Is Social Media a Good Way to Market Your Salon Business? The Pros and Cons
For many salon owners, the most cost efficient marketing channel to utilize would have to be social media. Social media marketing not only helps build your online presence, but it also helps in increasing the brand’s reach. Social media marketing provides your salon business the opportunity to expand its network, which will eventually lead to increase in revenue.
It’s become a norm for many people to turn to social media to voice out their opinions. Reports have indicated that from the past year, 67% of consumers are influenced by online reviews. Even statistics show that more and more people are becoming addicted to social media, with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, Pinterest and Linkedin topping the list of most visited networks these past years.
Today’s generation is all about keeping themselves updated with the latest news and trends by the use the most popular social channels. This only proves that online marketing through social media is indeed a surefire way to attract customers since it gives businesses an avenue to easily communicate and reach out to their intended audience.
But is it really the only way to market the salon business these days? What are the advantages and disadvantages of using social media as a platform to market a salon business? If you’re a business owner, here’s what you need to know.
The Pros
Let’s face it. A large percentage of consumers trust word of mouth when choosing a salon to go to. With social media, you can do more than just promote your brand, you can also build and establish relationships by communicating with your followers. One of the many advantages is using it as leverage to broaden your reach and gain new customers while also solidifying customer loyalty to your brand instead of the standard approach of waiting for new customers to visit your salon.
It’s common practice for a business, not just salons and stylists, to create a Facebook page. Since a majority of online users are evidently using Facebook, this will help you stay on top of your customer’s attention and maintain that spot.
Twitter may fall second to Facebook, but it’s still one of the most popular marketing platforms used by businesses. People mostly use Twitter to stir up witty conversations or to rant. You can expect to find your salon’s customers expressing their opinions about your service/products here and find out what they want so that you can go beyond and more than what they would expect from you.
A favorite social media platform among millenials, Instagram allows you to easily share samples of your products and showcase what your salon can do. Maintaining an Instagram account will give your customers a visual idea of what your brand has to offer.
The Cons
The biggest disadvantage of using social media as a marketing channel is that it can be ineffective. A salon business should consider their services and take into account what their other competitors are already doing. Coming up with new marketing strategies can help you carve out your niche because based on observation, a consumer is likely to compare two or three salons and their services (considering rate, promos, consumer reviews) and pick the best one out of the three. If your business is not the top choice, then it means your business is lacking something that other businesses already have a lead on.
Second, there is a risk of miscommunication in terms of visual marketing. For example, a post of a product or service on a business page may look quite impressive but once a consumer tries the product or service and gets completely different results from what was shown on the post, then there’s bound to be problems or complaints on your hands.
Third, Managing both the salon and your social media accounts will surely take hours of your day because social media marketing can be very time consuming. Social media marketing professionals recommend 2–5 posts per day at least. This doesn’t include the time you need to monitor your accounts and engage in conversation with your followers.
Lastly, you need to keep an eye out for reviews, especially negative feedback, in order to ensure that you address them promptly. If you leave your social media accounts unmanaged, chances are you’ll overlook some negative comments, which then can hurt your business in the long term.
Taking your salon to social media comes along with many advantages as well as disadvantages but if you are more than prepared to deal with what comes with establishing your presence online then, by all means, you should utilize social media sites for your business growth.
Have any tips on how to use your business’ social media accounts as part of your marketing strategy? Let us know in the comments section below.