if you are reading this article it is highly likely that you are a beautician and that you are looking for a way to acquire new customers – better if “high spending” – in your center.
Did I guess? Then read on: you won’t find the magic formula that will double your takings from tomorrow morning, but you will certainly dispel many myths.
Above all, I promise you that you will be able to start asking the right questions to correctly set up an effective promotion strategy.
Are you ready? We come to us.
You may have already read somewhere that you must necessarily have a Facebook page to make money with your center. Someone will have advised you to use Instagram auto liker. They will have proposed to you to make a KissAnime site or a blog.
And almost certainly, at least once in your life, you will have received a call from such a ” Google Partner” who promises to be on the front page for a year, so that customers can find you.
The point is, amid all the possibilities they’ve told you about, you don’t know who to credit and you don’t know what to choose. The budget you have is limited, and you need to understand how and where to direct it among all the web marketing activities that have been proposed to you.
Let’s try to do some clarity, and let’s start from the beginning.
Table of Contents
Content index
- What is web marketing?
- Best web marketing strategies: what are they for a beauty center?
- Creating a blog: a winning choice?
- SEO optimization: what does it mean and when is it useful?
- Advertising on Facebook: so is it always right to do it?
What is web marketing?
In an extremely simple way, we can define web marketing as the set of all the activities carried out on the Internet that bring customers to your business.
Nothing more, nothing less.
The ultimate goal of marketing activities is to bring money into your pocket. No likes on Facebook posts, no comments on a blog, no compliments.
Money.
Or rather: customers who spend to take advantage of your service.
Best web marketing strategies: what are they for a beauty center?
The short answer is: it depends.
Depends on what?
From multiple factors, most of which do not decide you, but are determined by the context in which you are moving.
There are 4 fundamental questions you need to ask yourself, before thinking about spending even a single euro on online promotional activities:
- Is my service requested by an adequate number of people in the area where I am located?
- Are there other businesses that offer the same service to my potential customers?
- Why should customers choose me and not my competitors?
- Assuming my service has a market, how is it searched?
Now, let’s make some borderline examples to understand each other better.
Suppose you live in a mountain village of 1,000 souls, whose average age is 70. You understand well that, in such a context, opening a beauty center specializing in the treatment of juvenile acne would not make much sense.
It might make sense if you opened it in a city with a good amount of teenagers. Why could it?
Because, even in this case, it depends.
Suppose there are 100 kids with acne, and there is already a well-established structure that solves their problem.
Your task would be to “snatch” customers from the existing structure. Or you could choose to offer a different service, satisfying a need that your competitor does not satisfy. For example by treating acne in a completely natural way.
The point is this: your service must solve a problem. And he has to do it excellently.
If you are a beautician like any other, if you do not meet a specific need, it will be difficult to get someone to prefer.
Marketing isn’t a magic bullet – it’s an amplifier.
With online promotion, what is commonly called “advertising”, you make your services known to those who might buy them. But if they don’t care because you are the copy of a thousand other beauticians in your area then it is very likely that you will spend money in vain.
So, the first thing you need to understand is what kind of service makes sense to offer in your area. The second thing you need to realize right away is how to advertise yourself online.
Creating a blog: a winning choice?
Before giving credit to those who tell you that you absolutely must have your blog, stop and think: what is the blog for? How is it to be conceived?
The blog is an online portal that allows you to communicate with your customers, interact with them by giving them valuable information, which can help them and at the same time make them understand how prepared you are in your work. So far, here we are.
There are two ways to do it: the first involves SEO optimization, the second doesn’t.
SEO optimization: what does it mean and when is it useful?
Let’s start by saying that SEO is the English acronym for Search Engine Optimization and indicates the set of all the activities carried out on a web portal to ensure that it is visible on the Internet when someone searches for the topics referred to. treats. (SEO is the discipline, SEO is the professional who deals with search engine positioning ).
For example, if you deal with dry skin in Rome, you would like anyone to search the Internet for “dry skin specialist in Rome” and find your blog, possibly on the front page.
SEO optimization allows you to have a well-positioned blog, on the front page, without having activated advertising campaigns.
Having a non-optimized blog, on the other hand, means initially saving on the creation of the portal but necessarily having to use other activities (often for a fee, such as sponsored articles on Google or Facebook) to bring people to read what you wrote.
