How To Market Your Beauty Salon on Social Media

A beauty salon is by definition a local business and is tied to geographic constraints. Your primary goal may be to simply increase your local customer base, which is the right thing to do. If you spend some time thinking about the big picture and strategize on how to increase your local customers, you may come up with ideas such as coupons, events and more. These are all good. But to be a great beauty salon, you need to think bigger and reach out to the world.

By getting exposure outside your geographic market, you will create a beauty salon brand that becomes appealing to the local market. By engaging people around the world with your brand, you gain a celebrity status which then creates a ripple effect in your local arena. And you do this through marketing your salon on social media.

Here are a few tips on how to market your beauty salon on social media:

Create a community on your Facebook page

For a beauty salon, Facebook should be  the primary marketing channel. You start off by engaging your local audience and keeping up with them through your FB page. Then you start reaching out to a wider audience.

Here are a few techniques to gain traction on Facebook:

• Post about beauty in general including tips and tricks – these could be posts you share by others or you can share posts from your own website and blog. If you do not have a blog, now is the time to start one.
• Share customer stories of transformations with a human angle and life improvements – these stories will not create a rapport with your customers but also make your brand human.
• Post personal stories of the staff and show the human face of your brand – let your team make appearances in posts and engage with your followers. People love to know about team members of brands they get service from. It is all about personal branding.
• Create contests on Facebook and offer coupons to the local residents and gift vouchers on Amazon for people outside your geographic area – make fun contests that may require your followers to either post photos or take a poll or share a story.

To get the best traction on Facebook, use these following tips:

• Post lost of high quality photos. Invest in a decent DSLR and designate one of your team members to always look out for an opportunity to take a photo.
• Turn your Facebook page into an extension of your website, if you have one, or as your mini-website. Mention your FB page URL in your emails, business cards, in your shop, on signage and everywhere else.

The beauty of Facebook is that you can start to engage with your followers and important events in their lives and show them that you care. Build long lasting relationships though this medium and turn your followers into a community.

Leverage Instagram to market your beauty salon

Instagram is a fantastic tool for businesses that can use photos to tell their story. A beauty salon has ample opportunity to use pictures to tell its brand story as well as the stories of its customers. Seek your customers’ permission and start sharing their stories that relate to the service you are providing.

You can post things like:

• Before and after photos of transformations
• New products that you use and your recommendations, if any. This will have a knock-on effect of these product companies noticing your account and following you, which will boost your relevance.
• Thank you images to thank customers for giving you their trust and their business
• Contests where your followers and customers can participate to get exclusive deals or coupons
• Upcoming events in your salon
• Upcoming events in your local community
• Lifestyle-related photos

To get the best traction on Instagram, use the following tips:

• Use hashtags to latch on to trends
• Mention your location in your hashtags
• Use photo collages of various styles that you have done for your customers
• Use a good quality camera – preferably a DSLR
• Engage with your followers and their accounts
• Follow other salons and engage with them
• Follow product brands and engage with them
• Post frequently and consistently

Create an engaging narrative on Twitter

Twitter is by far the most misunderstood social media platform and a tough one to get any real traction on. However, it is an important platform and you can not afford to ignore it. What Twitter is good at is really the ease with which you can post status updates and real-time narrative of your brand.

Here are a few ways you can use Twitter to market your salon brand:

• Use Twitter to post realtime updates about your business, offers, opening times, schedule load and more.
• Post time limited offers and coupon codes to create scarcity.
• Organize a live Twitter chat for a style demo and let users ask questions.
• Use Twitter for customer service including handling appointment updates, complaints and more
• Follow trends and have your say by posting comments using related hashtags
• Post content with your brand hashtag
• Post beauty tips on Twitter with photos if possible

To get the best traction on Twitter, use these following tips:

• Optimize your Twitter profile to be fun and entertaining
• Use high quality photos when posting
• Follow style, fashion, beauty and cosmetic profiles and retweet good content as much as possible
• Engage with beauty brands on Twitter and send direct messages with kudos on good news or developments
• Follow a posting schedule and use Buffer to time your tweets

Create cult following on Youtube

Youtube is a fantastic platform for beauty-related brands including salons, cosmetics companies, and the like. Some of the most-watched video channels belong to beauty and makeup tutorials by young people who are raking in tons of money from this platform.

As a beauty salon, you must have a strong presence on Youtube.

Here are a few things you can do on Youtube to market your brand:

• It is all about sharing your knowledge and expertise on Youtube while keeping it light-hearted and entertaining. Create videos showing beauty tips, before and after clips, and other useful information that your viewers can use and benefit from right away.
• Create branded tutorials on a variety of beauty-related topics. Be free with the information. Promote those videos on your other social media channels.
• Create product spotlight videos showcasing new products that you use and recommend. In fact, create video reviews of products on a regular basis. This may lead to the product brands contacting you for promotional campaigns.
• With your customers, permission, create interview videos if they like the service or the new look you gave them. Make the videos fun and informal with lots of laughter and personality.

To get the best traction on Instagram, use these following tips:

• Use attractive headlines, clear descriptions, and keywords in your videos on Youtube so that your videos will reach a wider audience.
• Invest in some decent video recording equipment. If you have a decent DSLR, it would work great for video too.
• Invest in some good editing software and train yourself or one of your team members to do some basic editing, add music and titles to the videos.
• Maintain consistency in the branding and format of the videos. Over time, a signature style would develop that should be recognizable.
• Post videos consistently and regularly.

Conclusion

I believe I have touched upon the major social media platforms that work for marketing a beauty salon. However, this list is not exhaustive not are the ideas the only ones. You need to educate yourself and experiment as much as you can with your social media campaigns. Understand each platform and what makes it tick. What kind of audience hang out on each platform? What are they interested in? What kind message would work?

If you have any questions or would like some help with branding and marketing your beauty salon, please do not hesitate to contact us.