Marketing advice for Spas, Salons and Massage Therapists

Creating A Personality For Your Brand

August 7, 2014

Brand Identity and Personality are distinct but closely related. Your brand identity is the visual image you create to communicate with your clients, including your logo, color scheme, or other repeating visual details. It is anything that your client (or potential client) sees that allows them to visually identify your business as distinct from your competition. Your brand personality is the emotional association that a client (or potential client) experiences when they think of your brand or see your logo. Personality helps create the emotions your client (or potential client) feels when they think of your brand or see your logo, as if they are thinking of a person rather than just a brand.

Knowing your brand personality can help determine how you communicate with your clients and how your business stands out in the community, especially compared to your competitors. Brand identity makes you recognizable. Brand personality makes you relatable.

Having a brand personality ensures that your communications will all look and feel like they are coming from the same place. It also allows you to be a storyteller and to become a business that people want to get to know better. People will always be more eager to speak about “a someone” rather than “a something”. By giving your brand a personality that comes across as more authentic in communications, you’ll get your clients excited and they’ll want to talk about you with their family and friends.

But how do you figure out what your brand personality is? Here are a few questions to consider when creating (or discovering) your brand personality.

Describe your business or brand with one adjective. Is it luxurious, trendy, hip, upscale, contemporary, etc?
What is the spirit of your brand? If you had to define the essence of your business in one word, what would you choose?
If your brand was a person, how would you describe him/her?
Who is your audience?
How do you want people to feel about your brand?

These questions should start to give you an idea about what the personality of your brand looks like. From there you can start to craft a personality to represent your brand.

Once you have created your brand personality, now is the time to cultivate it through your social media interactions, your blog, and your email marketing. It is a powerful social media tool for creating a relationship with your clients and for attracting the type of clients you really want. Don’t forget that brand personality is about the emotional association your clients feel when they see your logo or think about your brand. It is more about fostering a relationship with your clients rather than them just being able to identify your logo.

By having a strong brand personality, your clients will start to feel more like they have a personal relationship with your brand rather than just recognizing and liking your business. It gives your clients someone to talk about rather than just a brand. And that makes it much easier for them to become an advocate for your brand.

Creating A Strong Brand Identity

August 5, 2014

Your brand is so much more than just a logo or a name. It is a representation of what your business is and the experience you provide through your products and services. Your brand helps to differentiate you from other businesses in your area.

Brand management is the analysis and planning of your brand in your market, including planning out how to focus on your target demographic & how to maintain a good reputation for your brand. Knowing how to effectively manage your brand is key in this economy to ensure that your business continues to flourish.
But how do you make sure your brand is effective? Let’s take a look at some of the key things to consider when creating and managing your brand identity.

Develop a Personality and Image for your Brand
Your brand elicits emotions in your clients (both current and potential) when they see it. What sort of ideas and emotions do you want your brand to convey? An easier way to think about it is this: If your brand was a person, how would you describe their personality? Relaxed, luxurious, pampering, trendy, etc? From there, you can start to think about what your vision is for the brand and what your long-term goal is. In other words, what is your mission statement for your business and who is your target audience? All of these things put together help you develop the personality for your brand.

Create a Memorable Logo and Tag Line
Your logo is the most effective tool in building visual recognition for your brand. So take some time and effort to make it the most effective logo you can. Once you have developed the personality or image for your brand, creating a logo is the next step. Working with a graphic designer for this step can help you create the most powerful logo & color story to go with it. But don’t just stop there. Make sure that all of your communications with clients contain your logo and the color story drawn from that logo. Whether it is your website, social media, email communications, or even your collateral such as flyers, signage, or business cards, make sure your logo and color story carry throughout. Being consistent in your color story and logo will make your brand much more recognizable, and therefore more memorable.

