Advertising a Health Or Beauty Business While Making the Most of a Small Budget
Everyone is taking about the economical crisis that has shaken from the ground many businesses, and beauty salons, spa’s or hair salons were among the first to be affected. You may wonder why? In such times, people tend to focus on the main necessities, and some clients are ready to give up taking care of their skin or hair for paying their house mortgage. The true dilemma is: how do we gain them back, considering the fact that we as business owners are also going through tough financial times?
Advertising a hair salon, clinic or spa is essential, just as working with top professionals or having the best prices. Your allocated marketing budget should ideally be at least 10% from your total budget. And it should on both maintaining loyal customers and attracting new ones on a regular basis. Now if you think you don’t need to spend money to advertise your salon, spa or clinic, you’re completely wrong. It doesn’t matter the fact that you have the best people working in the salon, or the products you use, it’s all about letting people know what you can offer.
Especially if you are new in the business, setting the budget for advertising your hair salon, health business or beauty clinic, can be quite difficult. It’s hard to decide how much money will be used for the equipment, rent, retail products, professional products and many business owners leave the marketing plan at last.
However, your marketing plan is one of the most decisive factor in your future business success, one that cannot be ignored. This is why I thought that a basic guide on how to spend wisely on marketing your salon, spa or clinic would be useful for many of you.
1. Make a list with your marketing goals and the existing budget. For example, let’s say your first goals would be to introduce your new hair salon to the local community. For small budgets, the most convenient method to advertise the new hair salon could include a newspaper advertisement or flyers that you can make at home.
2. Decide on a balanced approach to your marketing and remember to keep track of the return of investment (ROI). Small budgets don’t allow mistakes, so make sure you analyze everything before spending. Choose the best media to advertise your business, keeping the message fresh, attractive and on-target.
3. Be creative! Even if you don’t have a allocate salon budget, this doesn’t mean you can’t be creative in order to obtain the same impact. Traditional, low-cost ads can always become hot stuff is you manage to keep them live and fresh, think about the features that make you salon unique on the market. Feature something NEW or FREE in the marketing material (whether we are talking about a newspaper ad, flyer or brochure) and you can get the attention of prospect clients.
4. Free stuff - Established hair & beauty salons or clinics used to attract customers with gifts or services. However, when you have a low budget and you don’t want to make any compromises regarding the quality of the gifts, is there any solution? Of course, it is: free consultations won’t cost you a penny or free gifts with the purchase of in-house products or services just require a small investment. The gifts don’t have to be expensive; they just have to reflect the perceived value to the customer.
5. Internet advertising is in the trends and costs ten times less than traditional advertising media! The Internet is still the best way to advertise a salon with a small marketing budget. While generally you get what you pay for, something is better than nothing - a budget website can be created for about $100, and you can write your own email newsletter. It is a great way to promote your products, services and special offers without spending a fortune.
For many business owners, setting a marketing budget can be a true challenge. However a good plan and wise choices can help you establish a solid position on the market and underline your unique vision without spending loads of money.
So what are your experiences with marketing budgets? Post a comment below and share your top tips!
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Rebecca Kepple specializes in helping business owners massively increase their client base and profits. To get instant access to her free insider secrets report ‘The Top 7 Secrets for Massively Increasing Your Client Base’ visit: http://www.wellbeingbusinesssecrets.com/freebiebook.
© Copyright Rebecca Kepple 2009
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February 23rd, 2009 at 3:50 pm
Thanks for this article Rebecca. It certainly helps to get these things into perspective, as the financial crisis deepens (or so they say).
My experiences of setting a marketing budget for our Hair Salon business has been a bit hit and miss over the 2 years we’ve been running.
When we first set up I did set aside £1000 within our start up costs for marketing/advertising. Throughout the first year we produced our own flyers/business cards and website, doing the design work myself to reduce costs. However when it came to buying advertising space in local newspapers, magazines and directories, I found the costs were ridiculous for the size of advert spaces that would be clearly visible to the reader, and we had no guarantee of a page position. Most of our budget went on this area, however with little return.
After 5 failed attempts at advertising and a lot of wasted money, we gave up on adverts and decided to have a feature written in a local community magazine instead. This gave us a chance to tell people who we are, our background in hairdressing, what we do differently and why they should come to us, along with some nice photos of our salon to make it a bit more inviting. This cost £199 for a 2-page spread and included an additional half page advert. We won 5 new clients from this so it well paid for itself.
We also decided to produce a newsletter and send it out to our current and lapsed clients (twice a year, and I print on my home printer to reduce costs). This has proved successful in reminding people we are still here, and that its time to treat their hair again (its amazing how many people forget about maintaining their hair). We also spend out christmas and birthday cards with a £5 voucher for the next service (again printed on my home printer).
We have just reached two full years in business, and after recently spending nearly £1000 for a small advert in the yellow pages directory, we simply can’t afford to do anymore advertising this year. So for the reminder of this year I plan to create as many different promotional ideas I can think of that won’t cost me a penny (well may be a little bit for printing), and make more use of the internet to attract new clients by revamping our website.
I’m hoping that on as small a budget as ours we will still be able to attract new clients and keep our current ones happy, as the down-turn is affecting our client spending, and also our finances.
Thanks for keeping me inspired.
Dionne (Silk Trends Hair Salon)