Creating Customers | SpaBoom

The Power of Storytelling

September 22, 2014

We’ve talked a lot lately about how to build your brand, through creating a personality and voice. And one of the most effective ways to do that is with storytelling. The best brands are good at telling stories, both about their company history and their clients’ experiences. But why is storytelling so effective as a marketing tool?

Storytelling is an ancient form of communication, one in which we all have a long history. From the time we are small we are told stories as a way to inform, educate, and entertain. We are wired to crave stories and to feel like we are a part of them. At some point we’ve all been completely mesmerized by a good story.

With the popularity of social media, and the personal connections and stories that we are addicted to having daily, storytelling is even more important. Storytelling allows you to connect with your clients. But more importantly, a story allows your clients to feel a more personal connection to your business. It allows you to build a persona for your brand, to set your brand up as a relatable commodity and as an authority that your clients can turn to when they are looking for advice.

So how can you start incorporating storytelling into your content marketing? Here are a few ideas to get you started:

Tell the story of why you decided to open the business or how you went about becoming a small business owner
Talk about challenges you have faced and the successes you have had, both personally and as a business
Talk about your staff – share their stories so that your clients will start to feel a more personal connection to them
Engage your audience – ask them questions about their life, what they want to see from your business, or what sorts of activities they are interested in
Share stories from events or volunteer activities that your business or staff are involved in
Tell the stories of your clients and their interactions with you, your business, and your community

Incorporating more storytelling into your content marketing sounds like a hard task. But in reality we are all storytellers already. It’s just a matter of writing our stories down and sharing them with our communities.

The power of storytelling can help you establish your brand identity and voice. By building a more personal relationship with your clients, you’ll solidify their connection with you. And you’ll see that reflected in growing brand loyalty and increased sales. After all, people tolerate a good pitch, but they love a good story.

Building Brand Advocates

August 20, 2014

Successful marketing is, first and foremost, about building relationships. Building a good relationship with your clients can turn them into advocates for your brand, increasing your reach and helping you to build a solid reputation and business through referrals.

But creating brand advocates takes time and effort to not only build that client relationship but to nurture it. Here are some effective ways to build a relationship with your clients and help turn them into brand advocates for your business.

Deliver Good Customer Service
I say it all the time. Good Customer Service is the foundation of every successful business. Every experience your clients have with you should be a positive and well delivered one. From the moment they first visit your website or Facebook page, call to make an appointment (or book one online), or walk through your front door to receive their service, every moment is an opportunity to deliver a positive, and consistent, experience to your clients. That should always be the first step in building a relationship with your client. Before a client can become a brand advocate, they have to be happy with their personal experiences with your business. And if they are happy with your business, they’ll go out and tell all their friends about you.

Keep Your Clients Engaged
Keep your clients engaged on a regular basis via social media, your blog, or in email. Different people want contact in different ways, so make sure you are covering all the bases. Give them content that is interesting to them (and most definitely more than just promos or specials). Offer them expert advice, ask them questions that encourage feedback and interesting discussions, or share information about what is going on with your business and your staff. If you set yourself up as a trusted resource, your clients will start to view you as an expert, and they’ll tell all their family and friends about you as well.

Focus On Your Clients
Your clients know what they want and need from your business. So take some time out regularly to focus on what your clients need or want from your business. Regularly ask them for feedback and really listen to what they have to say. Then act on it in whatever ways work best for both your business and your clients’ needs. If your clients feel like you really care about what they think and what their needs are, they are not only going to be happier, but they’re going to go out and share that with their network of people.

It’s not a huge leap from happy customer to brand advocate. Many of the things you do everyday to help grow a successful business are the same things that can help turn happy clients into advocates for your brand. But it does require a concerted, genuine, and focused effort on your part. Building and maintaining good relationships with your clients is key to creating a successful brand, and satisfied clients who are happy to advocate on your behalf with their family and friends.

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.

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!

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.

Do You Market Wellness?

May 27, 2014

As trained professionals, you have become adept at observing, closely, your clients’ hair, skin, and bodies. Identifying when something just isn’t right, or isn’t as it should be, comes with the territory. Sharing that information with your clients in a non-medical advice way can deepen your relationship and add a level of credibility that you might not have felt existed.

Case in point?

Lovely tresses provide a psychological boon, and simply make us feel well kept as well as stylish. Hair also speaks of overall health. Dry, brittle hair may point to a need to supplement and add nutritional elements that a person may be lacking. Loss of hair, depending upon where the loss is, how severe the loss may be, and when it occurs, may point to deeper health concerns that require medical support to address.

Massages support overall wellness, reduce stress, faciliate lymphatic movement and support a healthy lifestyle.

Regular pedicures can not only beautify the tootsies, but can also support healthy feet. Preventing ingrown toenails, softening and reducing callouses, providing foot massage which not only feels heavenly but also reduces stress and calms the mind..these are a few of the benefits.

