Going LIVE on Monday, February 6

We’re adding dozens of new salon advertising and marketing templates to the Members only ‘sealed section’ website site every month – this month, a completely new series of templates for those salons offering specialized salon services.

Balyage (like Rachael Bilson’s hair at left), IPL, chemical straightening, remedial massage, hair extensions, fat cavitation and much more… the new templates are instantly downloadable in Word format so you can easily edit them to suit your own salon’s offers.

You’ll find them in various sizes and formats, both US and A4, postcards, posters etc.

Never stare at a blank computer screen again!

The new templates join literally hundreds of done-for-you advertising only for salons & spas, in the world’s biggest specialist library for salon & spa marketing.

Just a handful of the hundreds of instantly downloadable salon marketing & advertising templates in the Members Only website

All you do is simply download them from the website, edit them to suit your own salon’s offers and specialties, enter your own business name and address, and bingo – instant advertising! Never again stare at a blank computer screen, not knowing what to write or how to lay it out.

These templates are being continually produced by our copywriting and graphics team, adding to our vast library every month.

The Members website is a storehouse containing literally years of proven, done-for-you direct response marketing templates. They’ve been downloaded, tested and proven to grab salon clients fast, all over the world.

Online marketing, email, SMS, newspaper ads, radio ads, salon posters, client letters – you’ll find them all on the Members Only website.

Not yet a member?

Still sitting in front of a computer screen, tearing your hair out, not knowing what to put in your ads?

Go here to find out how you can get Instant Access, for less than the price of a cut ‘n color!

But there is a problem : No marketing equals no clients. No clients means no lifestyle.

The investment that you make in the business by marketing to the public, and to your existing clients, is paramount to the success of your salon. And with any investment that you make in your business career, you want to invest now and see a return for a long time to come.

The results that you want are new and existing clients in the door spending their money with you, and not even giving a thought to any other salons.

Simple isn’t it!

So how do you make your marketing an investment? How is the marketing something that you will be able to “see” the returns on?

Your marketing, and learning how to market your salon CORRECTLY, is an investment in your business, and yourself. They are skills that once they are learned, are not forgotten, and will be used frequently in all your future business life. You will see the returns from the increased knowledge of how to market your business, through the business being marketed more efficiently to the market place, and more clients coming into the salon.

Your marketing, along with your salon owning mentor who will coach and guide you with learning how to market your salon, will become a tool that is used consistently to put new and existing clients into the salon with a minimum of fuss. The tools in the Essential Salon Owners Marketing Toolkit that you will use frequently and successfully, will need to be monitored to make sure that you are getting the returns on the investment that you want to achieve. There are headlines to test, offers to alter, and scarcity to create.

All of these help to improve the results that the marketing achieves for the business.

The investment in learning how to create and adjust your marketing so that you know you will get an “expected” result when  a piece of marketing is put into the market place, will pay enormous dividends to your salon.

The salon marketing tools need to be sharpened after every use. You will want to look at what the marketing  has achieved, and find where the tools have not performed. With razor sharp marketing tools and increasing skills, you will be putting clients in the salon, and see the investment in the marketing is producing positive results.

When the marketing puts clients in the salon, the investment in yourself and the salon is working. When your clients see you as the expert in the field, then the investment in the marketing has worked. When the client enters the salon and PRICE is not an issue, then the investment in the marketing is paid for. You now have marketing that is an investment. It leads clients to your salon who are pre conditioned to buying, no matter what the price.

There are many  forms of marketing that you can do that will be an investment in the salon. There are newsletters that you can use to talk to your clients about products and the benefits of using them ( versus the Coles and Woolies bought products ) and make them aware of what is happening in the salon, now and in the future. You also have Facebook available as a tool for letting your clients, and their friends know, what is happening  in your salon.

NOT yet a Member of the Inner Circle marketing & mentoring program? Don’t yet have the power of the Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit? Click here to find out more and apply for a 90-day Money Back Guaranteed Test Drive of the entire system, including the Toolkit, one-on-one coaching (with our experienced coaches who are all salon & spa owners themselves) and access to the Members Only resources website.

