Habits of Successful Clinic Owners (and other business owners)

Running a retail business is both demanding and exhausting. Running one where customers are booked one to one with your staff is even more demanding in terms of Marketing Strategy and Standard Management, since you have to pay the staff whether they are booked or not, and you actually can not see or even hear them while they are with clients. It doesn’t get much more challenging than that.

Here are some habits of successful Salon Owners (and other retail or service based businesses):

Habit Number One: publish written standards on your expectations from your team – including that you expect them to rebook, retail and add on at a specified level.

This is Rule Number One. If you don’t insist that your team build your business, it won’t happen. Therapists who are motivated enough to do all f the above without your direction will leave and establish their own business. The rest need you to push them along and teach them how. Use the 90 Day Trial to add a little pressure and get good habits formed early.

Habit Number Two: invest in training.

The old dilemma of what if I train them and they leave. They probably won’t, because you are keeping them engaged, but if you apply a reasonable bond for a period of say 6 months, then you should be covered. You need your staff to be at the top of their game because they are representing you. I just add to this, that post-training ongoing mini-tests are a good idea, to prevent the relaxing off and ‘unlearning’ that can happen.

Habit Number Three: look ahead at what is coming up – always.

Every month, week and day – look at forecasted revenue as compared to your expectation. This way you have time to action something if you need to boost sales – even on a daily basis with a crazy retail add-on. Know exactly where you are at month to date, and what your options A,B and C are to bring it in line.

Habit Number Four: treat your promotional tools as tools – bring out the right tool at the right time.

This is almost the habit of not panicking if you are behind the target, and not overspending or under promoting when you are above target. Have your set of tools ready for release. If you are at 110% of target – use the lightest tools. If you’re at 50% of target: pull out the sledgehammer. You will be unlikely to need the sledgehammer if you are watching ahead at what is coming as above.

Habit Number Five: treat every dollar spent as your last dollar in the bank.

Therapists hate this. Be Scrooge McDuck. When times are good, tuck some away in an accrual fund for future reinvestment. Always be looking for an opportunity to reduce costs without reducing quality and reviewing supply chains. Ask for samples of wax that’s less expensive than whatever you are using and watch prices. Suppliers do need to take increases from time to time, and the exchange rate adds pressure for sure, but you are within your rights to resist ongoing frequent price increases!

Habit Number Six: engage in active marketing campaigns 11 months of the year.

This does not say ‘Spam your Facebook followers with deals once per month’ – actually it is completely the opposite of that (another topic). Run a monthly marketing campaign of newsletter, social, blog and Google all year round – except for December. If you’ve run the rest of the year well, December will take care of itself!

Six is enough habits to consider in one day – how many of these habits are you following?

Using Google Analytics to increase enquiries from your website

You put up a promotional offer. You load it onto your website, you post it on Facebook, you send it out in a newsletter and you put up posters in your Salon.

Which one of those mediums gets you the customer – is it all of them, or is it none of them. You need this information.

Not all clicks to your website are equal – some cost and others don’t. Not all clicks to your website generate enquiries. You may discover that you are sending people to your website with advertising dollars, or with smart marketing and networking that gets you web visits with no cost, but you may then find that they do not yield enquiries.

Online advertising is charged per click generally. Each click has a cost either nominated by you or as a result of the amount of competition for the search term and audience. If you don’t know what you are doing it can be an expensive arena to play in, but more importantly – what happens to your people once they have clicked.

This is what Google Analytics is for – to find out how people are traveling around your website and what % of them take the actions that you want them to take.

The first step is to set up a Google Analytics account. Once that is sorted, find your Analytics Tracking Code in the Admin area and have that entered into your website. Each web platform has a slightly different way of doing this, but your web developer will be able to easily install the tracking code.

Now you need to wait a couple of weeks while some data is collected.

Essential to this process is knowing what you want people to do when they arrive on your website. The best idea is to chat this through out loud with someone else, as it’s easy to get store blind and think that something is obvious because you do it every day. Find someone who is new to your site and ask them – is it obvious that the site is telling you where to click to take the action that I want. If it is not ‘slap in the face obvious’, you need to make changes. Make tiny changes, one at a time and wait to see what happens.

You can set up ‘conversion goals’ in your analytics account – just click on the ‘conversions’ area and it’s really easy to see what to do. A good example of a conversion goal is to install a ‘book now’  alongside the promotional offer and track the conversion of ‘people clicking on the book now button‘. From there you play with how the web page is laid out, what the offer is and how it is written and measure the conversions with each change. Setting up conversion goals makes it easy to measure the percentage of visitors taking the action that you want. Now you are proactively working on your site to increase conversions.

