When we talk about beauty salons, it may seem that it’s barely possible to imagine customers with new tricks. After all, does anybody expect that a new wave of innovations comparable in a degree of influence with so-called “shared economy” formed by companies like Uber and Airbnb will roll from this particular business segment? Neither do we. But despite this fact, in 2019, a successful business strategy for a salon is hardly imaginable without the implementation of cutting-edge technologies. Unfortunately, modern tech won’t solve all your business problems. But it definitely can become an excellent addition to your innovative approach to the salon business.
Today, we’ll share some tips on a successful business strategy for your beauty or hair salon and consider how custom-made business solutions can help you to achieve your goals and make your customers happy.
Make Your Salon Recognizable With Efficient Branding
It’s hard to convince customers that you’ll improve their image if you don’t have an image of your own. Successful branding is an essential part of salon business strategy and the first thing that will attract people unfamiliar with your business. Therefore, you should brand your salon the way that will tell your potential customers about what look they will get in your salon.
The important thing to remember is that a successful salon business strategy excludes any rush. Your brand is an essential part of your salon as the set of services on which you’re going to focus. That’s the reason why your brand should match the expectations of your target audience in the first place. Market research will be an important part of your business strategy since it will help you to define how your potential customer looks like. According to this info, you can proceed with brand development which includes salon name, interior design, a catchy slogan, logos, and many other parts. All these efforts are intended to make your salon a place where customers want to return and of which they want to tell their friends.
Make Your Salon Accessible Choosing the Good Location
Location is another crucial part of your salon business strategy that can become one of the key ingredients of your future success. Choosing the right place for the salon is, at the same time, an extremely hard and pretty easy task. If you have some experience of visiting beauty salons or any other public institution, you can easily name several factors that are worthy of paying attention. For example, convenient parking, good neighborhood, safe and attractive surrounding area, the way that your signature will be facing, and so on.
Unfortunately, some factors critical for your strategy may be invisible to the eye without additional research. For example, if you’re going to rent a space where another beauty salon was located previously, it’ll be a good idea to investigate why this business has failed. The reason for such curiosity is simple. Some factors can be not so obvious. For example, you can find a great place with sea views and good logistics which can fully comply with the chosen strategy. But if your salon specializes in mohawk haircuts of all colors of the rainbow, you may encounter problems in finding a clientele if the area is inhabited mainly by superannuated people. Therefore, looking at the demographic makeup of the area before renting space for your future salon should become an essential part of your business strategy.
Choose The Right Focus
It’s not enough to draw the attention of your potential customers by catchy brand name and convenient location of your salon. While planning your strategy, remember that after the first spark of interest appears in a clients’ mind, they’ll proceed to a scrupulous analysis of services that you provide. At this point, they will want to ensure that you offer the exact things that are tailored to their lifestyles and preferences.
Trying to meet the needs of all potential customers at once will be an example of a bad strategy. Instead, on your first steps, you can focus on a couple of salon services and make your best to perform them well. While planning your further business strategy, you can talk to your customers to learn more about their thoughts on your salon. This approach will allow you to define if there’s the necessity to provide additional services so you’ll know what the focus should be in your salon. Besides the services that your salon offers, you can pay attention to the professionals with whom you’re working and who can become the members of your staff. For example, you can discover promising stylists at other salons that would become an excellent addition to your salon.
Hire the Right Salon Staff
The employees of your salon are an important part of your business strategy since they are the live embodiment of your business. They communicate with the customers directly and provide the services which quality in many ways determines whether they will come to you next time. The quality of their work determines your success in many ways but not completely. Besides the level of provided services, the mood in which your client leaves your salon means a lot too. That’s why a good strategy will be to hire your employees based on their personality as well as on practical skills. It can be easy to teach someone how to handle scissors, but teaching a person to love your clients can become an impossible task.
While choosing an employee with the right personality is a task that you can perform only by yourself, there are some software tools that can help you to find specialists for your salon that have a skill set required for building a solid strategy. Our easy-to-use HR module for job hunting allows efficiently finding and targeting promising specialists:
This web-based application can be used for searching and meeting with potential staff members, placing CVs or job opportunities. You can use it for quick and straightforward negotiation and interviewing. Users can create a list of favorite companies or send invitations for recruitment or interview. Besides improving your hiring strategy, this app can help you to handle your actual staff. For example, you can use it to manage salaries or access information about your employees.
Do Not Neglect Online Presence
Last, but not least, make sure that your salon is presented online. An online presence can become a crucial part of your strategy since the internet has become a pretty important part of our life. As a result, your business may not be taken seriously by a vast amount of people if they weren’t able to find info about your salon online. The numbers speak for themselves. According to statistics, modern internet users are spending an average of 2 hours and 22 minutes per day on social networking and messaging platforms only:
Source: DIGITAL INFORMATION WORLD
One of the best options to make your business accessible for clients is to make the adoption of a custom booking system a part of your strategy. Such apps are available 24/7, which allows your customers to book online at any time. So, instead of giving up the habitual way of doing things, your client can quickly switch to your salon’s app, make a booking, and then return to the Twitter feed. As simple as that. No more need to make phone calls during office hours or while you ride the bus.
The business strategy that implies the adoption of an online booking system can make your salon services way more accessible. Your customers can use an intuitive calendar of your salon to review all available time for appointments.
Online booking software developed for the chain of salons can be accessed by customers from anywhere with the use of any device. SMS notifications will remind your customers about the time of their appointment. Also, such notifications can be sent via Facebook, Viber, Whatsapp, or any other messenger which is popular in your country.
Described software can be pretty useful not only for your customers but for your employees as well since it can be used to automate some of your business processes. For example, your staff members can receive automated personalized notifications on new appointments. After a new booking is made, an employee will be notified via mobile application or email.
Conclusions
Developing a business strategy for your salon is the process that’s full of ups and downs. A successful strategy is always a combination of intuition, market research methodologies, luck, modern software, and god knows what else. The best possible advice is not to rely on a single approach and try to combine them differently to find your recipe for success. Just remember to keep abreast of life to ensure that you follow the latest trends and your business strategy corresponds to the best modern practices.
If you want to learn more about how modern software can help to improve your salon’s business strategy, you can get an instant, free consultation from our specialists.