In any new business, it is hard to find a clientele as a start-up. However, I believe it can be even worse for such jobs as a hairstylist since often, clients are loyal to their hairstylist.
It is about trust more than price. For this reason, a new hair stylist on the market must have a good strategy plan to be able to do this job for a living since customers are rare.
- Set your goals
Setting goals is very important to start because you need to know where you are going and as a hairstylist working for his own person, it can be easy to procrastinate or hard to find motivation.
This is why the goals must be attainable, but challenging. Once again, not being attainable would have a bad impact on motivation.
Setting short-term goals and long-term goals can be a good way to start. Here are some goals I believe would be good for a startup.
Short term goals:
-Fiding a place to rent a chair or a place to rent your own salon somewhere and get the place ready to receive customers in about a month.
-Being active on some social media such as Instagram, Facebook, or Pinterest and posting all the hair that was done in courses (if they are good looking maybe not the one when you started!) and the hair done in the internship.
-Making a giveaway on social media so that people follow the page and it is a good way to make it reach a larger audience and should be done right at the opening of the salon.
Long-term goal
-Having more than 20 loyal customers after a year
-Having a website where you can sell products that you use at your salon after six months to get new revenue
-Having more than 300 followers on your Instagram page after a year
The goals must respect the SMART objectives (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely)!
- The online presence
These days, it is not possible to be successful as a business without an online presence because everyone refers to the internet when a need occurs.
The second step of the buying process is called information search. To get this more concrete, we will do an example for a hairstylist.
The first step of the customer’s buying process is called need recognition. It is the step when the potential customer will feel the need to get a haircut or a balayage, for example.
After this, the customer will search for a potential hairstylist, a step that is obviously done online. The third step is the evaluation of alternatives and it is the most crucial one for digital marketing for hairstylists.
The potential clients (we take into consideration that they never went to any places that are part of the alternatives) never saw the hairstylists or their businesses before.
Therefore, the website and social media content is the only way for customers to evaluate the hairstylist and it is why there must be an online presence and there must be quality content.
Registering to google my business is very important as well because it gives access to many tools such as google Analytics that gives useful statistics about the way people interact with your website.
For hairstylists being on google my business is important because many people will search on google for the salon location and its opening hours.
- Search Engine Optimization
SEO optimization will be very important because people might not be willing to do a long drive only to get their hair done. For people who will not be hearing about the hair salon by word of mouth, they need to be able to find the business on google.
Then, if the SEO is well done, the hair salon will be on the top research when someone searches for “hair salon near me”.
Most people find what they are looking for inside the first 3 links on google and it is a very small percentage that goes on the second page. Making sure google my business is well filled can help.
Also, another way to get known by customers can be to write blogs about questions people might have about their hair.
Using WordPress for those blogs is good for SEO before they give an SEO score and explain how the score could be better.
- Customer’s review
Reviews from customers are very important for any type of business. However, most people only take the time to write reviews when they had a bad experience.
This can give a bad representation of happy customers since they might not take the time to write a review when they are satisfied.
Simply asking them at the end of the appointment if they could help by writing a review can make a huge difference in the representation of satisfied clients.
- Competition
Knowing competition and what they offer is very important to be able to offer something they don’t.
Moreover, if a special service that customers might not find everywhere else is offered, there must be some emphasis on this service in the social media content.
6. Conclusion
To conclude, digital marketing is very important to get known as a hairstylist.
It is hard to get customers because there is a loyalty between hairstylist and their customers most of the time. Doing special treatments to stand out from other can be a good way to get more clientele.
Taking the time to complete well a google my business account can have lots of benefit for a search engine optimization.
I hope that this strategy plan can help with a hairstylist start-up. Good luck!
Written by: Justine Picard, an internship at the international institute of digital marketing.