Digital marketing is one of the most important aspects of any business, even as a professional in the personal service industry. There are many ways that you can use digital marketing to your advantage. More importantly, there are vital signs that you need more digital marketing in your marketing plans to elicit more success.
At First Chair Solutions, we are well versed in digital marketing and know how to apply it to any business looking for improved marketing and promotions.
Signs You Need Digital Marketing
There are many ways that you might feel you need digital marketing. Here are some of the most important signs that you need a shift in their digital marketing plans:
- You lack a consistent brand presence
- You have been struggling to get clients
- You don’t have the trust of a base set of customers yet
- You don’t have a marketing plan that you find successful
If any of these signs sound like you, you need a new marketing plan or even a new digital marketing strategy.
Why Should You Have a Digital Marketing Strategy?
If you are a hairstylist, barber, nail technician, or masseuse, you might be wondering why digital marketing matters. In many cases, you might have more luck without digital marketing! Much of your customer base comes from word of mouth, and the trust people have in your services.
However, there are important reasons why digital marketing would be a beneficial addition to your current traditional marketing efforts and why you should consider hiring a digital marketing agency to assist you with this task.
Creates More Brand Awareness
If you are unsure what your brand is and people aren’t grasping your message as a company, it might be a good idea to start engaging in digital marketing. If you have multiple digital channels, you can take advantage of this and spread your brand even more.
Whether you choose Instagram or Facebook, there are many ways to communicate your brand. Through posts, images, videos, and more, you can share with your potential customer base precisely what your brand is. The best part is that the more you post, the more your customers know your message. All it takes is consistency and attention to detail to ensure continuity.
Potential Clients Will Find You
Instead of relying on the hopes of people spreading the word around about your work, digital marketing helps you connect with potential clients. They will find you based on your content and your trends, allowing you to market your business and attract more people as time goes on.
This organic customer conversion will significantly benefit your business and demonstrates the value that implementing digital marketing has for your services business. During the pandemic, the organic walk-in customers disappeared, thus making digital marketing for this purpose even more important than ever before.
Build Loyalty and Trust
This is one of the most important reasons why people should spend more time with digital marketing. Within the service industry, loyalty and trust are among the most important ways for people to keep their customers.
What people value more than a good service is a good relationship. As a personal service professional, your greatest gift to people is a great experience. People can go anywhere for their hair, nails, or massages, but they want to return to someone they feel comfortable with and enjoy seeing when they arrive.
As a hairstylist or barber, this means providing a comfortable and pleasant experience at the salon. As a nail technician or a masseuse, this means entertaining and providing customers with excellent treatments. It is not difficult to make a customer for life through quality customer service.
Loyalty and trust in the product or service and the professional provide a winning combination for success. Through digital marketing, you have the chance to show people they can trust you. If what you present is precise as you perform the service, you will have repeat customers repeatedly.
How Can I Implement Digital Marketing in My Business?
No matter your profession, there are a few ways that you can implement digital marketing into your marketing plan. It doesn’t happen overnight, but these changes can lead to improvements in your business over time.
Optimizing Your Website
Having a website is the start of a great marketing plan, but you have to make sure that your business website is optimized. Without lead generation potential, your website will struggle to see any traction or consistent visitors.
There are many ways that you can make a lead generation website. Here are some of the primary ways that people have been able to improve their website:
- Simplify your webpages
If you have websites that make you confused, then you have to change your web pages. Every webpage on your website should be easy to read and without too much information. Too little knowledge will turn away the customer, but too much will overwhelm them.
To make it easy, make sure that every webpage is easy to understand where you can navigate. If the customer can’t find the correct information or the page they want to view, they likely won’t revisit your website.
- Make the customer journey easy.
Customers shouldn’t get lost on your website. It should be easy for them to find out what services you offer, how much it costs, and where they can receive these items. Customers should have a straightforward journey without too many web pages to browse before arriving at the essential details.
One of the simple ways to make this a pleasant journey for your customer is through an accessible menu. This will tell them all they have access to, read more, and the critical contact information for your business.
- Every page should have a call to action.
Without a call to action, you will struggle to see customers visiting you for your services. If you want to sell people on your products or services, you must have a call to action on every webpage of your website.