Facebook - What you can do to protect your marketing!

Every woman and her dog are using Facebook to keep in touch, and let their clients know of great offers that they are promoting for the salon. There is even more reason to be cautious about who you let into your facebook world.

With over 700 million uses worldwide, it is undeniable that there are people out there that will drool over the idea of getting your information for their benefits.

Facebook Safety Tips:

Tip # 1: If you do not know them, don’t accept their offer to be friends. You wouldn’t let someone who you have just met move into your home, kick off their shoes and lie down on your coach. Don’t let them do this with your life!

Tip # 2: Only post on the net what it is that you want to be made public!

The personal information that you put on the web will stay on the web. And it is owned by someone else – not you.  So if you think that it is a closed conversation, and will not be repeated, then you may be in for a rude shock. You will find that the original post will have gone further than you thought. Internet scammers are always happy to take our details if we let them.

Tip #3: Manage your privacy settings.

Sixty percent of the social network uses are not aware of the default settings that are applied when you register. Follow these steps to help secure your facebook page.

- Read the Facebook Policy – (a nice glass of red will help) It will only take 10 minutes and will have a better understanding of what happens when you put personal information on the web.

- Goto the Facebook privacy help page – Here they tell you how to control any leaks that can happen on facebook.

- Customize your Facebook settings – This will make sure that you only share information that you are happy to share.

Tip #4: Keep Search engines out of your Facebook.

Don’t let search engines, like Google, see your Facebook site. It will put all your personal stuff on the web, in an indexed and orderly form.

Tip #5: Don’t believe everything you read. If someone is in financial distress, then CALL them first before you offer to send them money.  Always make sure the source of the info is real.

NOT yet a Member of the Inner Circle marketing & mentoring program? Don’t yet have the power of the Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit? Click here to find out more and apply for a 90-day Money Back Guaranteed Test Drive of the entire system, including the Toolkit, one-on-one coaching (with our experienced coaches who are all salon & spa owners themselves) and access to the Members Only resources website.

Inner Circle member Emma MacDonald (1 year) reveals the stresses of dealing with know-nothing newspaper ad reps

Emma MacDonald, like most WSM Inner Circle member salons who’ve had their Toolkit for more than a few weeks, soon ‘got’ what was wrong with typical beauty & hair industry advertising.

After all, as Emma says, “I was wasting money advertising until I got my Toolkit.”

Armed with her new and powerful advertising knowledge, she figured out what works for her using ‘our’ style of marketing in large-scale mailbox flyers, and told the local newspaper to turn them into a full-page ad.

For Emma, that’s when the fight started.

Turns out (haven’t we heard this before) the geniuses at the newspaper decided her advertising had too many words in it, not enough pretty pictures…existing Members will, in fact, get the picture.

“They consistantly cut text from my ads and fill up the space with pictures that I didn’t provide, they do not follow my layout and always want my salon name at the top….the list goes on and on. It’s a stressful nightmare.”

But it gets worse. Butting heads with newspaper advertising people who know nothing about what actually gets the phone to ring – because they’ve never had to put their own money on the line – is one of the more gruesome tasks in the life of an entrepreneur.

“I sent them my file with all of my directions and layout for my latest ad. They sent me back this half done ad that looked terrible. I had actually sent this exact same text to another marketing company to have my artwork done for flyers that I have distributed every week, and it LOOKED FANTASTIC! So in frustration I sent the newspaper the artwork I already had done so that they could see the standard I expected and how the layout should be. Guess what they did? They blew it up to A3 size and sent it back to me saying that they had redone the artwork!”

The next day I had the owner of the newspaper call me to ask me to have a meeting with him regarding my advertising. I asked why and he told me that the artwork team, the rep and himself were concerned that my ad’s were too much copy and weren’t going to work for me! I tried to explain to him what I was doing and at the end of the day I am paying so I want exactly what I want. He didn’t seem to think that was right.

