Are you looking for new hair salon advertising examples that will help you attract new clients and boost your business? You’ve come to the right place! 😏
Coming up with unique hair salon advertising ideas isn’t always the easiest task when you’re a busy barber or salon owner on the run all day. But really there are so many different salon advertising ideas you can use to elevate your business and get in front of the right people at the right time.
Before you start…
Understand your target audience
It might sound like a no-brainer, but one of the most common salon advertising mistakes to make is not understanding who your audience really is. You can’t advertise to potential clients if you don’t know who they are. No-one knows your clients better than you – you chat with them day-in-day-out! Look at your current clientele and start picking apart the conversations you have with them, keeping your eye out for common threads.
Also consider what your ideal client might look like. Are they who you have now, or more who you want to start engaging with? If not, what can you do or change to start speaking to them? For example, you might want to start targeting a younger clientele, who in just a year or two will be in the workforce. In their spare time they would be spending a lot of time on platforms like Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok, so building a strong presence on these platforms might help you get in front of them.
Check out the competition
Have a look around your local area. What are other barbers or salons advertising? What kinds of deals are they offering new clients? What channels are they using to get their message out? What details and imagery are in their ads?
Once you have a better idea of what the competition is doing, you can find your own lane and solidify your point of difference.
What to include in an ad
So once you know who your target audience is, it’s time to start crafting the content for your ad. There are a few essential elements that go into a perfect, effective ad including:
- Quality, eye-catching imagery
- A good balance of imagery and text
- Compelling copy that will prompt action from your audience
- A call to action so they know what to do or where to go when they see the ad
- Your phone number, address and website URL
- On point spelling and grammar (keep those grammar-obsessed keyboard warriors at bay!)
- An irresistible offer (if that’s the aim of your ad).
Unique hair salon advertising ideas
Get your stylists on Instagram!
Sometimes it takes a team to make magic happen and advertising your business is no different. Encourage each of your stylists or therapists to create their own professional Instagram accounts with your salon name in their handle. The idea would be for them to post images of their work, show behind the scenes clips of the salon, and post promotional content for the salon. It’s a great relationship-building tool for the business’s clientele.
Facebook organic and paid strategy
Your salon social media channels, like Facebook, are evergreen advertising opportunities for your business. Make sure to keep it updated regularly with a variety of engaging content which shows off your best self.
Create irresistible offers without discounting
One of the best things you can do for your business is create irresistible offers your clients will jump on, without discounting your services. When you discount, you undersell yourself and cheapen your work. Believe it or not, it’s more beneficial for your brand, and effective for client attraction and retention, to add value instead. This could be adding a treatment onto their service so they can try something new or giving them a bundle of sample size products to trial after five appointments.
Get out and about
In the age of digital marketing and time-poor people, it’s easy to forget that getting in front of the right people and having a conversation with them can do wonders for a word-of-mouth ripple effect. Get out and about and hand out hair flyers, posters and business cards to other local businesses, like cafes, and suggest partnering with them. For every appointment, you could offer the client a coffee from the café next door.
In return for the amount of coffee orders the café would see from your booming salon, they could promote your salon within their café. More clients for you = more coffee orders for them. It’s a win-win! Make sure to cross promote each other on Instagram and Facebook so you can reach an even wider (yet still local) audience!
Other unique hair salon advertising ideas
- Host a promotional event in the salon and invite people from the area.
- Invite local media publications to come in for a complimentary service.
- Create a selfie station and encourage your clients to post a happy-snap to their Insta feed or story.
- Work with influencers that align with your brand.
- Capture client feedback – it probably has a lot of gems you can use in your advertising!
- Offer digital gift cards that can be bought from your website. (Psst – Shortcuts now offers Online Gift Cards!)
Calculate if your salon advertising ideas worked
When you use any sort of advertising, you need to make sure you can track it and calculate what actually worked. Otherwise, what’s the point of spending both time and money on something that you’re not even sure is bringing new clients through your doors?
Luckily there’s some super simple ways you can track and see if your advertising is working!
Use trackable links
UTM codes are the bread and butter to your digital salon advertising campaigns. These tags are added to the end of a URL and help you track the effectiveness of your digital campaigns, all the way through to Google Analytics. It’s great for use in your Instagram or Facebook ads and your emails. Instead of using a basic URL, you’d use one with tracking codes built into it.
To create a UTM link, you first need an amazing tool – here’s two of our favourite freebies:
- Campaign URL Builder is Google Analytics’ very own link tracking baby
- UTM.io has great free-to-use tools when you’re getting started with link tracking
When you go to use either of these tools, you’ll notice there’s a few fields you’ll need to fill in, like the source and medium. These are the bones for your tracked link. Here’s how you would make a tracked link for an email campaign:
- Source: this is where you add in where (often a site) the traffic is coming from.
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- Example: mailchimp
- Medium: this is where you specify what kind of format or channel type your link is in.
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- Example: email
- Campaign: this is where you specify if the link is attached to a special promotion or campaign you’re running.
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- Example: mothers_day
- Content: this is the field that will help you differentiate where the traffic is coming from when it has a common source and medium. For instance, a text link and button link within the one email.
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- Example: button_link
💡Hot tip: You need to be consistent with how you create your links, since capital letters, extra spaces and additional punctuation will be identified as a new type of link and can throw your tracking out.
Use codes when promoting salon marketing offers
Another easy way to see if your promos are actually converting is adding a promo code that a client needs to quote when booking their next appointment. This tactic works best if your clients phone your business a lot to book their next appointment, or if you have an online store as part of your website. On most ecommerce websites you’re able to create promotional codes that a client can add in at the check–out.
Ask them directly!
Last, but not least, is to ALWAYS make sure to ask new clients how they first heard about you. Imagine getting an influx of amazing new clients and having no idea where they came from! Eeek.
You can ask this question at almost any time, from their very first phone call or DM you, to their first consultation, or even their first appointment. There are often multiple touchpoints when you acquire a new client, and at all of these points it’s an appropriate time to ask clients this crucial question. Hey, even when you have a walk-in client that sits down for a 15-minute service, you can still ask them how they came across your business. This information can be so useful to your business, and feed into a strategy to gain more clients by targeting the right people via the right channels.
