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The paradox associated with social media is that those who appear to use it, frequently fail and those who do not even go near it also fail. As a matter of fact there were so many cases last year that I waded through dozens of case files to pick some of the most notable examples of social media fails.

A recent study suggests that despite the popularity of social media in the Press when it comes to the actual members of social networks like Facebook and Twitter the power of brands to sway opinion and translate social activity into sales, comes under question.

Read more: http://technorati.com/blogging/article/is-social-media-really-overrated/#ixzz1jdZszJb4

This is what we created our business to do! If you need help getting your Facebook page created with rich images or “Like” Specials then just let us know! If you need a more professional looking website, look no further! There are a lot of resources out there for the do-it-yourselfers out there too. From Youtube tutorials to books on blogging, the web is a salon owners best friend! The biggets issue is time. If you work in your salon you know how hard it is to find the time to take a sales call from a distributor, let alone dedicate one or two ours a day to marketing!

Next time you find yourself thinking you’d like to be doing more marketing but can’t find the time let us know!

If you are on the fence and think that email is too expensive or hard to control try it out. Mailchimp offers a ‘free-mium’ service that lets you send out unlimited emails to up to 2,000 addresses! There are tons of templates available or you can create beautiful HTML rich emails…..if you know how (or you can call us and we can!) They also recently purchased TinyLetter that lets you quickly and easily write very simple newsletters. Did I mention these are FREE services? Sure, there are advanced functions with some other paid email services, but this is a great way to get started in the world of emailing your customers.

By the way that friend of mine did send an email out talking about a couple specific issues that he though MIGHT be of interest to people…..he garnered 4 new regular clients from the single email!!! It cost him about a hour of his time…….take about ROI!

With our marketing in place we are nimble and able to react to the market almost instantly, where as some of these larger franchises can’t and are stuck doing the same old tired activities time and time again. Get creative and try new ideas some will work some won’t…..thats why its call marketing and banking!

The reason that I bring this up at all is just to give an example of how accessible marketing is to you now. With the internet, email and so many other channels that are more accessible than ever, you actually can go up against giants and be competitive if not dominate the market. I am still so surprised when big companies fail to convey any message at all in their marketing efforts. The days of a bulk postcard with a girl in a bikini under a palm tree are coming to an end. Consumers want and expect value for there dollar and are doing the research prior to making any kind of investment….even before stepping foot inside a salon! I’m not saying that you will have a certain level of ROI, but I do think that salons today need to be WAAAY more savvy then they have been in the past.

Have had any similar things happen? Comment below, I love to hear about t

Best of luck!

Website Updating: Cost: $0-$300 per month // Time: 1-5 hours/ month // Effectiveness: Moderate -High

This is a big one. Search engines look for content updates and many other factors that help them detemine your ranking. It is also good to update and add new content regularly to give your existing customers a reason to come back to your site and be exposed to additional marketing impressions. Do you offer specials in your salon? make sure that those specials are available online as well as in-store. Regular, repeat visitors to sites really help solidify your messaging. Another thing to do regularly that is very low-cost but extremely important….CHECK YOUR LINKS!! Make sure that when a customer clicks on a link that it actually functions as it’s supposed to. So often broken or mis-directed links can really take away from the users experience on the site. There are many great resources and checklists online that will help you double check your site.

Email Marketing: Cost: $0 – $20 per month // Time: 1-6 hours/ month // Effectiveness: Moderate -High

Email marketing is effective! No matter what peoples opinions is about it, it’s another way to relay a message to your potential customer. Done regularly one to two times per month, these can be a simple text email letting your customer know about a special coming up or a concert that is coming to town or even just to tell them that you are now on FaceBook! Even if a customer doesn’t have use for all of the information that you are sending them, they will at least get an impression of your company’s name in front of them……that’s more than the competitor down the street just got! Making a quality looking email is important however. You’ve see the differences: the snazzy HTML emails embedded in the body of the email, nice graphics, the company name located in a position that grabs the eye and most importantly a call to action!! Whether it’s coming in to take advantage of a great special or mentioning that Christmas is coming up and you have just the gift for Dad! You don’t just want to send out an email that says “Here we are!!, Do with us what you’d like!” You can actually drive the customers to do what you want them to do by simply giving them some direction. Next time you get a good email from a company that appeals to you, see if they are nudging you to do something.