Develop a Voice for your Brand
Developing a voice for your brand, one that matches your brand image, is the number one way to come across as authentic in your communications. You want your voice to reflect the personality and image of your brand. For instance, a luxury spa will have a very different voice than a trendy nail salon. By matching the voice of your brand to the personality and image of your business, your communications will come across much more effectively. This helps to tie your communications into your brand identity and makes your brand, and your business, much more relatable and recognizable.

Creating a powerful brand and managing it effectively is key to distinguishing yourself in the marketplace. It can help to focus your business and makes you more recognizable to clients (both current and prospective). It also gives you a strong foundation upon which to leverage and grow your business.

It’s Your Blog: Write What You Know

August 1, 2014

Writers sometimes experience ‘white page syndrome’, that dreaded condition where you know you need to produce relevant content for an article, and, for some reason, the muse refuses to produce worthwhile fodder for your effort.

Muses are fickle, and have their own agendas, so any experienced writer knows that having a more concrete approach to writing pays off. Your blog falls directly into this arena, doesn’t it? Do you find yourself wishing you had something to say? Do you become intensely self-critical, and edit yourself into nonperformance? Do you procrastinate until you finally release yourself from the obligation to write ‘until another day’, where you most likely will repeat the avoidance?

Guess what? You’re not alone! Very few people really enjoy writing. Seriously, most of the world prefers to have other people handle their content work, and trust me, there is no shame in that, none at all. But you can break through the content wall, the key is a simple plan and consistent follow through.

Set a schedule. If you create a real schedule around producing your blog posts you’ll feel an obligation to produce, and when you’re focusing elsewhere, like on providing client services, you brain can also be working on possible future topics, or be developing one you’ve already slated for creation. Start simple, maybe by opting for two articles a month at first. In time, increase that to one a week. Your clients will gradually build an expectation around your blog posts, and you’ll garner interest in the form of readers and comments, both of which help direct your future topic efforts.

Mix it up. Once you’ve set a theme of sorts for your articles, think variety. People love to feel like they have the inside track on information, so if you’ve introduced a new service to your menu, be sure to share your rationale on why you chose that, describe it in detail, and request feedback in your article. Are you active in your community? Be sure to mention events and share your passion for charitable efforts or various causes. Sharing your enthusiasm will engender more interest for a given endeavor as well as enlighten your clients about your breadth. When they begin to see you for more than a great salon or spa, their sense of loyalty and support will grow as well. Did you just bring in a new product line? Talk about it on your blog! Why did you choose it? What is special about it? Is there a relevant back-story to share? Over time you’ll find yourself viewing daily activities in your spa, salon or massage practice as potential topics for blog posts, and you’ll probably want to adjust your schedule to accommodate more articles.

Writing is a skill, one that simply needs practice to become adept at. Simple, clean, direct writing on topics that you truly care about will go a long way to filling your blog space and engaging your clients.

Enlist Your Clients In Your Success

July 30, 2014

When it comes to running a successful business, your clients are your greatest asset. They chose your business over others in the area and even refer their family and friends. So why not involve them in your success and find out from them what makes you so great and what you can do to improve? Here are some things to do with your clients to help make your business even better.

Engage Them
Your clients are a great resource for finding out what you are doing well and what you could do to be even better. So ask them. Set up a short questionnaire, and ask your clients to fill it out and provide feedback. Here is a sample list of 8 simple questions that you could ask your clients:

Why did you choose us
What sets us apart from similar businesses in the area
How would you describe us to your family and friends
Why do you refer us to others – And how do you refer people to us
What do we do best
What can we do better
What do you find most annoying about businesses like ours in this area
What do we not offer now that you would like to see us offer in the future

To promote feedback and participation, you could tie-in participation in the survey with a reward. Maybe it’s a free product or $10 off their next service. Or it could even be that they get entered into a drawing for a larger prize, like a free premiere service.

Listen to Them
Once you start to get results back from the surveys, make sure you actually pay attention to what your clients have to say. They took the time to share their thoughts with you. Don’t just let that slide. Really pay attention to what they had to say – both good and bad – and consider how you can use their feedback and advice to create an even better experience for them when they come to see you.

