Sell More: Tips & Tricks

In choosing your location, keep in mind the overall image you want your salon to portray. If you’re aiming for an upscale, elegant salon, you’re going to have to locate in similar surroundings. Its decorating style also will have to be correspondingly tasteful. Even with an existing salon, you must be aware of how the location is working to sell your product. In any service industry, it is imperative that the space be clean and attractive and promote the type of atmosphere you want your salon to convey.

The act of promotion is creating an interest in your product by a variety of methods. Many excellent products languish because they lack the proper promotion. They never capture the public’s attention, and therefore, never reach a broad market. Specific means of promotion include:

• advertising
• packaging
• branding
• personal selling
• sales manuals
• dealer cooperation (displays/rebates, etc.)
• coupons/premiums

Most salons have small budgets for advertising, if they have any budget at all. It makes sense then to try to ensure that those few dollars are spent as wisely as possible.

Before you pick up the phone to call the local newspaper and arrange for an ad, stop and think. Do the customers you want to attract read the paper? In what section will an ad reach them in the right frame of mind? What should the ad say to get their attention and then make them want to come into your salon? Is a local radio station a favorite of the desired audience? Might fliers distributed at a local mall work as well? Can you get hold of a mailing list specific enough to make direct mail pay off?

After you choose and run an ad, make sure the dollars were well spent. Get in the habit of asking new customers where they heard about you and keep track of their responses. You’ll begin to see patterns indicating the effectiveness of different promotional efforts. Keep those patterns in mind in future advertising decisions and you will see results without wasting advertising money.

A fifth "P" inherent in making decisions about each of the other four is People. Meaningful marketing decisions always must take the desired customer into account.

The four Ps, then, are the basis of any effective marketing scheme. The effective and efficient interrelation of them may not guarantee success, but it goes a long way in that direction.