So what to do?
It depends on how your customer behaves, your competition, and your pocket.
Blogging is just a tool, there is no absolute best way to use it.
What you need to worry about is understanding how your prospect gets to buy from you.
That is, you have to analyze what is called the “purchasing process”. That is:
- How does your customer look for the service you offer?
- Which online channels do you use? How do you use them?
What I can do is give you an indicative answer to the first question, based on what I have experienced with my hand in recent years.
When someone is looking for a new beauty center, they mainly move in 3 ways:
A. He asks a trusted person, because maybe he has found himself wrong with the previous beautician, and wants to change her.
This aspect is by no means negligible and must be contemplated in an integrated marketing strategy that provides for the encouragement of word of mouth outside the Internet, which we will not discuss here.
B. Search on Google. This is why, even before creating a blog, it is essential to have an active Google My Business profile. What is that?
It is a tool made available by Google, completely free, where you can manage the information of your company, insert posts, images, timetables, and information about your center. You can have customers write reviews, link to your blog, and appear on Google Maps.
Suppose we are in Milan and type in Google “Milan beauty center”
The following screen would appear in the Google results, with the results of the centers that have an active Google My Business profile:
C. He asks a trusted person and at the same time searches on Google, to get his idea. Google My Business is therefore an essential tool for you who have a beauty center. Even if we are talking about older customers it is often close relatives or friends who are looking for them, to help them solve the problem.
At this point, however, we need to understand what the other channels are.
What are they doing on the Internet?
Mainly two things:
They search for products or services on search engines (such as Google);
They run on social media.
Also in the world, the most used social networks are YouTube and Facebook.
Advertising on Facebook: so is it always right to do it?
Not!
You don’t have to preside over the most used platforms in general, but those most used by your target customer, that is, by your best paying customer!
Generally speaking, what we know is that Facebook is increasingly considered a social for “adults”, while the “young” move to more recently social networks.
Instagram for example has gained a lot of market among the under 35s in the last year. While it is more difficult to find an over 50 who uses it.
Warning: these are general indications.
The best thing you can do is set up questionnaires and administer them to your customers so they understand:
How they searched and found you on Google;
If they wanted to solve a specific problem and which one;
Because they chose you and not the beautician who opened in front of you;
Which social networks they use.
And so on.
The more information you have about how they move, the more you can understand where you need to be, and how you need to be there.
Another very important aspect to consider and understand is how much time passes between the moment they learn about your services and the purchase of them.
If what you offer is expensive than average, it will likely take a long time before the purchase, because they will want to understand why they will search for information material and reviews to make sure not to throw the money away.
From this point of view, SEO optimization to be present on the front page may not be recommended if you have a low budget, since the investment, which is not indifferent if entrusted to a professional, could have an economic return only for a long time. term.
In these cases, you could consider investing in promotional activities on social networks (choosing those appropriate to the target audience), which are generally less expensive.
In general, and in a very simplified way, keep this in mind:
If you are the problem you solve is very much felt, it is much sought on the net by the people you can serve (and it turns out by analyzing the net with the appropriate tools), and you are the only one who solves it in a certain way, has it makes sense to act immediately in SEO to be visible and well positioned on search engines.
In fact, in these cases, it also makes sense to advertise on Google.
Because even if the costs tend to be higher than promoting on social media, people tend to buy faster, as they urgently need to solve the problem.
For example, it could be the case of particularly structured and painless curative pedicures, because it responds to the strong need to eliminate a discomfort (and often a pain that prevents movement) from the foot.
In this case, the clients are driven by the need to walk again and, many times, they want to avoid going to a doctor who could cut the limb.
I have seen beauticians being more sought after and paid than some Podiatrists in the same area.
The very first thing that must be done is therefore an analysis of the situation, which allows us to understand, numbers in hand, which way it makes sense to go, and which tools to use to reach the goal.
Let’s face it: no one has a crystal ball, and no one will be able to tell you with mathematical precision that the path you have chosen will be successful right away. Often it is necessary to proceed with subsequent adjustments, testing in the field, and making decisions based on the results obtained, to optimize them.
And a professional must follow you in this process, who knows the right tools, and above all who guides your marketing based on concrete data.