Don’t forget to listen not only to your top clients, but to all your clients. It could be that a few small changes to your business offerings could mean that some of your “sometimes” clients become top clients. They’re your clients and they know what they want, so use the feedback from them to determine what you are doing well and what you could improve. From there, you have nowhere to go but up and up!

Ready To Setup A Rewards Program?

July 24, 2014

Returning clients spend an average of 67% more than new clients. So it only makes sense to focus on bringing your clients back again and again. One great way to do that is to reward them for being loyal customers. SpaBoom offers great functionality for running your rewards program. But before you turn it on there is a lot to think about. Here are some things to ask yourself when you’re ready to set up your rewards program.

What activities do you want to reward?
You want to make sure you are rewarding behaviors that help your business to grow, either in the number of clients you have or the amount of revenue being generated. Some of the most popular activities to reward are:

Purchasing Gift Certificates
Purchasing Services
Using Online Booking
Purchasing Deals
Referrals for services or purchases
Signing up for Email Marketing
Share with a Friend
Shared Friend Signups

How many points will be rewarded for each activity?
You need to decide what sorts of behavior you want to reward the most. Is it more important to keep your clients coming back again and again? Then make purchases and services worth more points than referrals. Or maybe referrals are more important, so you would want to make referrals for services or actual signups worth more points. The default in the Rewards setup is 1 point per dollar spent and 100 points for email newsletter signup. But you can change these and fully customize the point values for each individual activity.

How much is each point worth?
A good starting point might be to make 10 points worth $1. This makes it easy for your clients to quickly earn rewards, which is a good thing. SpaBoom gives you full control over how much each point is worth, so you can decide what works best for your business. But keep in mind that people who participate in a rewards program typically want to be able to redeem their points in 3-6 months. So making it easy to earn points, and easy to redeem them, will make your rewards program much more effective.

What rewards do you want to offer?
Create rewards and incentives that your clients desire, but also that are unique to your business. You also want to make sure that your Rewards program is helping to grow your business and isn’t hurting your bottom line. So keep that in mind when deciding on rewards. Some rewards options are:

Discounts on services
Gift certificates for services or products
Bonus products
Add-on experiences
Monthly special – an exclusive offer for reward members

Studies show that clients tend to be happier with rewards other than discounts. But now might be a good time to ask both your staff, and some of your top clients, what they think the rewards should be. Tailoring your rewards to meet the needs of your clients will make your program more successful.

How will you promote it?
Be sure you promote it on your website and via social media. But, more importantly, make sure your staff are ambassadors for your program. They should all understand how it works and why it is a benefit to both the client and the business. Some spas even have displays showing what you can receive at each point level. Talking with your clients about your rewards program should be part of the checkout process at the end of every visit. Let them know how many points they currently have, and also what they can redeem them for, as well as an incentive for re-booking at the time of checkout.

How will your clients earn, track, and redeem points?
This one is easy. SpaBoom rewards make it easy to do all of this from your SpaBoom account. You can even set it up to automatically redeem points. When a certain level is reached, SpaBoom will automatically send your client a congratulatory email with their reward attached as a gift certificate. We also make it easy for your staff to look up how many points a client has earned and redeem them right there while the client is still at your front desk. Efficiency in use guarantees a successful rewards program.

You are now ready to turn on and set up your Rewards program in SpaBoom. But keep in mind that your rewards program is a living entity. Follow-up regularly with your clients to make sure your program is meeting their needs as well as yours and that the rewards are really worth it. Communicate with them regularly, both about what is available in the rewards program this month, and also about how many points they have currently. And make changes as needed to keep it competitive and successful.

A successful rewards program not only rewards your clients for their loyalty, but can help to reinforce the relationship they have with your business. Making it an easy program for your clients to participate in, and also for your staff to administer, will ensure that your clients are happy and keep them coming back for more.