Soon you will be addicted to directing traffic on your site! It’s really fun.

Another really excellent way of tracking how your marketing is working and understanding what is driving your customers to your website is to use ‘tracked URLs’.

This is a way of finding out exactly which Facebook post, Instagram link, ad or offsite link generated the click to your website. Using the URL generator you create a customised URL as your link. This link is tagged with all the details of where the click has come from – for example, your customised URL may read as ‘FB post 2 Sept on Vitamin C with link to facials page’.

In the Analytics area, you will see exactly how many clicks came from that link – and whether or not they converted to making a booking or contacting your Salon.

If you run the same offer to the same web page on your Adwords, your Facebook page, on a separate Facebook advertising campaign and in your newsletter – each with a specifically tagged URL, you will be able to see which of those mediums generated the FIRST customer click and which one of them created the conversion.

Remember that customers need to see an ad or offer more than once to be persuaded to take up the offer. Tagged URLs allow you to understand which advertising medium first caused the customers to click, and which one of them caused the customer to convert – and you run the mediums in future in that order, which saves you marketing $ in the long run.

Smart marketing beats Grabones’ and discounted deals EVERY time.

Should Beauty Businesses Be On Instagram?

Beauty businesses have invaded Facebook! It appears to be widely accepted that a Beauty business ‘needs’ a Facebook page.

We set one up, post a few deals and BOOM – we’ve over it! If this is you, don’t start an Instagram account for your business.

However, if you want to run a marketing driven business continuously inspiring men and women to look and feel their best, Insta could be the way forward!

Take a look around Instagram – search up local salons and national chains. You will see that most of them are either not there, or they are not really rocking it. I have only seen one beauty business that has been working Instagram well. This means there is heaps of space for you to grow a stronger presence than you can on Facebook.

So, how to approach. Here’s my advice:

• Don’t steal pictures. Instagram people HATE their material being stolen. Ask permission to re-post and use a re-posting App like regram.
• Be social – put aside an hour a week to follow others, like their posts and place comments, build a community. Embrace the community and the community will embrace you back.
• Use loads of hashtags, but research them first – find out which hashtags are trending and use Apps like hashme to find more.
• Use Later.com to schedule your posts – it’s too hard trying to post live all the time.
• Use the best photos you can find – it’s not Snapchat. Instagram has become more and more demanding for quality – ask suppliers for photos. Load them into Later.com from a desktop for posting at your scheduled time.
• Try and use large square image image files – Instagram ads must use images at least 1000px x 1000px. I create all mine in that size in case I want to promote them.
• Place your hashtags in a comment. Not only does this make your feed look nice and clean, it also registers as an engagement on your post. Instagram measures the speed of engagement. It’s a lot about speed.
• When you post, also post to Facebook, but when you do that – do follow the point above. Facebook users do not love hashtags.
• Use the insights to find out when your Insta followers are online – posting when they are offline is a lot like presenting to an empty room. The feed is fast – timing is crucial!

So – on to your material. On the surface, it seems that Instagram is all about the pictures. Well – it’s almost all about the pictures. Instagram is really all about the hashtags. And when I say it’s about the hashtags, it might not be what you think. This hashtag thing is quite weird, but you get used to it. Instagram is a bit weird full stop – it’s definitely a good kind of weird. I love it!

Use the hashtags that you think people will search up when they are on the Insta App – so you are looking for trending hashtags for things relating to beauty – you are NOT looking for hashtags that describe your business.

Let’s go back to that word inspiring – that’s the key here. It’s about making people feel motivated to be a part of your world because of how it makes them feel to be there. Take pics yourself of your beautiful salon and your amazing team, of your products – maybe of a treatment room and send them out into Insta world with a clever series of hashtags to attract people to you. Ask suppliers for suitable images – clean shots work well, but make sure you make it personal.

Finally, set up a posting schedule – that means to decide how often you are going to post, and every week or month, sit down and prepare your material – set it up on Later.com or any other scheduling App, research wat your hashtags are going to be – copy and paste them in and away you go! You can realistically get all this done in a couple of hours a month – 15 minutes if your images are all sized and ready to go, so get to it!

One final word of advice for Instagram – have fun! It’s social. Be social with it.

Should I Have A Facebook Page For My Salon?

Having a Business Page on Facebook is something that people ‘do’ – right? Well, most do. We start our salon, we set up a page and invite friends to like and share it. Then we wonder why the phone is not ringing off the hook, so we post specials on it.

This seems to be a really common situation in Beauty.

