Salon Marketing Campaign of the year – our entry (US version)

Hairdressing Business Awards 2019

This is our entry into the 2019 Hairdressing Business Awards "Best Salon Marketing Campaign" on behalf of the Voodou salons.

NOTES:
* We suggest you read this on a PC (not mobile).
* We help salons in the UK, US and Australia. Click here for the results in UK Pounds.
* This new client campaign will work for Hair, Beauty and Aesthetic salons.

This is a BIG read with a LOT of detail for any salon owner serious about attracting New Clients over a sustained campaign.

Their advert spend may be a lot higher than your budget, but you could plan to spend 10% of their investment for 10% of the return.

The headlines results over 12 months...

  • Income from the new client campaign in 2019 $339,000. This is the value from just the 1st visit.
  • It brought 4,132 new clients
  • Their 1st visit average bill was $83 (over the year). In the last quarter that rose to $97.

At the bottom of this page you can take the first step to get our help in replicating these amazing results for your salon.

Q: Tell us about your brand image, how this has evolved and why should you win this award?

Voodou started 43 years ago with one suburban salon and has since grown with some of the best-known and most successful hair salons in Liverpool. Everyone in Liverpool knows the Voodou brand:  we are fiercely independent and offer quirky, irreverent, warm and welcoming salons where our stylists lead the way with the latest hair trends and colours.

At the heart of the company’s success is a relentless focus on marketing and a constant evolution of the brand to ensure we remain relevant to our clients. We refuse to stand still.

Where many hairdressers didn’t see the need for a website, Voodou led the charge, working with salon marketing experts Salon Guru to create a website with excellent SEO that leads clients through our doors on a daily basis. We take a similar approach to the growth of social media, bloggers, influencers and online advertising. 

With increasing competition for hair clients in Liverpool, it’s vital Voodou continues to lead the way.  That is why we decided to deliver an innovative new marketing campaign to attract new hair colour clients.

 In the past 12 months we spent just $27,800 to gain $339,000 in new income from 4,132 new clients. The new income is purely from first visits and, with more than 500 five star reviews of our hair services, we are confident we can convert the majority of these clients into loyal and returning customers.

This has been our most ambitious digital marketing campaign to date.  It owes its success to clever targeting on our social media platforms, facebook and Instagram – and partnering with an expert in salon online marketing.  We have also measured, monitored and tweaked each step of the process to deliver a marketing campaign that is now being heralded as the benchmark for other hair salons across the UK.

Short video by the Voodou MD

Q: Describe your approach when putting together your marketing strategy.

Voodou worked in partnership with salon marketing experts Salon Guru to create our most ambitious ever new client campaign.

This entry shows how, after 12 months of hard work, we have perfected a campaign that now…

brings new colour clients every day at a cost of less than $4 each

and a 1st visit average spend of $97.

Voodou’s primary client demographic is students and young females who are living, working or studying in the city centre. For this reason, our potential clientele can be transient so we have focussed our marketing strategy on attracting new colour clients.

For many years we have had:

  • an incredibly busy website with over 200,000 unique visitors a year, and have won the UK’s Best Salon Website award twice.
  • exceptional SEO – ranked number 1 in Liverpool for over 100 salon phrases.
  • amongst the best salon social with 28,000 facebook fans and almost 16,000 Instagram followers.

So, our new client campaign in the last 12 months has utilised the incredible power of facebook and Instagram adverts. We use the massive amounts of personal data that social media stores to reach clients of the right age, gender, location and buying intent.

In the last year, that has produced over $339,000 of new client income from first visits – all from an advert spend of just $27,800.

Q: What is special about your marketing strategy? How does it differ from competitors? Provide an example of a successful marketing campaign and the costs.

Our new client campaign is entirely performance data-driven. We run many sets of adverts each with their own hair colour videos, headline and promotional text. From these, we choose the “winning adverts” based on sign-ups and cost per acquisition and move them to a live advert set. This process is repeated every week with new videos and headlines.

We then run more tests using the chosen adverts to compare ages ranges and postal codes.

This constant testing and tweaking means that we have an evolving set of adverts that use the best creative (videos and text) that is always focussed on the best demographic (age and locations).

The process to get new client sign-ups has changed many times over the year as we tested new methods to a) reduce costs per acquisition and b) maximise the number of sign-ups.

