83,199 hairdressing salons were listed in 2016. In 2018, it was 85,192 establishments, an increase of 2.4% in two years, and this trend was confirmed in 2019. To succeed in this ultra-competitive environment, it is, therefore, necessary to stand out. Because faced with this figure of 2.4%, many salons face financial difficulties that are sometimes irreparable. The main challenge for a hair salon is its ability to be known, recognized, and visible. Visibility is not an end in itself, but it is the means to increase its customer base and turnover and perpetuate its activity.

Also, in the context of digital transformation, a hairdressing salon can often no longer be visible in its fullest sense if it is not present online. A hairdressing salon’s visibility must now be dual, and it is reasonable to work on two-legged marketing, direct marketing, and online marketing.

We present below 9 Barbershop Business Plan marketing ideas for your hair salon and boost its visibility.

Direct marketing:

1. Going to the Hairdresser in your salon should be an experience

2. Retain your customer base

3. Offer promotions to attract

4. Offer animations to modernize the image of your living room

5. Make sponsorship and work your network

Digital marketing:

6. Position yourself on Google (own site or via the platform)

7. Offer to book an appointment online

8. Surf on social networks (Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat)

9. Advertise online and newsletters

1. Going to the Hairdresser in your salon should be an experience

Consumers no longer seek a simple service but an experience. Consumers who want a haircut are not your target. They are the target of low-cost salons or sometimes even prefer to cut their hair themselves. For the rest, therefore, going to the Hairdresser is not a simple necessity but must be a pleasure.

Make this moment an experience for the consumer. Relaxation, calm. Offer free little extra touches that will contribute to the positive image. A hello, a smile, a thank you, and a hot drink are not enough. Do even better and try to personalize and humanize your customer relationship. For example, ask the reason for the haircut, the last haircut, give personalized advice. A head massage while shampooing in the tub, news magazines or reviews, and music choice during the haircut if the client is alone in the salon.

Because if marketing can bring you, new customers, there is nothing worse than disappointing them once they are present at the show. In this sense, the interior and exterior appearance of your living room are very important. Showcase your hair salon. Word of mouth remains a safe bet to attract new customers. To fully satisfy a customer guarantees that he comes back and speaks well to those around him.

And what’s more, this service is free! Satisfying your customer is good, but surprising them positively is even better. This is what is called in certain sectors “the wow effect”.

Watch out for dissatisfied customers who have even more impact when they give negative feedback. Man is naturally suspicious and will remember a salon he has been harmed by better than a salon he has been praised. There are three elements to refine in the reception you reserve for your customers: service, service, and SERVICE.

The showcase of your living room should catch the eye and represent the image of your living room. The same goes for your living room’s interior, which should reflect the idea of ​​the service you are offering. A point of vigilance must be placed on the cleanliness, which must be impeccable because nothing better to frighten a customer than a salon with questionable hygiene.

2. Loyalty and sponsorship

Consolidating the existing customer base by retaining them is essential because it represents your business’s bulk more than the new customers who come and go. To do this, you need to have electronic customer follow-up or through a card system. Offering a reduction after the 10th cut can be a way to keep a customer who sees a reward by staying loyal.

And speaking of rewards, why not reward your clients for recommending your services to their loved ones? While word of mouth is the oldest form of marketing, it is also one of the most successful. What’s more, a person who has been recommended a hair salon is more likely to become a regular at the salon afterward as well.

A good habit to take when checking out is to ask if the customer now wants to make an appointment for a next haircut. It is the simplest, open question, which should not be forced on the customer. You leave him the choice, and if he is forward-looking, it will perhaps make you win the next meeting easily.

Another way to do this is to automatically send an SMS after the appointment to confirm that the appointment went well and offer to take a new one.

3. Promotion offers

Special operations attract. They allow you to bring in new customers who see an interest in the offer and might not have crossed your doorstep otherwise. It is then up to you to get them back with or without the promotion.

Special Ops can follow your schedule to boost your off-peak hours with promotional offers or the calendar with pop-up holiday offers. The year is full of special occasions to offer promotions: Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Halloween, Mother’s Day, or the brand new Black Friday. And why not offer a discount on your customer’s birthday? Who doesn’t want to be pampered on their birthday?

However, you don’t have to wait for a party or special occasion to offer a promotion. It is quite possible, for example, to create temporary promotions (flash promo) for a particular service because you want to make it known to your customers because it is new or trendy or because you have too much stock of a product to flow out.

And for these promotional offers to be impactful and effective, do not hesitate to advertise. Handing out flyers is a tireless method of attracting new customers to your salon. To distribute to the passer-by in the streets near your living room, on the cars’ windshields, or in the surroundings’ mailboxes. The target is clear, and it is very easy these days to print flyers inexpensively on the Internet or in a local print shop. With an ongoing promotion, prospects will be much more likely to come and test your service.

