What 99% of Salon and Spa Owners DON’T Get….

by Greg Milner on Wednesday, September 24th, 2008 at 7:13 pm

Direct Response Marketing 101 for Salons & Spas: Tell the WHOLE story.

View from my room in Wellington. Not bad, huh?

I’m writing this in Wellington, New Zealand, a brief stop-over to see my son Michael and his wife Gemma on my way to California for the Your Beauty Network weekend business retreat in Carlsbad.

To be honest, it’s just an excuse to break up the trip. It was an 8-hour flight to get this far, and there’s another 12 hours across the Pacific tomorrow. Even flying business, I loathe travelling – I’d rather have root canal therapy – but made more tolerable to wake up on a pristine, sunny, windless morning (Wellington doesn’t have many of those, it’s one of the windiest cities on earth) and look out over a spectacular harbour.

(And I’ll be back here in NZ in three weeks, for two marketing classes for salons and spas I’ll be giving in Auckland on October 20 and Wellington on October 21. If you’re in NZ and have NOT yet booked in for one of these classes, do so now – call Ticketek on 0800 842538)

Mike and Gem have gone off to work. Idly, I’ve flicked on the TV in my room. It’s the Guthy-Renker infomercial show. Okay, maybe I should get a life, but I’m in the business of studying, researching, testing and writing about effective marketing strategies for salons & spas… and trying ceaselessly to educate our Inner Circle members on what actually works, as against the dangerously ill-informed nonsense that most beauty industry professionals are fed by their peers, friends, staff – and worse, product suppliers, ’business coaches’ and ‘trainers’ who’ve never written a successful ad in their lives.

Case in point: conventional ‘wisdom’ says ‘be brief…people won’t read lots of text…don’t clutter your ad or flyer with copy…just your name, a few pretty pictures, and your contact details…if they want it, they’ll call – and other such drivel.

No, they won’t call!

I’m a great believer in simply studying what works, and applying it to whatever I want to do. ‘Steal and deploy’. So that’s why, on cable TV in my room, I’m watching Guthy-Renker infomercials. Specifically, extemely well-preserved 56-year-old Victoria Principal, selling her range of face creams, skin treatments and other glop.

Now, this infomercial goes on and on…and on…and on. Breathlessly, Victoria introduces a parade of middle-aged women who all look like Christie Brinkley and rave about the stunning effects Victoria’s glop has had on their faces. I go make myself a coffee, walk outside, take in the view for a few minutes.

Back in my room, the infomercial is still running. Twenty minutes or more. It’s relentless. I make a couple of phone calls. Back in Victoria-land, lab technicians are describing how the ‘secret European formula’ smoothes wrinkles like never before.

For thirty minutes, Victoria uses testimonials (proof!), scientific ‘evidence’ (more proof), case studies, celebrity interviews, tops it off with a great value-add offer, a Call to Action (‘call NOW…1800 etc), more testimonials…another Call to Action…on, and on, and on.

Why on earth would this relate to you, the owner of a small salon or spa?

Surely, if you believe the ‘experts’ who tell you to ‘keep it brief’ – surely just a 15-second ‘Hi, this is really good glop, buy it’ commercial would be more than enough?

Think about it. The Guthy-Renker company is a 100-million dollar corporation. Do you really believe that such a smart company would spend gazillions of dollars on hugely-elaborate long-form advertising if it didn’t work???

Of course not. Through years of endless testing, measuring, tweaking, testing again, Guthy-Renker have proven beyond reasonable doubt that

The More You Tell, the More You Sell.

I mean, if you told a staff member to sit down with a prospective client and sell her on your services, you wouldn’t tell that staff member to ‘stop talking when you reach 250 words’ would you? Of course not. And yet…even from Inner Circle members…I get ads faxed to me, emailed to me that are almost all white space, just bullet points. No compelling detail, no ‘reason why’, no effort put into them. And where’s the testimonials???

There is magic in the detail.

(Take a look around our websites. Why do you think they’re full of copy, full of testimonials? ‘Cos it works!)

As example, here’s an written for one of our Members. Take a good hard look at it. Tightly-packed copy. Strategically laid out so the reader’s eye is forced to follow a chosen path – towards a buying decision. Not just thrown together any old how.

Footnote: Victoria’s infomercial has finally ended. I’ve called the 1800 number, ordered a year’s supply of glop. I flick over to the Tyra Banks show. It’s about women who run ‘sex clubs’. I keep watching – in the interests of research, you understand – and sure enough, Tyra ends the show with a brief story about a

lawn-mowing business!

I’m serious. But this ain’t no ordinary lawn-mowing business. For an extra fee, you can get your grass cut by babes pushing mowers in bikinis! (The babes, not the lawnmowers, silly.) Not surprisingly, business is booming, because this ordinary, garden-variety (excuse the pun) business has worked out a way to be different. Nope, they don’t cut lawns better than the next guy. But they make more money than the next guy, because they’ve figured out that it’s better to be different than it is to be better.

Now, go apply that thinking to your salon or spa.

Speaking of testimonials…

Good direct response marketing works, wherever you are in the world. From Snellville, Georgia (it’s just outside Atlanta, Babe Savage (www.babesavage.com) joined the Inner Circle program and received her Essential Salon Owner’s Marketing Toolkit only a few weeks ago.

Motion beats meditation, every time. Babe took immediate action, and is already reaping the rewards. Here’s what she wrote to me a few days ago (and the punctuation is all her own work:-):
“Hello Greg
I’ve been going through the toolkit this week and we have implemented the “queen of referrals” IT HAS WORKED LIKE A CHARM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! We had 7 new clients last week!!!!!!!!!! And we haven’t even gone through the whole kit. And remember we aren’t in a high traffic area!!!!!!

I have never seen any marketing kit put together like this IT IS AWESOME…I’m looking forward to a long business relationship with you all!!

Babe Savage
“Experience the Exceptional”
WWW.BabeSavage.com
770-294-4879

Now that’s really ‘getting it’. We get emails and faxes like this all the time, have done for years, and yet it never ceases to make me immensely proud whenever I see such positive feedback, and realise that all over the world, salon & spa owners are using our material, our advice, our coaching, to make more money, bigger sales, fatter profits, despite all obstacles thrown up by the ‘recession’, idiots on Wall Street, government restrictions, even their own nervousness at doing things different.

If you have not yet applied to join the Inner Circle program, click here to do so now. You will NOT achieve different results by keeping on doing things the same way you’ve always done them. Expecting better results while changing nothing is by definition, insanity.

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.