Worldwide Salon Marketing

Salon and Spa Marketing – and the Most Dangerous Number in Business

by Greg Milner on 01/07/09 at 8:12 pm

The most dangerous number in any business.

Last week I had an interesting conversation with a very embarrassed woman.

I’ll call her Jenny. For reasons which will become clear, I won’t identify this very nice lady, except to say she is a supplier to the beauty industry. Jenny was one of more than 30 people who had expressed an interest in hiring me as their marketing and sales strategy consultant (see more here).

Turns out that six months ago Jenny had applied for membership of the salon & spa marketing Inner Circle system, and had been talked out of it by Jill, because the program is skewed towards salon & spa owners rather than suppliers, and at that time we were not offering marketing systems for suppliers (although that is about to change.)

So Jenny went away and did something she now regrets. She was persuaded by a public relations firm to hand over – wait for it – forty thousand dollars - on the promise this firm would get her publicity in the industry trade magazines.

In the six months since then, the PR firm has managed to secure Jenny a total of (pause for effect)… THREE small stories on the product pages of the magazines. Yes, just three little mentions.

How many actual paying customers came from those stories? None. Nada. Zip. Not a single one.

“I am,” Jenny told me, “extremely embarrassed that I fell for this.”

Now, I’m not having a crack here at the PR firm. This is more a cautionary tale about the Most Dangerous Number in Business. And that is the number ‘1′. Because Jenny was basing almost her entire marketing campaign on this one method of generating new business, which failed, she has lost a whole six months in which she could have been running multiple campaigns in various media, testing and measuring until she found the ones that worked for her business.

One of anything. One source of leads. One product or service. One means of taking payment. One crucial staff member. One major customer. (And by the way, if you only have one major customer, they’re not a customer, they’re your employer.)

The business landscape is littered with examples, large and small, of companies that crashed because they relied on, or exposed themselves, to ’one’.  If you depend on internet marketing for ALL your business, what happens on the day terrorists kill the internet? If your only form of getting new customers is mailbox flyers, you’re in deep trouble the day the government bans unaddressed mail (as has already happened in many parts of the world, particularly the US).

I can’t count the number of times I’ve bought something, only to be told ’sorry sir, we can’t take payment because the computers are down’.

Clare Oliver single-handedly ruined the solarium business, and died in the process.

How many salon owners were reliant on solariums for a substantial part of their income, only to have that income disappear overnight the day 26-year-old Melbourne woman and anti-solarium campaigner Clare Oliver died of melanoma she blamed on her use of the tanning beds?

Here’s some advice, for free: take a good look around your business. Is there one staff member who, upon leaving, would take most of your business with her? Do you only have one means of attracting new business? Are you completely or largely reliant on one product or service? Do you have only one major supplier?

Worst of all, are you the major income earner in your business?

If so, you don’t actually have a business. You have a job, which could be taken away in a nanosecond by events and circumstances largely outside your control.

Beware the number ‘1′.

Footnote: For Jenny’s forty grand, we would have

1) Consulted and advised on a complete multi-faceted sales and marketing strategy, including the development of a significant USP (unique selling proposition), a great offer, a series of packages to allow for upselling, a detailed Membership program for her customers, including a Loyalty system.

2) Developed and implemented a comprehensive online lead-generation system, including a revamped website, shopping cart, and Goodle ads, plus a means of capturing those leads, and an automated series of email marketing to get those leads over the line.

3) an offline lead generation system, including small but highly-targeted ads in trade magazines, and a rolling direct-mail campaign to market to those leads.

And we might even have made Jenny’s products available to our own extensive list of customers and subscribers, numbering more than 15,000 opt-in email addresses, and more than 30,000 salons for whom we have physical addresses.

If you want to find out more about our Private Consulting services, go here and complete the Expression of Interest form.

A post by Greg Milner The odd idea, a bit of prodding, a nudge here and there, a little fun, and the occasional dose of brutal reality. Greg is co-founder and CEO of Worldwide Salon Marketing, a writer, direct response marketing consultant, specialist marketing systems adviser and coach. He (sometimes) accepts private consulting clients.

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