Need help getting your Rewards program set up? Give us a call. We’re always happy to help!

Stabilizing Economy = Opportunity For Small Businesses

July 22, 2014

After years of holding our collective breath, it appears that the economy is finally trending in the right direction. Growth is looking good, and inflation is under control. The big economic indicators bode well for the next few years, with projections of steady improvement characterizing the forecasts. This is a tremendous thing for small business, because once word gets out via national and social media that things are looking up, people will begin to breathe sighs of relief and allow themselves to enjoy services that reach further than just ‘maintenance and necessary.’

Remaining top-of-mind with your clientele means gearing your marketing and promotions to ‘meet them where they’re at.’ (Pardon the grammar, but the phrase works, here.) Where they’re at may be in a place where they are giving themselves permission to purchase services that move a tad beyond the pure ‘have to’ into the ‘ok, so I also want this add on..’ arena. That can mean extending a 60 minute massage to 90 minutes, choosing to go with a deep conditioning following a style and highlight, opting for a mani/pedi combination in lieu of just regular manicures, or choosing the rejuvenating facial with ultra-softening mask over the basic facial.

Up-selling now requires finesse and a good plan. Look at your service menu and consider ways that you might entice your clients.

Are there ways for you to add perceived value to the next-tier services without incurring real costs? When clients perceive they are receiving more for their money, they’re likely to invest in the next option ‘up’ the menu.

Will something as subtle as opting to list your services from most indulgent to more economical help? Order of sight matters, too. If your clients are seeing your most economical services at the top of your menu, they’ll have to think harder about moving to the next level than if they see the most indulgent first and the middle option (the one you’re wanting to encourage now) right below it.

Winning higher level sales means your clients will be enjoying services that they may have waited years to justify and you’ll be generating a boosted revenue stream as well.

Now’s the time to get creative with ways to enrich the experiences of your clients and create higher average tickets as you do it.

It’s another win-win.

3 Healthy Marketing Habits To Start Tomorrow

July 18, 2014

You work so hard to build your business and you want to help it continue to grow. Here are 3 healthy marketing habits you can start today to help you strengthen and grow your business in this economy.

Provide Excellent Customer Service
First and foremost, you want to make sure your clients are receiving excellent customer service every single time they interact with your business. From trying to find something on your website, to speaking to someone on the phone when they call, or the actual experience they have when they come in to make a purchase or receive a treatment, every interaction is an opportunity to build your relationship through stellar customer service. It should be the foundation of your business and an important part of staff training. Providing excellent customer service is the greatest indication of future success. It also allows you to build a relationship with your clients and that can make them even more loyal.

Be Consistent with your Branding/Marketing
Whether it is at your physical location, on your website, or via social media or email, make sure that your clients are receiving a consistent message with consistent branding. Make sure your logo is used across all communications. Clients are often much more comfortable with a uniform recognizable format to your blog posts or email communications. That way, they know as soon as they see it in their inbox that it is from you.

Maintaining a consistent message across all social media platforms makes your message even more powerful. This is not to say that every single place should have exactly the same format. A twitter message is very different from a blog post or a longer message on Facebook. But they should all boil down to a consistent overall message across all platforms.

By being consistent, you make yourself more recognizable. And by being more recognizable, your clients start to feel more familiar and comfortable with your business overall.

Analyze Your Marketing
You put a lot of time and effort into coming up with your marketing campaigns and then promoting them in-house and via social media, email, and your website. But many people spend all their time coming up with marketing and leave little time to analyze what worked and what didn’t. And that is a big mistake. If you don’t take the time to figure out what is working and why, you’re just wasting a lot of your marketing time, energy, and dollars. So run statistics on what promo gift certificates are redeemed the most. Pay attention to your stats on Facebook and your website to see what posts are the most viewed or have the most responses.