The newspaper's first effort at turning Emma's successful double-sided flyer into a full-page ad...a mish-mash of unappealing layout. IC members can log into the Members Only area and download Emma's extremely succesful mailbox flyer...

It gets dumber, and dumber.

“He told me that my ad is the only one like it and that I am the exception for the entire paper…..he thought this was a bad thing! I still haven’t arranged a meeting with him as I see it as a waste of my time.”

Which, as Members will know, goes to show how little most publishers know about advertising.

Rule #1 to 100: Good advertisng is precisely about looking different from everything else around it. By attempting to get Emma to make her ads like everybody else’s ads, this newpaper owner was virtually guaranteeing failure. Doubly dumb: if the ad fails, the advertiser pulls the campaign. Result – no more revenue for the paper.

“As I’m typing this email they are supposed to be redoing my ad for the 3rd time, the deadline is 12pm tomorrow and I gave it to them nearly 4 weeks ago to sort out.

These are supposed to be trained advertising people and they can’t seem to understand what I am trying to do with my ads, it’s like hitting my head against a brick wall when I deal with them.

The Toolkit was the best investment I have ever made for my business, I am constantly searching the Members Only website for more ideas!

Thank You!
Emma

ATTENTION MEMBERS! You can download Emma’s successful mailbox flyer in the Members Only ‘sealed section’ here.

WSM graphic artist Vanessa Goh and copywriter Chanelle Van Der Heijden with the all-new Essential Salon Owner's Marketing Toolkit - the first major update since the product was launched in 2004

If YOU don’t yet have the power of the Toolkit, go here to find out more and apply for one of only 30 new places int he Inner Circle marketing & mentoring program released each month, worldwide.You may even qualify for a 90-day Money Back Guaranteed Test Drive.

(But be warned: we receive more than 140 applications a month. Merely applying is no guarantee of a place.)

Part of our back yard before the blitz....

A few weeks before Christmas, Michelle and I were putting the finishing touches* to a major  renovation of our backyard. I was looking for an electrician to install some fancy lighting, wire up the fountain and run cabling up to the house so we could switch everything on and off from the kitchen.

The Yellow Pages was bursting at the seams with electricians advertising their wares. I presumed they could all do a competent job. After all, electrical contractors are  heavily regulated and highly-qualified, so their customers don’t fry or burn to death.

After - the Garden Lighting Guy perfectly matched what I was looking for. That's precisely why he got the job...

It was pretty much a ‘pin the tail on the donkey’ exercise.

Then I saw an ad that leapt out at me. Here was a guy offering not merely “All Kinds of Electrical Work – No job too big or small”

as you would expect, but one who’d figured out – granted, perhaps unconsciously – the immense value of not trying to be all things to all people.

His ad read

“Light up Your Garden with the Garden Lighting Guy!”

What he had implemented was one of the Key Success Strategies:

Shrinking your target market so that whatever resources you’re prepared to throw at it has the maximum possible impact.

Key word here: shrinking.

Most owners of businesses, when asked what their target market is, reply with something along the lines of “Oh, the White Pages.” And in being all things to all people, they sooner rather than later become nothing to nobody.

Many of our own Members of the Inner Circle marketing & mentoring program have figured this out to great advantage.

Inner Circle member Amy Mitchell with baby Macy - a sudden rush of new clients thanks to 'niche' marketing

Example: a year or more ago, Amy Mitchell joined the program and got her marketing Toolkit, hoping it would be ‘the’ answer to boosting her struggling massage business.

But in the course of a brief conversation with me shortly after she enrolled in the program, Amy let slip that much of her existing business came from pregnant women.

I made a suggestion. Amy acted on it. She found a target market that’s

An Inch Wide but a Mile Deep.

Today, Amy has a super-successful new business that focuses on a very narrow, easily-defined niche market, called

Yummy Mummy – Australia’s Only Pregnancy Day Spa.

Amy focused on a narrow niche market - expectant mothers.