The local press, the city magazine, or public posters are also a good way to make your show more visible during your promotional operations. It is much more interesting to communicate about your salon when it offers special promotions than when no reduction is offered.

4. Animations in your hairdressing salon

To get people talking about your show, nothing like an event to discuss, share and pass on to your growing community. Your customers will be loyal, and your prospects convinced. The animation will make a difference in the consumer’s choice between your salon and the competition.

The event allows you to highlight your image as an expert. So why not offer a hairdressing course to your clients or prospects? How many times do we leave the hairdressers perfectly well-groomed and the next day unable to reproduce the same hairstyle? Styling professionally can be learned. You can also organize makeover afternoons or hairstyle tutorials.

In this way, you will increase the traffic in your salon and improve your visibility. You can even imagine holding these workshops on your off-peak hours to further increase the profit.

5. Sponsor local sports teams, events

Partnering with a team, a local association, or a local event means gaining local visibility, developing a real brand image and sympathy. Be careful to choose the event or association in question according to the values ​​ you want to communicate.

This can then allow you to expand your professional network and work in synergy with other partners. Joining up with a club or a project offers the possibility of meeting other traders who are also sponsors.

Financially, it is useful to remember that sponsorship allows you to have tax advantages to deduct these expenses from your business’s tax result following the law on sponsorship.

It is strongly recommended to set up a marketing and communication of foot (“put yourself outdoor”) where you go directly to the businesses in the surroundings to discuss, make your promotion, and strike up a relation. These merchants can then transfer their customers to your services. It’s a network you can count on.

6. Google, a powerful friend

If by typing “nearby hair salon,” your salon doesn’t appear in Google search, ” you don’t exist for your potential clients. So before continuing to read this article (very interesting, I grant you that, and it’s hard to stop), go to Google My Business to create a profile for your establishment. It’s simple, free, and essential! Google is the most used search engine, but there are also other engines on which it is recommended to also create an account, Apple Map or Bing Places in particular. Once you’ve completed this phase, you can start thinking about expanding your digital marketing activities, but at the very least, you’ll be visible online.

If you have a clean website, make sure it isn’t too old-fashioned and out of date. The Internet is evolving very quickly, and a website developed 10 years ago could make a bad impression and scare away potential prospects. Also, the site must be optimized to succeed in appearing in the first results of a Google search. A website is the virtual storefront of your hair salon – and it’s as important as the physical storefront. It is often better not to have a website of your own rather than a dated and off-putting website.

You can easily register on sites that list hairdressing salons if you don’t have your website. This will allow you to display the necessary information on a dedicated page and improve your hair salon’s positioning on the first page of Google searches in your region. And also, you have the option of offering online appointments to your clients.

7. Online appointments

Indeed, did you know that more than 35% of people prefer to book their appointments online? And this statistic will only grow when we know the propensity of new generations to make appointments only online. And for your living room, it saves time.

Here too, Hello Hairdresser is a good, simple and free tool to support you.

If you already have this option available, be sure to set up your online booking feature on your website and social channels.

8. Social networks, the new digital players

How to do without social networks these days. Social networks for which this is not the primary purpose prove to be very useful for traders. Social networks offer a targeted audience for hairdressing salons (age, location, interests) and allow communities to be created around them.

A Facebook page is the most common communication channel these days to speed up your digital presence and online interaction with customers and prospects.

The Instagram tool is also a growing communication vector that allows you to communicate simply with photos and videos of your achievements, cuts, and events. It is also the social network to favor if you want to start. Some home hairdressers only work by this tool. Their contact details are available on their account, where there are many professional photos of their best achievements. It’s the digital version of word of mouth that you can orchestrate there. Without going into too complex details, it is still a question of target here. Consider using the right hashtags to meet your goal as quickly as possible. This will allow you to be found by the right potential customers.

Another social network can be used to reach your youngest clientele, and that is Snapchat. This service allows you to interact with your customers and create a real community around your salon. If you want to adopt a young brand image, it will be difficult to miss this service to be visible.

And so that all these materials are consistent with each other consider putting links from one page to another. For example, links from your website appear on your Instagram account and vice versa.

To go even further, you can invite an “influencer” or an “influencer” to your hair salon for a free haircut so that they can then advertise your salon on social networks.

9. Advertising and email campaigns

However, if you have a recent, functional, and optimized website, it is still not certain that you will appear among the first results of the Google searches that you target. To be first on the page, you have to go through Google Ads; Google’s paid service will allow you to display your show as a sponsored link at the top of the page. A Google Ads campaign must be specific, targeted, and limited to effectively and convert the maximum number of potential customers. Since you only pay for clicks with Google Ads, you must make sure that the people who click are in your target demographic. A Google Ads campaign can be very expensive and ineffective if not set up correctly.

We told you about Facebook earlier in this article, and of course, there is also a professional advertising tool on Facebook to target the right community. The advantage of Facebook is that it can target your advertising geographically and according to additional characteristics that people enter in their profile and which are public.