What Net Neutrality Means To Small Businesses

July 15, 2014

On May 15, 2014, the FCC proposed new rules to govern internet access. The new plan would allow internet service providers (ISPs) to charge extra to large companies like Google or AT&T for preferential treatment (such as faster delivery of information). The problem with this is that it then creates a two-tiered internet: a superhighway for businesses who can afford to pay and a dirt road for all of us smaller businesses. You can read more about net neutrality in our blog post from last month: Should You Care About Net Neutrality?

But why should you care anyway? Internet is still internet, right? Well, actually, it’s not. Net Neutrality is the definition of an open internet and it ensures our right to communicate freely. Without it, the internet is up for bid and those with the most money will have the most control not only over what sort of information you can send as a business but also over what your clients can receive as consumers. Without net neutrality, big companies such as Verizon or AT&T would have the power to choose whether or not your website is available and whether or not your clients can access it.

Here are just a few reasons why net neutrality is especially important for small businesses:

The loss of net neutrality will affect the ability of people to find and access your website
People are busy these days and don’t want to waste a lot of time. When they pull up your website, they expect it to load quickly and easily. If it doesn’t, they may just decide it is taking too long and move on to your competitor.

Without net neutrality, small businesses won’t have the necessary resources to put themselves into the internet fast lane, which could mean slower load times, or clients who cannot even access your site due to their ISP deciding not to carry it (similar to cable companies). This means that the internet would no longer be a level playing field and it will most certainly hurt not only your ability to conduct business online, but also your ability to simply promote your business effectively online.

The internet will no longer be a level playing field
A free and open internet, where no ISP can decide what you can and cannot post or read, is a key foundation of Net Neutrality, and it is what the internet was based upon. Without net neutrality, ISPs would be able to give preferential treatment to those who can afford to pay for it, and users would no longer have access to everything posted on the web. It means that small businesses would no longer be able to compete on the same level as bigger companies. It stifles competition, but more importantly, it stifles innovation. Many small businesses would never be able to get off the ground without a free and open internet. It diminishes progress and the overall sharing of information for all of us.

For your business, it could mean that users in your area may no longer be able to access your website at all, or it may be buried underneath the results of bigger companies in your area, or those with deeper pockets. It would have a major negative effect on your online presence, unless you have the funds available to push yourself up to the superhighway. And the sad truth is that most small businesses just don’t have the funds to compete with larger corporations. Without net neutrality, we’ll fall behind the big guys, and that could mean the end of our businesses.

So what can we do?
The new rules were proposed on May 15, 2014, and we are now in the midst of a comment period, before the FCC makes their ruling on September 15th. Everyone is welcome to submit a comment to the FCC and we encourage you to do so.
But, more importantly, contact your representatives in Congress and let them know how important Net Neutrality is to you. Many feel that the only way to truly ensure net neutrality, is for Congress to make it a part of law, by adding it to an updated version of the Telecommunications Act, and there is a movement to do just that. This would take the decision making out of the hands of unelected officials at the FCC, and put it into the hands of elected officials, who are accountable to the American people.

There is a huge movement to protect and ensure net neutrality, but, as small business owners, all of us need to speak up and become part of the conversation. It is just that important.

3 Secrets To Successful Promotions

July 11, 2014

Promotions can be an effective way to build your business. A good promotion creates buzz and can help bring in new clients or introduce your regular clients to new services. A great promotion allows you to do the same without costing your bottom line.

But a mistake many of us make is that we don’t devote enough time and thought to designing our marketing strategy and planning out our promotions over the course of the year. We get caught up running our business and leave planning of promotions to the last minute, which can lead to lost opportunities and promos that just aren’t effective.

A little bit of planning goes a long way. Set aside some time to lay out your marketing plan and plan out your promotions for the next year. Identify promo opportunities, such as holidays, local events, and specific times of the year, that might otherwise slip through the cracks if you wait until the last minute. Having a plan in place allows you to maximize your resources and gives you more lead-time to design effective promotions. Creating a plan also gives you the opportunity to revisit it regularly to review what is and is not working and then make changes to improve it.