Like the Garden Lighting Guy, she recognized that there are Riches in Niches – that the mistake most salon and spa businesses make is jumping up and down in an ocean and expecting the ripples to spread far and wide.

Smart business owners have figured it out; what you want to do is jump up and down in a puddle, where you’ll have massive impact with relatively few resources.

There is case study after case study to prove this incredibly important strategy.

Here’s one way of figuring out if there’s a niche you can easily exploit – and the more information you already have about your clients, or can obtain through surveys, the easier this will be:

1)      Go through your list of current customers and look for ‘patterns’ of behavior, demographics etc. See if you can ‘slice and dice’ your customer list into segments.

2)     Is there any kind of common theme among a large group of clients? For example, do many of them work in a particular company, or a particular industry…do they live in a certain area…do they have children?
Is there a group of customers that have a common interest of any kind?

3)     Once you’ve identified a ‘trend’, you can then start to think about creating a specially-branded service that appeals to that group and that group only.
For example, let’s say you’ve identified that a large group of your customers are ‘working mothers of school-age children’.

So you could re-invent an existing service or package so that it directly appeals to that niche market. For example,

“Attention Working Mothers! Tired of that ‘what about me?’ feeling?

At last! How to Look and Feel Drop-Dead Sexy in 1 Hour with our Cinderella-to-Princess Hair & Make-up Glamour Make-over – ONLY for Working Mothers, and ONLY available 4.30pm to 6pm Monday to Wednesday!”

(And if you’re reading this and thinking “Oh, I’m already far more sophisticated than that…” – no doubt there are many who have already implemented some kind of niche marketing, or perhaps many types. But this is just one very simple example, just to show the structure or the idea.)

I could go on here and write an entire ad or flyer campaign based on this simple premise, but you should by now be getting the picture.

This process is called ‘Creating a Business within the Business’, but you could just as easily create an entirely new business – as Amy Mitchell did – that focuses on this or any other single niche market.

There’s another BIG advantage to creating and investing in a small, narrowly-defined niche market. (I’m a particularly lazy guy, so this is what attracted me to the salon & spa niche when I started Worldwide Salon Marketing 7 years agoJ)

It’s one heck of a lot easier to create and manage marketing campaigns, advertising material etc based on a narrow niche than it is to create and manage marketing material that tries to speak to ALL kinds of people, all at once.

So, now that you have some homework, get to work!

* Disclosure in the Interests of Honesty: when I say that ‘Michelle and I were putting the finishes touches…’ don’t take that too literally. I long ago gave up pretending that I’m any kind of tradesman. What I actually did was watch the chaps who lift heavy things, and continuously hand over large lumps of cash.

So here’s a list you can download – it’s the Contents Page of the Salon Marketing Made Easy manual, which contains the hundreds of salon-specific marketing templates for marketing in all kinds of media; newspapers, direct mail, online, text messages, letters, Yellow Pages, magazines, email and much more. Plus how to use them, the Direct Response formulas behind them, and the campaign strategies they’re based on.

Click here to download the Contents Page for the Hair Salon marketing manual.

Click here to download the Contents Page for the Beauty Salon marketing manual.

NOTE: These are the contents of just the Salon Marketing Made Easy manual in the Toolkit. I have not included here the contents of the other major manual, Selling Like Crazy.

How to get the entire Toolkit, and join the Inner Circle Premium marketing & mentoring program on a 90-day Risk Free Test Drive – Click here to complete the simple online form and we’ll contact you within 48 hours.

WSM graphic artist Vanessa Goh and copywriter Chanelle Van Der Heijden with the all-new Essential Salon Owner's Marketing Toolkit - the first major update since the product was launched in 2004

It's with ill-conceived and poorly-executed advertising like this that so many salons & spas waste so much money

Here’s a salon flier that lobbed in WSM coach Marnie Kallmeyer’s mailbox in the first week of November. Apart from the ‘Rule 1′ advertising layout mistake of using multi-colored text on a black background (hard to read), this effort is almost devoid of even a single compelling message.