The most effective calls to action lead to where the customer can make a purchase or an appointment. This can be added to any webpage: on the sidebar or the bottom of the page.
Search Engine Optimization
Also known as SEO, this is especially important for appearing near the top results on the search engines. If you can find the right keywords that are unique from competitors and what is trending, you will be able to stand out and attract more visitors.
Search Engine Optimization is one of the best ways to create organic traffic. By doing basic research or employing the help of a digital marketing agency, you will have the right tools to create a clean and helpful SEO plan for your website and social media.
Social Media Presence
As a personal service professional, there are so many ways for you to show off your work on social media and create a presence for yourself. Social media is one of the many ways people remain in touch with one another, but it is also a large part of how people share great ideas or photos.
There are many ways that any profession in the personal service industry can use this to their advantage.
- As a hairstylist, you can seek permission from key clients or use models to showcase your work, your hairstyles, and the value of your customer service.
- As a barber, you can show off sleek haircuts for men, essential products you use, and other critical promotional events you have for your business.
- As a nail technician, you can show off fabulous nails, new promotions, and other products that you love and use in your store.
- Masseuses can share tranquil photos of their massage rooms, essential stretches, and facts about massages, and other essential details customers would see value in.
Why Use Facebook and Instagram Ads
Facebook and Instagram are some of the most popular social media channels currently online. Together they have over 3.9 billion individuals on their platforms alone. This is over half of the world population. While you might not have a global business, this is excellent news for your company.
Facebook and Instagram both have become more business-friendly in recent years. It used to be mainly for individuals, but now it has become a global platform for commerce. Individuals can even book appointments and visit websites through their profiles!
- Facebook Ads
As the largest social media platform currently on the web, you need to use Facebook for your marketing needs. The website specializes in capturing user data and allows the user to even submit their data with ease to a product or service of their interest.
With Facebook Ads, you also have the chance to change your objective. Maybe you want to have more people visit your Facebook page rather than your website. Facebook can quickly help you with this change and help you accomplish your marketing goals.
- Instagram Ads
Instagram is owned by the same platform, which means that many of their capabilities are precisely the same. Using Facebook Ad Manager, you can create your ads for both platforms. You can even run the same ad and make sure that there is consistency across both platforms.
One thing to note is that Instagram is better for brand awareness, whereas Facebook is better for a call to action. If you want to make the sale, focus on your website or Facebook. If you’re going to increase your brand awareness, be sure to focus more on Instagram and its capabilities.
Your solid and consistent social media presence will either gain a new follower, have a new visitor to your website, or maybe even both! Social media marketing is beneficial to serve the needs of your growing business. If you are unsure how to proceed in this task, there are always digital marketing servicesto assist you with your digital marketing tactics.
Tips for Hair Stylists, Barbers, Nail Technicians, and Masseuses
There are several ways for you to add more to your digital marketing campaigns and your advertising. Whether you style hair or do nails, or give massages, these are some helpful tips for you to use to make your digital marketing more effective and to show the customer the right content, so they make the purchase.
Stay on Trend
This depends on your style and your target market, but this will be incredibly important if you service younger generations in any capacity. Keeping up to date with trends will keep you essential and talked about in the community.
If you see a new hairstyle and post a photo of it on Instagram, you’ll likely have a few hits because it is what everyone is talking about.
With a new set of nails inspired by the latest celebrity red carpet event, you will have people discuss whether they should do the same to their hands.
As a masseuse, if you post content regarding the latest health discussions about massages, you will likely have a few people messaging you for more information.
Staying on-trend might take effort, but it pays off in ways you will never imagine!
Use Geotagging to Find Potential Customers
If you are located in a particular region and small business, geotagging can help you stay connected to your community. Even in a small town, you will reach more people if you can track your location.
Facebook allows you to check in to places, even your own business. This can be helpful to give people a potential call to action to come and visit your location themselves.
On Instagram, you can tag your location and use hashtags. This helps you connect to people who search multiple areas of the site for places and stores.
Location-based marketing and advertising help businesses stay local, retain local customers, and potentially find new customers in the area.
Before and Afters
For the hairstylists, barbers, and nail technicians, this is a must if you want to wow your customers. Seeing peoples’ before and after pictures often convinces people that they need to have the same service completed.
Perhaps you showcase a photo of a woman after she got her haircut, colored, and styled in a new way to show off her cheekbones better.