This is also a great time to involve your staff. Utilize their creativity & expertise when putting together the plan. Successful promos will come from having a staff that not only understands the purpose behind why the promotion is being offered, but also feels like they had a stake in coming up with the ideas.

Here are three key things to think about when planning promotions.

What is the purpose of this promotion?

Promotions can have a number of purposes depending on the needs of your business at any given time. Targeting the focus of your promos allows you to drive your customers to do what you want them to do. The most common reasons to have a promotion are to:

bring in new business
create value incentives
feature a person, product, or service
boost business during slow hours, days, or months

Who is your audience?

Knowing your audience allows you to tailor the promotion to meet their needs and expectations.

Are you offering this promotion to your entire email list or just to a select group like your VIPs?
Perhaps you are looking to bring in new business

Figuring out your target audience allows you to design a promotion that fits their wants while fulfilling your business needs.

What is the incentive?

Incentive is the piece of your promotion that encourages your audience to do something. In this case, it is to take advantage of your promotion. The most common incentives are:

Price savings – offering a service for a discounted amount or bundling it into a package deal
Value-added offers – offering add-ons to a purchase, such as extra services or a gift with purchase
Coupons – a percentage or dollar discount

When considering the incentive, be sure to take into account how the incentive will affect your bottom line. A successful promotion has an incentive that makes both the client and you winners.

So you’ve created & run what you hoped was a successful promotion and now it’s over. Now is the time to you go back and evaluate the effectiveness of your promo. Some questions to ask:

Did the promo successfully meet the purpose?
Did we get the expected response from our target audience?
Did the promo bring in more money than it cost to run?

This is the perfect opportunity to figure out what worked and what didn’t work and use that information when creating future promotions.

By taking some time to create a marketing plan, and then devoting just a little bit of time on an on-going basis to evaluate and update that plan, you are setting yourself up to run successful promotions designed to help you grow a successful business.

Using Collateral To Manage Your Brand

July 9, 2014

Brand identity is so important when putting together any sort of marketing or communication for your clients. You always want to make sure that you are including your logo and that it is consistently presented across all platforms. From your website, to emails, social media platforms, and even in your business, making sure you have a consistent brand identity not only makes you more recognizable, but can also make you feel more familiar to your clients.

SpaBoom provides you with many powerful tools to allow you to manage your brand and market it effectively. One of the most powerful modules for doing this in your business is our Collateral module.

The Collateral module of your SpaBoom account makes it easy for you to create and print comment cards, email signup forms, and even signs or promo inserts for all your marketing needs. We’ve already put several different beautiful designs into your SpaBoom account. And the best part: your logo is automatically included when the collateral is created, helping you maintain and grow your brand identity throughout all those communications with your clients. All you need to do is choose the design you like and print it out. Here’s how:

Click on the Marketing Tab and then select collateral from the left hand column.
You will see a list of templates with names like “4 per page: BEVELED, TOP Logo, with  gift offer”. These are just names for slightly different layouts.
Click on one to take you to the “Edit Collateral Piece” page. On this page you can make  minor adjustments to the paper size and the format (how large each piece will print). If you make a change to either of these, don’t forget to click “Save” before you print or review your collateral.
Want to see what your collateral will look like? Click on the link at the bottom that says “Print or view your collateral piece (PDF). This opens up the collateral and lets you see what it actually looks like.
When the pdf is open, you can choose to print it to your printer in the office right there. OR, you can save the pdf to your computer and then send it off to your regular print shop.

It’s as easy as that! Collateral is a great way to promote feedback and interaction with your clients at the perfect moment: when they’re standing in your business.

It is also a great tool for managing your brand identity and a great way to easily create and print out signage for sales you’re having or inserts for upcoming promotions to include in the bag with any purchases, all with your logo included in the design. Why not get started today?

Need help editing or creating a new piece of collateral? Give our support team a call. We are always happy to help!

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