Here’s the thing – posting special offers continually on a Facebook page (or any social platform) is like being the boring person at the dinner party who only wants to talk about herself. 

Social platforms are about getting people involved with what you are doing – sharing your passion and your expertise.

For most ‘Business to Consumer’ businesses, the Facebook page is one of the very first portals people visit to see what you are about. If you show them discounted offers and spelling errors, they will make a decision that you will not like about you.

If you show them you, your team, your product ingredients and why they matter to you, your busy schedule, and your fabulous newly fitted treatment room, they will feel they are getting to know you.

Using Facebook Live oreven videos, while scary – triples this effect.

Like every aspect of your business, your social platforms need a plan behind them. A written plan is best. And your results need to be checked regularly against the goals in that plan so that the future plan can be optimised: more of what was successful and less of what wasn’t. Social Marketing is a moving target. Every aspect of it changes continually – content review is so important.

Start your planning process with your goal. What do I want to get from having a Facebook page for my business? Is it clicks to website, is it awareness of my brands, is it because I am a new owner and I want people to know that things have changed – think of Social as another window in your storefront – one literally where people are willing to line up and chat with you and other people about your business. Where else can that take place? No other medium allows this opportunity to have a multidimensional relationship with strangers.

So – if you had a bunch of people standing in that window in real life, chatting with you (you leading the chat) – what would you say to them? If it’s ‘Come on In and Try This’ – then you need clicks to the website as your goal. Following that thread, if you give people a link to find out more and they take it – what will they see? Are you updating your website content to exactly meet the expectation of the clicker before posting the link? If not, you’re not making the most of that ‘window’ – that is the same as asking them in to chat more, then ignoring the topic to be chatted about.

You can (and you should) use Google Analytics to literally follow people around your website. You don’t find out their names – they are a code to you, but you can view which days at what time and which pages they have visited (in the sequence viewed) – this will tell you if your leads are being successful or not. You can view this information for a block of people for patterns, or as one person at a time for a more targeted campaign. This is how you find out if your ‘click to web’ campaigns are converting to enquiries or not. Setting up Google Analytics Conversion reporting is the same as checking if your therapists are rebooking or not – it’s a key measure.

This is all really important information because ALL marketing is designed to alter people’s behaviour and the first step in that process is understanding it. Now you are seeing that there is far more to this than posting a link. Follow the results and continually improve them by planning smart moves based on knowledge. That’s how you grow a business.

The next thing Salon Owners say or feel after they have posted material is ‘no one is interacting’ or ‘no one has viewed’. Here you need to remind yourself why Facebook (and other social platforms) were created. They are about people connecting with people, so act accordingly. Pages that spam their followers with nothing but offers will be denied newsfeed placement. End of story. Pages with extremely clever engaging content including rich keywords and fabulous images will get a much higher organic newsfeed distribution. However, to get really good newsfeed distribution, you need to put a small ad budget behind your posts. By small, I mean tiny. If you don’t want to do that, don’t have a page. If you don’t have a page, you are closing a blind on that interactive window. You need to really consider your goals and plan accordingly.

Social advertising is by far cheaper per click than Google advertising, and is often more meaningful and more successful in generating interest in your area of business – because it’s interesting – but only if it is executed to a plan and with clear and specific filters for targeting (that’s the topic for a future blog on Social Media Targeting).

Coming back to the two key questions ‘Should I have a Facebook Page for my Salon’ – the answer is YES. You should, but you should plan the content carefully and in advance, and you should analyse how successful that content has been and plan to include more of what has worked – you will find that people want to see who you are, what you believe in and connect with you – be human, but of course be professional.

In answer to ‘Why Aren’t People Buying My Special Offers Off Facebook’ – the answer is pretty much because this is not what people want to see. Change your content strategy and you will find engagement increasing and your occasional Facebook offer will be seen and appreciated by many more people. For my page of around 5,500 likers when I sold the business, so often I had people wander in and be fully conversant with a product or a treatment that I had been posting about, but not once had they interacted with a post – they felt they knew me and knew the business because they had been following the page for some time – so don’t worry if no one likes or shares your posts – for every single person that ‘reacts’ to one of your posts there are a hundred others clapping and cheering – trust me.

This has ended up being a lot lengthier than I planned – the shades of grey in Social are what I love the most about marketing – ask questions – drop me an email or post here! Let’s chat!

Which Online Advertising Should I Use?

I started my Beauty business at the very time Facebook came to be. Not a stranger to advertising, but a complete novice to electronic marketing (we all were!), I learned electronic advertising from the ground up. Today I am going to try to shortcut this ‘advertising online’ options for you into two broad categories – Social and Search. It’s a huge topic and can be extremely involved. Today I am writing at top line only and will drill down in more detail in future blogs.

