), your establishment, your co-workers and even your neighborhood. Create different photo albums like ‘Best Updo’s', ‘Look who’s relaxing at our Spa’ or ‘New Nail Colors to try’. Ask your customers to Continue reading
