According to estimates Africa’s dry hair market — that is, the market for weaves, wigs and hair extensions — is currently worth over $6 billion a year and growing quite rapidly. If you’re investing in this multi-million dollar business and would like to know more on how to strategize when it comes to Digital Marketing then keep on reading this article.
Why Is Digital Marketing Important For Hair Industry?
Marketing has always been about connecting with your audience in the right place and at the right time. Today, that means you need to meet them where they are already spending time: on the internet. Digital marketing, allows you to create brand awareness, identify and target a highly-specific audience, and send that audience personalized, high-converting marketing messages.
How to establish a clear digital marketing strategy for Hair Business:
- Identify your current success.
There is different ways that you can measure your current performance depending on what platform is your business focused on. However, platforms such as Instagram and Facebook have tools to view insights and analyze performance. This will provide you with a clear vision to the organization on how users or customers are behaving. Through digital analytics, companies obtain an insight into the areas where they need improvement.
With digital analytics in marketing, you:
- Understand who your most likely customers are so you can target them more meaningfully
- Retain customers
- Increase customer lifetime value
- Proactively relate to customers
- Deliver the right message at the right time
2- Set your Goals:
Now that you have evaluated your business analytics, you need to set your goals. One of the reasons goals are so important is that they give you direction. When you’ve got clearly set and well-defined goals, they make lots of decisions easy. Below are few examples of long and short term goals for hair business.
Short- Term Goals:
- Within three months, I want to be able to sell 15 wigs per month
- Within four months, I want to have 500 followers on Instagram.
- Within five months I want to be able to sell to 5 customers by referrals vouchers.
Long-Term Goals
- Within 7 months, I want to have 35 hair orders per month.
- Within 8 months, I want to have at least 1,000 followers on Instagram and 2,000 followers on Facebook.
- Create 10 YouTube videos each year
- Increase retention rate by 15%
3- Focus On Your Unique Selling:
In Hair Industry, customers are overwhelmed with options, and they want to quickly understand what makes one product or brand different than another. Knowing the right way to position yourself and your products can mean the difference between standing out and blending in. For Hair Industry you have to provide high quality or Virgin hair to stand out.
A better way to understand this is by answering the following question:
“What makes you different from the competition?”
4- Research your competition:
The competitor research casts light on what other brands in your niche are doing to acquire and retain customers.
Before you build your social media marketing strategy, it’s worth investigating what others are doing. Check their LinkedIn and Facebook pages, see their YouTube channel, find out if they use TikTok and other trending social media platforms.
Facebook has a free tool to peek inside the space of your competition. The Facebook Ad library allows you to search by keyword or brand name to find all active ad campaigns. However, you won’t be able to track whether a competitive brand was active on Facebook in the previous quarter.
5- Embrace Content:
The importance of content marketing in digital marketing relates to its ability to increase the volume of quality traffic to your website. Content is king in creating awareness and generating quality leads which sustains healthy sales growth.
Digital Marketing Strategy Implementation:
1- Create a Website:
Without a website, people may question your legitimacy as a business. Having a website is an opportunity to make a great first impression and give people comfort that you’re a real business. But thanks to the evolution of technology this does not end there, you can now sell online without a website on platforms such as Facebook, and Instagram and finish your sells offline through WhatsApp business communication tool for business.
2. Establish your branding
We need to establish what is your brand, and why is it different from others. Set a branding guideline that will establish your presence on the market in a way that, in the long run, customers will distinguish you from the competitors. When you hear from a brand that people remember or instantly recognize, that brings trust to it, and trust will increase your sales.
3- Create Interesting Content for Social Media Channels
In Hair industry, 90% of the times customers will only make their first purchase from you after viewing a content or quality image of what your business offer.
Solution: Create high quality content featuring hair artists demonstrating on how to install wigs or hair extensions. Shoot high quality images.
4. Start a blog linked to your Social Media platforms or your website.
How to gain more followers?
Solution: A blog will help you improve the SEO of your webpage or make you gain more follower. Video tutorials of you how to make a wig or install one with in trending ways, it’s a way to show the quality of your products, the whole process until the final results. It’s a win-win idea that brings so much value to the table and will help you to convert viewers into customers.
5- Influential Marketing
It is always smart idea to work with digital influential to review your products(weaves or wigs) on their Instagram, or YouTube channels as well as on TikTok. This will highly create brand awareness and make you gain potential customers.
6- Create promotions and giveaways:
The benefits of social media contests are many when done properly and effectively, they are a great way to give businesses a boost in terms of awareness and really connecting with your audience.
Here are some of the benefits of social media contests and how you should consider running a contest/giveaway for your business:
– Build community
–Incentivize people to follow
–Build awareness
–Increase subscribers
–Increase sales
–Increase engagement
For conclusion, try to be consistent on your content, it’s always best to schedule your posts you can use tools such as Heropost, this way you will save time and know what type of contents your followers and internet users are more likely to be interested on and engage.
References:
https://mmbo.in/why-data-analysis-is-important-in-the-success-of-a-digital-marketing-campaign/
https://blog.thedigitalmarketinginstitute.org/digital-marketing-plan-for-dessert-businesses/
https://www.shopify.com/blog/unique-selling-proposition
Written by: Maria Fuca, Digital Marketing Analyst at The International Institute of Digital Marketing™.