How to Write a Salon Marketing Plan For 2018

Promoting your salon is easier when you have the proper tools. One of the most effective ways to ensure you’re reaching the largest possible audience of prospective customers is by creating a salon marketing plan.

A quality marketing plan serves as your detailed step-by-step calendar for the upcoming month, quarter, or year. By adhering to your salon marketing plan, you can attract new clients, retain current ones, and increase your business’ revenue. Interested in learning how to create a salon marketing plan that will help you achieve your goals? Read on for a step-by-step guide into salon marketing.

Assess What You’re Currently Doing

 Before you can begin improving on your marketing plan, you need to identify what you’re doing currently to bolster marketing efforts. What’s included in your marketing strategy? Marketing is everything from your social media presence to the wording in the emails you’re sending out to subscribers.  Do you have a current marketing plan in place, or have you been checking promotional tasks off a list as they come to you? If it’s the latter, don’t worry. You can still work to create a detailed marketing plan that incorporates all your business’ needs. However, the best thing to do is to develop a situational analysis, or a detailed document that outlines your current marketing efforts. This will easily allow you to identify gaps in your plan or areas in which you can support and strengthen your salon marketing efforts.

Identify Your Target Audience

 As a salon owner, you need to identify your target audience. You might think that your target audience is whoever comes into your salon most often, but that could just be a fraction of the demographic you could be reaching if you shift your approach. By increasing your salon marketing efforts, you’ll be able to reach a much broader audience and therefore more people. Think about the type of clients you currently have, and the type of clients that your services and price points would appeal to. Where’s the crossover in this list? How can you best reach these people? Think about defining characteristics such as age, income, sex, and location – all of these factors contribute to who is coming into your salon. You can also create a list of adjectives that describe your ideal client – are they conservative, forward-thinking? Are they adventurous? Social? Once you have the description you need, create a profile of your ideal client and visualize them as a person. This could be just a few short paragraphs, but it will allow you to identify who your marketing plan should be directed toward.

Set Goals 

Now that you know what you’re currently offering and who you’re offering it to, it’s time to set goals for your new marketing plan. Think of actionable items that can be measured and tracked over time. For instance, do you want to see a thirty percent growth in your overall sales? Do you want to have a certain number of clients coming into the salon each month? Or do you prefer to focus on referrals? Create a list of goals that will become the backbone of your salon marketing plan, and stick to them as the year progresses.

Budget and Resources

With your goals in place, you can now start creating a list of steps to take to help you execute your marketing plan. Before you begin drafting your plan, review your salon’s financial resources and develop a marketing budget. There are many components to a marketing plan that involve funding, such as creating signage, investing in salon software, paying for social media promotions, and perhaps even hiring a marketing assistant to execute these items throughout the year.

Next, you need to identify the tools for success that you’ll need to follow through on your marketing plan. This can include the mentioned signage, software, and employees to help you with your plan, amongst other things. You also need to be reasonable in thinking about the amount of time it will take to further your marketing plan. Is this something you can work on for one hour each week? Two hours? Do you need to work on it every day for thirty minutes? By setting yourself up with the budget and resources to succeed, you’re more likely to follow through with your salon marketing plan.

Actionable Items

 The time has come to create a document with the marketing tactics you’ll use to achieve your goals. Begin by creating an overview of the things you’ll need to accomplish, and then focus on details. For instance, if your goal is to reach new customers, the best way to do that is by increasing your online presence. Establish that as the first actionable item: Expand Online Presence. Next, think about the best ways to accomplish this goal. This could include things like actively managing social media accounts, creating an email list, and investing in ads on websites and social media channels. Create goals that will not only bolster your business’ marketing efforts, but are things you can accomplish with the amount of resources and time you have.

Measure Success and Improve Processes

 
Now that you’ve established what your goals are and who you’re reaching out to, it’s time to execute your marketing plan. Develop a timeline over which you’ll begin working toward your goals and follow through. Set times to check in on your progress and analyze results.  Use salon software to track how many people are opening your emails, monitor how many social media followers you have, and identify referrals coming in as a result of your marketing efforts. These measurements will show you how effective or ineffective your marketing plan is, and you’ll be able to develop a stronger, more efficient marketing plan as a result. Don’t be afraid to scrap items off your marketing plan that aren’t serving you, but wait at least a year to do so, as some growth can take time.

Developing a salon marketing plan can feel like a large task, but you can accomplish this more easily by using the tools available through SalonTarget. The award-winning salon software program offers options to help you attract and retain clients, all while improving your digital presence. Get started today by seeing if the software can help you make your salon marketing plan more robust, with the aid ofSalonTarget’s free seven-day trial.