Professional aesthetics help in the fight with age, provide a way to identify any skin changes that may deserve an appointment with a dermatologist, and make us feel fabulous. How can a smooth, soft complexion NOT improve a person’s day?

The wellness benefits of regular hair, body and skin care are extensive. Historically the focus has been on the pampering and more superficial enjoyment that comes from good care in these areas, and really, that is great. But there’s more, and it’s deeper.

Do you market the wellness benefits of your services? If you don’t, you should. Not doing so means you’re missing out on a way to position your services as not only feel good, but beneficial on a deeper level. From a competitive standpoint, being seen as not just providing the fluffy stuff, but actually imbuing health and wellness into treatments will encourage deeper client loyalty and prevent casual straying. Positioning as an expert that gets all aspects of hair, body and skin treatments will engender trust and help foster client retention.

And retention, unless it’s water (which, interestingly enough could be reduced with lymphatic massage!), is a good thing.

SpaBoom Feature: Customer Retention

May 22, 2014

Customer retention is important in order to grow and maintain a healthy business. Maintaining regular contact with your clients can make the difference between them returning to your business or going with the next business down the street.

SpaBoom makes retaining customers easy with our Customer Retention functionality. It allows you to send email communications to customers in two different categories: those who haven’t visited you in a short or long while, and those who purchased a gift certificate almost a year ago for specific events (birthday, holiday, anniversary). Let’s take a look at how these work.

Visit Reminders

Visit reminders can be used if you are using Booking or Rewards functionality in SpaBoom. Clients are reminded if they haven’t been back to see you in a short while (usually 30-60 days, depending on your business type) and a second email is sent if a longer period passes between visits (usually 90-120 days). The longer period email will have an offer attached to it, to motivate them to come back and see you again. Visit reminders are a great way to stay in touch with your clients who may have gotten too busy to remember to schedule an appointment.

Purchase Reminders

Purchase reminders are used to remind a customer, who purchased a gift certificate almost a year ago, that the event they purchased it for (birthday, anniversary, holiday) is coming up again soon and suggest it is time to purchase another gift certificate for that same event this year. It’s a good way to stay in touch with those clients who used you last year and may have forgotten about you since then, and also provides a friendly reminder to them that a gift-giving opportunity is coming up soon.

Using Customer Retention can help you catch those clients who may get busy and lost in the shuffle of life, and remind them to come back and see you again.

We’ve made it easy to use the SpaBoom Client Retention functionality, just turn it on, make sure the email content looks good, and then let the system do all the work for you.

Here’s how:

Go to the Marketing tab and turn on Customer Retention at the bottom of the page
Once turned on, you will see 1-3 emails depending on the functionality you are using (booking and rewards)
You can go in and review the content of these emails, and edit them if you like. Go in and view the offer attached to the long period with no visit email to make sure it’s correct as well

And that’s it! Once you’ve turned on Customer Retention, and verified the content of the emails and the offer, you’re all set. The day after you turn it on, SpaBoom will take it from there and automatically send these reminder emails to your clients. It’s that easy!

With so much competition for business these days, SpaBoom’s Customer Retention is an important feature to help you stay in touch with your clients.

Have questions or need help setting up Customer Retention? Give us a call! We’re always happy to help.

3 Key Things to Help Your Business Grow

May 19, 2014

You’ve worked hard and invested a lot of time and money in your business. And now you’d like to see your business grow. Here are three key areas to focus on today that can help your business grow in the long run.

Differentiate Yourself

In a marketplace filled with so many competing or seemingly similar businesses, it is important to differentiate yourself. Focus on what makes you stand out from the competition. What are your strengths? Do you offer products and services nobody else offers? Figure out what makes your business unique and then highlight that. It will not only differentiate you from the competition but also strengthen your brand in the process.

Cultivate Loyalty

Considering the fact that return customers spend more, and also send new business your way through referrals, having a loyal customer base can really pay off. Make sure you cultivate that loyalty by delivering great customer service every time, communicating regularly with your clients, and asking them for feedback. By making your customers feel like they are a valued part of your business, you’ll keep them coming back again and again. That translates into growth for you. Happy repeat clients not only spend more per visit, they actually visit more frequently, and can help you grow your new client base through referrals of family and friends.

Be flexible

You are a small business owner, and that gives you a great deal of flexibility to implement changes quickly when necessary. But if you never make the necessary changes, or are resistant to change, in the long run that can hurt your bottom line. Making sure you regularly evaluate your processes and business model and update it to meet your current and future needs will make sure your business is ready to handle growth. This is a great place to involve your staff, since they’re often the ones with the best first hand experience on what is and what is not working well. Having a streamlined business that can flex to meet future needs will set you up for future success.

By focusing on these three key areas, you can make small changes in your business model and practices that can pay off with big results. Take some time this week to focus on some changes you can make in these areas.