Social Marketing: Cost: $0 per month // Time: 5-25 hours/ month // Effectiveness: Moderate -High

You think it’s just for kids these days? If so you are wrong! Social media and networking sites are here to stay. It is arguably the new face and interface of the web. Many people use sites like FaceBook as their portal to the web. With more than 400 million FaceBook users accessing the site regularly and an average of 130 friends, you do the math there is a great opportunity to reach your customers and more importantly the friends of customers!! You think “People won’t care enough about my product to follow me on Facebook or Twitter.”? If so you would be surprised that a client we worked with recently received 10% of their sales in one month through direct contacts through FaceBook!!! What was the industry you ask? Signs and large format printing! Who cares that much about signs??? Apparently a lot of people-  like nearly 150 referred directly to their website from Facebook! Guess what, they now are using Twitter and updating the content of their site regularly! Do you have a new product? Write about it with a matching link on your FaceBook page. Having a one-day-only sale tomorrow? Send out a Tweet! Savvy, well-informed customers will appreciate it and might even pass that information along as content on their sites. They don’t call it viral for nothin’!

Blogging: Cost: $0 per month // Time: 5-50 hours/ month // Effectiveness: Moderate -High

More time consuming that Twitter or FaceBook, but equally or often more rewarding is Blogging. This is a great way to help educate the customer and create an advocate for your product. Offering tid bits of useful information to people will help them become more familiar with your product. Often, a retail business blog is really just an extension of the already operating website. This is where many will post news about the store, specials, preferred products or links to other websites that helps educate the customer. My favorite thing about a blog is how well they can contribute to higher search engine results: Some experts found recently that small to mid-sized companies that blog see 55% more visitors to their website than those who don’t! And more of their pages show up too – nearly 434% more!!! Not too shabby eh? Well there is another side to this. While the results of blogging can really help drive people to your website and increase the visibility of your marketing efforts, you have to have the time and the content to really make this work! Your posts have to be regular and consistent. There is nothing worse than stumbling on a blog that hasn’t been updated since 2006! Make sure that before you start a blog you are prepared to spend some time on it. There is a lot of content out there and linking to that info is a great way to take advantage of existing content too. There are a lot of great books and online resources for creating and maintaining a blog.

Press Releases: Cost: $0 per month // Time: 1-5 hours/ month // Effectiveness: Moderate -High

Another great way to generate better search results is by sending out press releases to online PR sites. They circulate the news and content and offer it for free to other companies that are looking for content or articles related to the subject you have written about. These can be trick and there are some formalities that should be considered before writing a press release. Mainly, you just want to make sure that it’s of some worth to the potential reader and of course the publisher, otherwise it’s just a waste of time. If the information isn’t particularly interesting to people outside of yourself, save it. Press releases should be sent out rarely and when the information shared is worthy. The rewards can be terrific if done right!

Gabe Storm consults small to mid-sized tanning salon salons throughout the US and Canada providing graphic design, branding and marketing support. As the principle of PDXdesigns located in Portland, Oregon- Gabe has more than 12 years of professional marketing and graphic design experience working with small to mid-sized businesses.

To me this is a fairly often occurrence in tanning salons and its a hard one to get over I suppose- if you are only looking to sell your product rather than your brand. By this I mean don’t worry about making the big sale today, if it means you’re going after the dollar rather than matching the right product for the customer. Forcing the fit will not  Of course, you know this and its easy for me to tell you to slow and steady wins the race….but why are so many salons still trying to sell large packages to 42 year old mothers of 3 who have never tanned in their lives? Answer: They have to! They have no choice but to try and get as much money from each customer as fast as they can to make ends meet. Problem? More often than not, the customer leaves feel duped or scammed buy the salon they just stopped into to get educated in.

So, how did this breakdown start? First of all you have an employee who is paid on commission, that’s fine. Problem is you have placed so much emphasis on making the sale and the commission rate structure and how to close while training her, you forgot the most important thing- The Experience! Believe it or not, to most of the public tanning is all the same no matter what salon you go to or what kinds of lamps or beds they are using….all the same. The key is in the experience that each customer has when they come to your salon. Think about it, if every time you went to a grocery store you found something negative about the experience, how long would it take you to find a new grocery store to frequent? Second, the employees did not read the customer or take some cues as to what they might be looking to do at your salon. Vacation? Hard-core bronzing? Vitamin D? You know as well as I do that all these people are going to dress, look and even behave differently and most likely expect a different experience. Of course you can just come right out and ask them what they want to buy, but then you have allowed them to set the agenda for the rest of the sale process. Short, sometimes unrelated questions are a better way to make the customer feel at ease while also getting to better understand their level of tanning and interest.