It’s littered with basic marketing mistakes, I’ll point out just a few… and the nail in the coffin from the salon’s active and dedicated Sales Prevention Department…

1) If the very best this salon can say about itself is that it’s a ‘Unisex Hairdresser’, they’re in deep trouble

2) A list of bullet points that talk all about the salon, nothing about the customer. Where are the benefits?

3) ‘As seen on TV’?? Where? When? Which program?????

4) Who is the guy sporting bedroom eyes in the picture? Is he the owner? A model? A customer snapped in a hurry as he rushed to leave the place? A caption would have helped.

Then I looked for the most essential ingredient of any salon marketing piece – the offer – and found the Sales Prevention Department had worked its magic.

There, at the bottom of the leaflet, a stunning piece of dumb thinking.

’10% off your first visit with presentation of this flyer – excluding the months of November, December and January’

Remember, this was being delivered in the first week of November. Now, close your eyes. Can you really imagine Margorie, having excitedly and tenderly retrieved this masterpiece from the mailbox, elbowing Norm aside so she can get to the fridge and stick it up there with one of those nifty little magnets, fervently declaring

“Don’t you dare touch this Norm, I’m going to keep this safe till February next year, ‘cos I want that 10% discount and by crikey, you’d better make sure you leave the damn thing right where it is!”

I don’t think so. And how a salon, a spa, in fact any business can spend money on this kind of rubbish and somehow expect a stampede of eager customers is a mystery to me.

And it’s precisely these kind of Advertising Victims who complain wearily to me, when I question them on what kind of marketing they’ve been doing, complain bitterly that

“Oh, I’ve tried advertising and ‘it’ doesn’t work. It’s a waste of money.”

If they’re using this kind of crap, no wonder.

The treacherous waters of advertising are difficult enough to navigate successfully without some fool of a sales rep giving you their reasons to spend your ad dollars with them, disguised as educated ‘wisdom’.

They’ll lead you onto the rocks as surely as the mythical Siren. Evidence the following load of tripe from a radio sales rep to one of our Inner Circle Premium members, in Geelong, Victoria, who had recently signed a contract for 12 months of radio advertising at $680 a month.

The station wrote to this salon owner after she’d joined the Inner Circle program, got her Toolkit, discovered some examples of radio ads that actually work, and told the rep she wanted to change her ad.

By this time it had run 8 times a weekday for two weeks – that’s EIGHTY times – without raising a single call. Not ONE.

Dear Jan,
We would like to thank you for making Radioactive a part of your marketing for the next 12 months.
We appreciate you placing faith in our station to assist you in growing your business and we do not take the responsibility lightly.
Radioactive is designed to assist in building your brand by giving people reasons to deal with you when next they are in the market for your product or service.
It will probably take a number of months for the effect of the branding style advertising to be noticed.  We recommend strongly that you remain consistent with your message and that you allow a commercial to run for 2-3 months before changing.  We look forward to helping you throughout the year and beyond.
regards……….

Now, if you analyze this letter, there’s a few things to spot, I’ll point out three.

1)      ‘…building your brand’ – small business advertising is not about building a brand. It’s about getting customers through the door now, with Direct Response marketing that is instantly measurable, and therefore accountable for its costs. Any ‘brand building’ should be as a by-product of measurable, accountable Direct Response, not as an end in itself.

2)     ‘…allow a commercial to run for 2-3 months before changing’. Are you kidding me? You mean, you want me to keep flushing money down the toilet month after month before I figure out if it’s working?
Clearly, this is ‘advice’ from a fool who has never, ever had to spend their own money to generate business. And equally clearly, it’s in the interests of the radio station to play down expectations of early results. Means you keep paying them to ‘build your brand’. Yuk.
Listen up: if an ad – particularly a radio ad – doesn’t work the very first time you run it, it’s probably not going to work. Ever.