I caution you also that whatever works today and how it’s executed may not work next year. Online advertising changes ALL the TIME. You have to keep up – or have someone keep up for you! The other really key thing to remember about online advertising is that you are not the only person using it… read on!

Key Point Number One: Be relevant and be interesting – in a way that is specific to the medium you are advertising in..

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest, Linkedin – all are available for advertising, Facebook being the most common globally, and Instagram quickly gaining ground.

This is key with using Social Mediums: consumers come into each of the mediums with an expectation on what they should see there. You MUST show them appropriate content to meet their expectation of the platform and you MUST make it interesting – whether it’s a post or an ad.

On Social Platforms, promote and advertise areas of your business that have an ‘intrigue’ factor: such as looking younger for longer. or interesting ingredients – or anything people might not have considered and probably would not have Google searched – if you see a plumber advertising drain unblocking on Facebook, you probably won’t click through, but if you see a plumber posting about how to save water by installing some gadget, you might. The same goes in every industry – create a demand by being interesting. Let people get to know you and feel comfortable with who you are and what you can offer them.

On Social – outside of advertising – around 1 in 10 communications can be an offer. This is the single greatest mistakes Beauty businesses make on social – they spam relentlessly. Talk value not price. Deliver relevant information in an interesting way. Be surprising and be fun. Be real. At the end of the day, people really don’t care how many gaps you have in your day – they just want to know if you are relevant to them.

When placing ads on Social, the relevance of your ad to your targetted audience is the single most important thing. Ads that are deemed relevant to the audience will get far more exposure at far less cost. Happily, you can select SO MANY facets about your audience and their lifestyle when targeting ads on Social that being relevant to your ads becomes much easier and extremely affordable. Every business can afford to advertise on Social. The skill is in selecting the right medium and crafting the relevance of your ad.

When advertising on Social, drill down as far as you can to get the smallest, tightest audience to fit with your ad – and show them something that they will be sure to be interested in. Put multiple ads in a campaign and let the market decide which is stronger or more interesting and relevant. This drill-down factor is super important to your Social advertising success.

In this way you can have several tightly targeted advertising threads running at the same time independently of each other, each with multiple ads via multiple delivery channels (mobile, tablet, desktop).

I could write all day about Social Media Targeting and how incredible it is, but for today I’ll stay with the broad brush strokes.

Key Point Number Two: Think about whether or not the customer will actively search out your service.

Going beyond Social Media, if you have a product or service that people will be actively looking for at the time that they need it and otherwise not, advertise it in a place where they will look – here is where you use Google Adwords.

Google Adwords is the perfect place to put an ad for a local service that people will want to seek out – such as beauty therapy. There are three broad options for Adwords – Search, Display, and Video. For situations as described above, where people will seek out a service when they need it, use the Google Search option.

Adwords is also largely about being relevant – you need to find the right keywords and phrases to use, then you need to nominate how much you are prepared to pay for them, and how far up the list you want to go. Relevance to the customer’s search is everything. Think about the time of day your target customer will be searching – and schedule an ad campaign to run during that time only, using as a headline the phrase they are MOST likely to search on. Adwords takes time to finetune and perfect, but it is time well spent. Most of my ‘new’ Beauty Therapy clients came in from Google Adwords, as did a large number of the IPL clients in the early days.

Key Point Number Three: Think about who else might be advertising.

Think online silent auction. How Google Advertising works is that the highest bidder with the most relevant ad copy wins the highest [desired] place in the online listings. For some industries – beauty included, this can increase keyword costs considerably. However, there are ways and means of securing top spots without getting into a keyword price battle. If some other player has much more budget that you and wants to get the top spot, change your settings to target second or third spot and work on your ad’s relevance. While this challenges every word in your ad and definitely the headline for the ad, it is effort well spent. Keep trying until you hit something that works, then monitor it.

Run multiple ads and continue tweaking them over time. Set up mobile-only campaigns to change out to, and scheduled campaigns to start and finish at different times of the day to become unpredictable in your own patterns. Assuming relevance of your ads are high, running multiple campaigns is the single most difficult thing for competitors to track.

Which to use – Search or Social.

My recommendation is to use both – with low budgets. Think of it as a push/pull effect, with Social Platforms providing the ‘push’ (creating interest) and the Adwords Search ads providing the ‘pull” – reeling them in. You will found that the people you are targeting think you are everywhere – especially if you add remarketing to this mix, but actually, you are positioning and targeting closely so that you are seen frequently by those who you want to be seen by.