But what else can we do? It’s about perception of a value. When you buy a computer or a car or pretty much any item out there, by now you have learned that price cannot be the only deciding factor in your purchase and there are other features, that when added the value of these features outweighs the additional cost. Somewhere along the line we lost sight of this in the tanning industry and rather than take the appropriate steps to explain the value that we can offer our customers we went the easy route and slashed the prices so low that its nearly impossible to stay in business. Is trying to create a perception of value with your customer more time consuming and perhaps even a little daunting? Yep, no doubt about it, it does take more though and time to create this solid foundation, but once it’s there and your customers and your employees are hearing this consistent messaging again and again the perception will eventually start to change. Now, I wouldn’t suggest raising your prices and try and convince people that you’re the best shop in town, but I would try to focus more on value and what you get as a customer than how much money we can save you. You’ll start to see a shift in the morale of the employees as well when you stop trying to be the low-cost salon and start touting the premium features and high-end customer service that you provide. Be creative, some salons have the best parking or the cleanest beds, you don’t have to have the the most expensive equipment or products……again it’s perception.

What are we left with now? In the great race to lower our prices so low that we can’t pay our rent we’ve also attracted some less than perfect clients along the way. These are often overly fickle, easily swayed customers that not only are hard to capture they are just as hard to keep. They are often less loyal to the companies that they frequent since they’re usually chasing down low prices rather than looking for the best value. This has become more the case since the internet became such a powerful tool. I mean, with resources like Google Shopping,  and amazon we are very much trained to seek out the lowest price first and think about value second…if at all. Of course, choosing a tanning salon is not the same thing as buying printer toner online, but its hard to get out of that mindset for many price sensitive customers.

Salons can start to change this perception with a strong and consistent marketing message that they are offering a true value and that the customer is getting something more than just a tan like any salon can offer. This can be in the cleanliness of the salon, the friendliest personnel, tan certification, the regular maintenance, whatever…..There IS something that you do better than the competition and it is of value to a certain customer……exploit it!

Gabe Storm consults small to mid-sized tanning salon salons throughout the US and Canada providing graphic design, branding and marketing support. As the principle of PDXdesigns located in Portland, Oregon- Gabe has more than 12 years of professional marketing and graphic design experience working with small to mid-sized businesses.

We had an incident in one market with a chain that we represent. It was really frustrating to see a zero star rating on several review. And more frustrating was that the fact that the comments were not even accurate. In this case they were talking about high pressure sales tactics and 3 year contracts….this chain only offers one year commitments for a substantial discount and doesn’t even offer a 3 year. We knew that something was up when they started talking about the beds they have and equipment that they don’t even own!

After several of these reviews popped up, all within a month of each other, we knew something was up. We contacted the VERY well-known and often at the top of Google search results to find out how we could remove this phony feedback. The only option that they have that allows removing the negative feedback cost us $500 per month as a “Premium” member. I cried scam! More recently we had a similar situation where a “customer” gave a negative review to a client. We again contacted the review site and asked they to take a closer look at the review and perhaps remove due to inaccurate or altogether false information. This very reputable and highly-marketed site also told my client that to be able to combat these reviews they would need to pay a monthly membership. This time it was $750!!! I have heard horror stories about salons that have put all of their eggs in one basket so-to-speak, and relied on these review sites to be the sole place for there potential ciustomers to gather information and  form their opinion. It’s such a shame that with a few spare hours and a handful of loyal minions all of your hard work can be undone in nearly an instant by competing owners or managers.

My advice? Diversify! Make sure that when someone is searching for a tanning salon in your area that you are covering all of your bases and not just relying on one source for customers to garner all of their decision making information from one source. This means taking advantage of all the many sources out there. Another piece of advice, Google yourself regularly to get a good idea of how you are percieved on the web. This is important not just for gaining market share but also for making sure that you are retaining the customers you already have! Its much easier and cheaper to keep the clients you have than to have to go out and get all new ones!

Gabe Storm consults small to mid-sized tanning salon salons throughout the US and Canada providing graphic design, branding and marketing support. As the principle of PDXdesigns located in Portland, Oregon- Gabe has more than 12 years of professional marketing and graphic design experience working with small to mid-sized businesses.