Maybe you present your social media following with a photo of a male customer with a new haircut from your promotional weekend sale.
You might even want to show the final result of your client’s nails after they asked you to use that new product.
No matter how you present it, the before and after photo sets help people see the results you can produce, showing them trustworthy and valuable personal service professionals.
Show Off Your Personality
If you have ever watched a commercial where the narrator and the video lacked personality at all, you probably don’t remember it. That’s because that sort of content–the bland, dry, and straight-to-the-point ads–can be incredibly dull, and they don’t sell people on your business.
These days, personality is the way that people can show off their business. It is not all about being professional but also being approachable. Some of the most successful companies in several industries are successful not because of their solely professional demeanor but despite their ability to deviate from this.
There are subtle and significant ways to show off your personality, even online and with a digital presence that is growing:
- Use personable and conversational language
- Use hashtags that are important to you and your brand
- Use emojis to show off your character
- Share images that are not just picture-perfect but have personality
- Don’t be afraid to share behind the scenes photos
Digital marketing is not about being perfect but about meeting your customer with content they want to engage with. The truth is, no one wants to read an infomercial. People want something funny, fresh, and memorable that they can remember and return to when they want to make the appointment or the purchase.
Treat Your Social Media Pages Like Mini Websites
There is nothing worse than starting a social media channel, gaining traction, and letting the whole platform slip inconsistency. If you want to be successful with your digital marketing, you must find ways to continue to show content on your platforms.
If you see your Facebook and your Instagram or other platforms as mini websites, you will be able to connect them. The ultimate goal should be to either convert the user on the social media platform or send them to your website.
In most cases, it is always better to convert the user on the social media platform. If you genuinely created a smaller version of your website, they should be able to access anything they need on your Facebook or your Instagram.
Discover Your Message and Stick With It, Unless Change is Inevitable
It is unreasonable to stick to the same brand message for the entirety of your career, but keeping a consistent message will do wonders for your business. Digital marketing is meant to convey your brand’s message, and if it is inconsistent, your customers won’t know what you are attempting to share with them.
Before you even embark on your digital marketing efforts, you need to have a standard brand message that you want to share. Your customers need this just as much as your business does. Think of your message like a reliable tool: whenever you need it, your message will be there to remind clients of what they receive from you.
If you have multiple audiences, you can find ways to connect with them and share different messages. People can do this by sharing diverse media, connecting with your followers, or even being clear on who you want to be for your particular demographics. Even though this sounds difficult, it isn’t as hard as you might think.
Don’t Be Afraid to Spend Some Money.
Digital marketing is free in some cases, but to make a difference, you might have to invest a bit more time and effort than you can at the very start. For an excellent digital marketing plan, you can expect to pay comparable prices to your traditional marketing likely costs.
The most crucial aspect of your digital marketing plan should be your budget. If you can’t pay for your marketing plans, you can’t promote your business. Luckily, several internet platforms like Google and Instagram have made it easier than ever for people to schedule and budget themselves accordingly.
Why Digital Marketing?
Many people might shrug off digital marketing, but it is becoming one of the most important ways people can share their business and services. For hairstylists and masseuses alike, learning how to use digital marketing effectively is an excellent decision for the future of your business.
The internet has made it possible so that anyone can make their own promotional and advertising materials. It has helped lower the barrier to entry, as anyone can learn how to do digital marketing. No matter your skill level, digital learning marketing will do wonders for your business. In a short amount of time, digital marketing has become the main form of advertising for many small businesses.
About First Chair Solutions
At First Chair Solutions, we know all about digital marketing, and we want to help you further your business. We offer a variety of services for you and your business. No matter what type of professional you are in the personal service industry, we can help you every step of the way.
Our team offers professional services in the following areas:
- Social Media Marketing
- Facebook and Instagram Ads
- Dynamic Inventory Advertising
- Digital Video, Connected TV, Streaming Media
- Programmatic Display and Audio
- Website and Google Analytics
First Chair Solutions also offers several services within branding, media services, and web services. We’re happy to consult and help you plan digital marketing that applies to your specific business.
To learn more about our services, reach out to uson our website. We’d be happy to discuss further details and find the best digital marketing solution to ensure your business’s success in the future.