This topic of online advertising/online presence is so broad and has so many critical ‘outlying’ factors such as website SEO, Page Post Management, Google Display, Google Video, Remarketing and Custom List Marketing that I have tried to stay strictly with online advertising. Stay tuned for future blogs on the broader zones, or call/email me for a chat if you want future depth on how these areas can work for you.

How To Attract The Clients You Will Love To Keep

Behaviour of a particular type is a choice. People judge on behaviours. The behaviours of all those around you will affect how your business is seen – even those behaviours that are beyond your control.

Your potential clients will judge you from the first ring of your phone, the first seconds on your website and the first glimpse of your premises. Do all these interfaces say the same thing? They should. In a world where there is a plethora of choice, you need to craft your business personality and give your client something to believe in and to expect from you.

Many years ago, I was an aerobics instructor in a well known national chain of gyms. Standing up in front of over 100 people dressed in a g-string leotard (yes we really wore those things) – you’re kind of exposed. The way to deal with that is to present a ‘stage personality’ – give the people what they want. In this instance, the people were expecting extroverted loudness and super exuberant energy to uplift them – not a natural state for most people and definitely not for me. Each time I got up on stage it was ‘show time’. This is what you need to do too!

If you consider the fact that likes attract likes – and I did have some really cool ‘loud’ friends in those aerobics days – why would anyone want to deliver super-cheap to the beauty market – or to any service industry for that matter? Apart from delivering little margin – what does the discount approach really bring you… well, a few years ago, we got some insight into that…

In the days of super cheap deal sites in our industry, clients became very disrespectful. They moved from requesting to demanding to bullying – thinking that they had the right to name their price. If this is what you want – go ahead and run deals on deal sites.

However, if you wish to have a group of clients that you can have a genuine relationship with, and who will pay you a fair price for your work, you need to decide exactly who are you going to be – this is your show-time personality.

Now we are getting down to what your core values are – what you hold true in your heart as being more important than other things – honesty? integrity of knowledge? nurturing of others? respect? compassion? Core values are the guiding principles for the way in which your business will operate. Core values are every bit as important as your strategic goals. They determine what people should expect from you, your team, your business – even from the car parking and general surrounds. Core values are immediately undermined if every single aspect around your business does not reflect them. Core values are critical in site selection before you even open.

Right – now back to the part about attracting the clients you will love to see every day. Now that you have decided what your core values shall be – create five ways to bring them to life. This may be a professionally prepared placard in your waiting area saying ‘thank you for allowing us to take care of you today – we appreciate your business’, or a personalised take-home pack in the treatment room with the client’s name on a tag – like a personalised gift for her – or if you are running slightly late, an envelope with your next client’s name on it containing a $5 gift card and an apology for keeping her waiting. It’s nothing, but it will show her that you value her time. This client is very unlikely to arrive late in future – she will show you the same respect and value your time. Personal touches make an enormous difference to people. Bringing your values to life is the same thing as putting your heart into the business. Bring EVERY touch point back to your values – including all those exterior ones (clean windows, clean signs, clean pavement are three perfect examples of where core values become undermined).

OK so on to the involved topic of having other people represent your business – in particular, your team of therapists. This is an interesting thing, as often owners make the mistake of employing people who are just like them (like attracts like) because they are selecting on personality rather than on values. As it happens, you need a variety of personalities in a business to make it a whole – but that does not mean you can’t still extend or uphold your core values across different personalities. Core values are not personality bound and all personality types are able to uphold core values – behaviours are decisions. Your role as the leader is to manage those behaviours.

So – how do we achieve this? Simple – we select the right person by putting people on the spot during the interviewing process – if our top core value is nurturing people, just ask your candidate what they can think of as an example of really nurturing a client to make them feel special. if they come out with getting the client a glass of water after a facial – that may not be enough. You want the ones who can step up the effort in your areas of key concern. This is critical not only to your future success but also to your future freedom from your business. Recruiting on values is the only way to build a successful business unit – teaching skills is much easier than teaching values.

Before long if you put this simple regimen in place, your team will be offering exactly what you need them to – a truly nurturing environment – this is team culture.

Team culture is something that is felt – not spoken. When you enter an environment where positive core values are instilled, reinforced and upheld by all, you will feel the vibe. For the client that fits and also holds true these same values, it is truly like coming home. You can charge them what you need to charge – they won’t mind.  They will feel comfortable. Client fit is never about price.

So – what will your core values be, and what changes can you put in place to get them out there on the airways today?