CHOOSING A TARGET MARKET FOR YOUR SALON PROMOTION

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Posted February 18, 2019

Next in our Salon Promotion series is a discussion about target markets and how to define them and develop an offer that will target them specifically.

 

Your target market is key to any promotion and is typically defined as your ideal customer. Whether that’s based on age, gender or service type, you need to know who your ideal customer is at all times in your business so you can be aiming to get them into your salon. For some salons, it might be 30-something women with coloured hair. It might be men looking for full body waxing, because that is a high-cost service with great repeats. It’s also about looking for what you aren’t interested in – most salons aren’t specifically targeting 18-year old’s as they don’t have the money to spend and aren’t targeting the client who only comes in for the lowest cost service.

 

That’s not saying you should turn away any customer, but these are the ones we ideally want to work with. Once we work out who our ideal customer is, any customer then falls into one of the two below categories – existing customers or new customers.

 

EXISTING CUSTOMERS

Your existing customers are always going to be your easier sell. They already know you and trust you and so they are likely to purchase from you again. Making your existing customers more profitable is the easiest way to make a huge difference to your bottom line and is more determined by your staff in salon than it is about amplification.

 

The other side of existing customers is those customers who have purchased from you before but haven’t engaged in some time. Often a specific discount or service offer to this market can yield great results and encourage them to again be regular customers of your salon.

 

For existing customers, centering your offer around bulk purchase or booking of services is a great way to lock them in and keep them happy. Whether it’s a discounted course of facials or a discount when they book a certain number of hair services, locking in your customers for key dates is good for business. The other way to appeal to them typically is through an add on to their existing service – a new treatment, a free brow wax with every facial booked or similar. This is a great way to both reward loyalty and to encourage them to book a few appointments in advance – and of course, the more times a client is in salon, the more chances you have to upsell on retail product or new services. Win win.

 

NEW CUSTOMERS

Most promotions are designed to attract new business to your salon. Whether it’s an offer that is exclusively available to new customers that has been discounted, or whether its in your amplification and promotion of existing services (more on this later), all salon owners want new business. But as discussed, it is not the only way to make more money. For instance, a beauty salon might run a free brow wax promotion, with the aim of gathering new business or selling more retail product. But whether or not that is successful is dependent on the sales ability of your team and the kind of people you attract with the offer. Sometimes, a free low-cost service actually attracts people who will never spend in salon and are simply looking for something free. In either instance its

 

The key is finding offers that can appeal to both markets, or exclusively focussing on one or the other target market. Sometimes it pays to create special packages and offers exclusively for new customers that are designed to appeal to your ideal customer – for instance, a discounted colour makeover for new clients will certainly appeal to a 30-something woman, where a series of perm treatments will not. For existing customers it’s about adding extra value and add-ons to their existing services, or key offers to those clients who haven’t visited the salon in a while to get them to reengage with your services. Once you know who your ideal customer is, it’s easy to create an offer that will immediately appeal to them – but you need to know who they are. Stay tuned for next week’s post on running a great salon promotion and let us know about your successes or failures in running salon promotions on social media!