The screenshots below show the process (click on an image to enlarge)

  1. Video advert shown (from a set of about 10 at any time)
  2. Sign-up button opens a facebook lead form
  3. Submission of data saves into a database (we can download later for more marketing)
  4. Submission also triggers an email reminder with links to the website and T&Cs
  5. People who click the MORE button on the Thank You page (about 40% do this) are subscribed to a chatbot sequence. This allows for reminder messages to be sent via facebook over the coming days.  These messages include quick-dial buttons and reminder visuals.

Step 1 - video advert 1

Step 1a advert

An example video advert. See the live version on this link.

Step 1 - video advert 2

Step 1b advert

An example video advert. See the live version on this link.

Step 2 - the Lead Form

Step 2 Lead Form

A facebook Lead Form. It pre-fills data based on their facebook profile data.

Step 4 - the Thank You page

Step 3 Thankyou

This auto sends a Thank You email with the Voucher and a web link to the offer and T&Cs.

Step 5 - the email confirmation

Step 4 Email

Step 6 - the 1st Messenger message

Step 5 Messenger introduction

Step 7 - Messenger reminder after 2 hours

Step 6 Messenger reminder 1 hour

Step 8 - 2nd Messenger reminder after 2 days

Step 7 reminder 1 day

Once a client visits the salon, we have a comprehensive New Client Journey series of emails and texts and a card given in-salon to encourage future visits.

Q: Show any evidence for the above
The image below shows a snapshot of our facebook account over the year. You can see the various campaigns with the different delivery methods we have tested. Our evolution has been…

  1. Image adverts - linked to our webpage with a form to complete
  2. Images made into video carousels - linked to our webpage with a form to complete
  3. Videos - linked to our webpage with a form to complete
  4. Videos that trigger a Messenger chatbot
  5. The current/best performing result -
    Videos with a facebook lead form, thank you page on facebook, automatic emails and a Messenger chatbot sequence as reminders.

This campaign is named Ladies NCO leads on the screenshot and since it started (30/4/19) its key metrics (shown in dollars) are…

  • Spent $2,579.
  • Reached (seen by) 154,000 people.
  • Lead forms 670.
  • Cost per client lead $3.85.

FBads1

Q: How do you measure, monitor and evaluate your marketing plan?

The Voodou and Salon Guru teams have a weekly “review meeting” by telephone and screenshare where we look at all the key metrics:

  • Amount spent on ads
  • Number of completed new client forms
  • Cost per acquisition
  • New targeting suggestions
  • New creative (videos) needed
  • Income from vouchers used “in-salon”
  • Costs per client acquisition and ROI (Return on Investment)
  • Analysis of strengths and weaknesses by platform (facebook & Instagram) and across demographics.

We work with a very detailed shared Google sheet that shows per week all the data and comparisons to the previous year. A much-simplified summary sheet is linked in the next section.

Proof of results and income can be seen on the Google sheet on this link

This is a simplified version of the sheet we use and review each week and the key data is highlighted in yellow

  • First visit nncome from the new client campaign in 2019 $339,000
  • It brought 4,132 new clients
  • Their average bill was $83 (over the year). In the last quarter that rose to $97.

Q: What is your marketing budget and what is it spent on?

The spend on new client adverts has grown over the year as the results have proven to be sustainable and scalable. In May 2019 the ad spend was $900 a week producing almost $9,000 a week of new client 1st visit income.

In addition, we pay Salon Guru $500 a month to create the adverts, modify targeting, optimise performance based on results and take part in the weekly performance reviews.

Q: Talk us through your website and how it has benefited the business. Provide links to online activity.

The Voodou website and its strength on search engines is at the core of all our marketing and has twice won Best Salon Website in the UK and also Best Online Salon.

We have spent more than 5 years working with Salon Guru to add new content and constant optimisation to ensure we are number 1 on Google search for over 100 salon phrases in Liverpool. This brings over 200,000 unique visitors to the website each year.

The statistics from Google Analytics shown below that the 95,000 visits in the last 5 months have come from a variety of sources – but the top 4 are …

  1. Google search – showing the power of our SEO
  2. Facebook adverts and organic – our New Client Campaign
  3. Direct – clicks on client emails we send every month to over 30,000 people
  4. Instagram adverts and organic – our New Client Campaign

Analytics

How to use Salon Guru's expertise to get new salon clients!

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