Just started a salon business but can’t attract enough clients? Or do you have an established beauty salon business but don’t know how to grow it further?
For a beauty salon as a service business, growth in all aspects is very important: attracting more customers, improving your efficiency, and selling more and better services/products. If your beauty salon business is stagnant, sooner or later your competitor will outrun you and take your clients away.
So, how can we improve our beauty salon and take it to the next level? Below we’ll share some of the best tips and techniques just for that.
Growth Strategies: Improving Your Beauty Salon Business
Before anything else, we should understand that there is more than one way we can improve any business, including a beauty salon business. Some are obvious, like heavier promotions to attract more clients, hiring better hairstylists, and renovating our salon’s interior.
However, for a beauty salon, all these different methods can be compiled into three major growth frameworks: market penetration, market development, and product/service development.
Let’s discuss them one by one:
1. Market Penetration
This growth strategy is about increasing the sales of your beauty salon services to your existing target market. There are two main ways to do this: “stealing” your competitors’ clients and getting your existing clients to come more often.
2. Market Development
Market development refers to selling your beauty salon services on previously unexplored markets. This can involve opening a new branch of your salon in different locations or offering your service to different customer segments (i.e. kids’ haircut).
3. Product/ Service Development
This strategy refers to launching new services or products on an existing market. For example, if your salon hasn’t offered manicure/pedicure services in the past, you can offer these services to your clients.
Below, we’ll discuss actionable tactics in executing these growth strategies.
Actionable Tactics To Improve Your Beauty Salon
1. Attract New Clients
The most obvious way to achieve growth is to attract new clients. The question is, how? Here are a few tips:
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Know your clients better
The better you understand your existing clients, the better you can attract new clients with a similar profile. A beauty salon is a place that is naturally filled with conversations, so train your stylists to effectively communicate with clients and identify what made your current clients visit your salon and not your competitors.
Based on these “interviews” and overall market research, you should be able to identify your Unique Value Proposition (UVP), what makes you different from your competitors. Leverage this unique selling point to attract even more new clients.
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Establish a stronger online presence
In this increasingly digital world, more and more people learn about local businesses (including beauty salons) exclusively from the internet, especially from social media and Google searches. So, if you want to win more clients, you should establish a stronger online presence in four key areas:
- Professional website: your website must be mobile-friendly, well-designed, informative, and functional. There are various affordable tools like Wix that allow us to easily create a professional-looking website.
- Online booking and reservation: integrate a reliable online reservation and appointment management solution to your website, and link to this reservation page from your social media accounts. Make sure it’s as easy as possible for people to book your beauty salon.
- Social media presence: social media nowadays is about finding the right balance between regularly posting high-quality posts, effectively using paid advertising options, and working with the right influencers to help promote your beauty salon.
- Local SEO: Make sure your Google Maps listing is available on the top spots when potential clients search for queries like “ beauty salons near me” and similar ones. You can check out this local SEO or Google Maps SEO guide to help you further.
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Referral program
You can run a referral campaign to give current customers the opportunity to earn commissions by bringing in friends and peers to your beauty salon. Alternatively, you can also offer group discounts so they can pay less for your services when they come together with friends.
2. Become More efficient
By improving the speed of how your beauty salon operates, you can serve more customers on any given day and grow your revenue.
Map how your beauty salon operates while considering all the different elements, and figure out how you can eliminate bottlenecks and efficiencies.
For example, you can train your hairstylists to work even faster without sacrificing the quality of service or hire more experienced stylists. You should also consider other areas like receptionists, cleaners, and your online experience.
3. Upsell Existing Clients
Improving your beauty salon is not only about getting new clients but keeping your existing clients happy is also very important, if not even more important.
You’ve already convinced these existing clients to come in, so you should also maximize their lifetime value. Upsell your clients to more and better services. For example, if they come for a haircut, offer them a discount on a hair spa session.
4. Offer Complimentary Products and Services
You can, for example, bring in a massage therapist or aesthetician to offer more services to your existing clients. By doing so, you can earn more money per client while also attracting new clients that might be interested in these services. Alternatively, you can also sell products like shampoos, conditioners, hair dye, cosmetics, and so on.
Closing Thoughts
To ensure your salon is on the right path for success, you constantly need to improve and strive for growth.
By following the tips we’ve shared above, you can:
- Grow your beauty salon clientele
- Keep your existing clients happy and get them to visit more often
- Sell more services and products per visit
- Improve your salon’s operational efficiency to serve more customers and keep them happy
- Add more revenue streams to your beauty salon business
- Reduce your salon’s operational costs
And ultimately, scale up your beauty salon business to be an even more successful venture. Know your customers better, identify your inefficiencies, and become a better business.