3)     ‘…giving people reasons to deal with you when next they are in the market for your product or service.’
Huh? Why not just stand by the freeway with a sign saying ‘hey, when you’re next in the market, you know where to find me…’
Good grief. Marketing is about turning prospects into customers NOW, not when they get a vague twinge six months down the track. Or never.

This kind of nonsense is going on all the time, perpetrated by those who have studied how to sell ad space, not what content to put in it. Fortunately, this salon owner got wise before she’d wasted an entire year’s worth of advertising. When we get results of her revised ‘Toolkit-style’ ad, we’ll bring you up to date.

WSM graphic artist Vanessa Goh and copywriter Chanelle Van Der Heijden with the all-new Essential Salon Owner's Marketing Toolkit - the first major update since the product was launched in 2004

If YOU want the kind of powerful salon & spa marketing tools this salon owner has, apply here and see if you qualify for a 90-day Money Back Guaranteed Test Drive of the entire Inner Circle system, including the Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit®

Not by thinking ‘how can I copy this?’ -- you can’t unless you have a multi-million-dollar ad budget -- but ‘how can I ‘piggy-back’ on the success of this stunning ad campaign?.

In case you haven’t seen it (more than 15 million have, thanks to YouTube) here’s the ad many marketers are calling one of the cleverest they’ve ever seen. (And if you’re interested, it was all shot in a single take, mixed with computer trickery)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=owGykVbfgUE

Now, this is a pure branding ad -- NOT something any small salon or spa can afford to do. BUT…there are ways you can piggy back on this.

If you want to do a simple Google search with ‘old spice guy’ you’ll find it’s gone mad on the web, in everything from YouTube to Facebook and Twitter. So phenomenal has this campaign been in terms of viral marketing, the star of the ad’s been interviewed on dozens of talk shows from Oprah down.

If I owned a salon pitching to men, here’s a few of the things I’d be doing:

1) making damn sure this commercial was running on my own website, and an offer of a free bottle of Old Spice glop with every cut, shave and face treatment (you can buy the stuff online for $5!)

2) driving prospective male customers to it using email and text messages

3) Driving prospective male customers to it through their wives/girlfriends (“Yes you can have a man who smells like the Old Spice Guy”)

4) offering it on posters and sandwich boards outside the salon

5) Getting free publicity via local radio and TV with a press release announcing you’re giving away the smell of the Old Spice Guy (Smell Like the Old Spice Guy for FREE!)

6) offering it in ‘buy 1, get 1 free’ promotions, and they have to visit the salon to pick it up (where, if you’re doing your job properly, they’ll book in for a cut and/or buy other product)

What you’re doing here is what famous ad man Robert Collier described as ‘entering the conversation already going on in your prospective customers’ heads’

It’s one of the greatest talents any marketer can have -- using what’s already happening as a ‘Trojan Horse’ to cut through the clutter of a million other advertising messages.

And if you’ve read this far and still don’t ‘get’ what I’m on about…and put the idea aside ‘cos it’s all too hard…you’re already wasting time. These opportunities are for marketers who’re quick on their feet.

The opportunity won’t last long. Use it or lose it.

Tracey Maryska of Passion in New South Wales

Inner Circle Premium member Tracey Maryska featured only recently here in a blog post that got a LOT of response when she told how the idiots at the Yellow Pages printed her ad with the wrong phone number – worse, they used the phone number of a rival salon instead!

But you can’t keep a good marketer down. A member of the Inner Circle program since 2008, Tracey’s salons have achieved terrific results because she figured out a long time ago what most in the hair and beauty business never ‘get’ – that she’s in the salon marketing business, not the hair cutting business.

For Tracey, everything she does is ‘marketing’, i.e., any activity which brings in a customer predisposed to buy from her instead instead of her opposition. And I have no doubt that when she got the opportunity to appear on the local TV news recently, she saw it as yet another marketing opportunity.

Tracey’s salons were among more than a hundred in her region to fit energy-saving lights – and the local TV station chose her salon to tell the story….

FLICKING THE SWITCH ON ENERGY GUZZLING LIGHTBULBS