Monday, November 19, 2012

Increase Your Marketing Muscle



      This weeks marketing tip is all about getting more traction for your marketing efforts.
Why not partner with your manufacturers? These companies we spend our hard earned dollars with have marketing departments that spend time and money getting their product out to beauty editors, bloggers, trade magazines and consumers. When branding your salon, partner with your manufacturers and use some of their marketing muscle. If you don’t have a one on one relationship with someone at the company send an email or better yet call and introduce yourself. Tell them a bit about your salon and that you would appreciate partnering with them to market their products and your services. Get to know their educators, establishing relationships is easier than ever with facebook and twitter. Spend some time on their websites to grab some of their press coverage. Pull a look off their website, put it in a nice frame and write the caption steal this look. Look to see if they have gotten press. Most manufacturers will post their press on their sites. If you can get a hold of the magazine, do the same. Frame it with the caption Steal this look, or from the celebrities to your nails right here at your salon. Ask If your manufacturer doesn’t have press releases ready you can go to their site and adjust the wording for your needs. Ask about artwork as well, high resolution images look best in newsletters and press releases. Look for marketing opportunities for new product releases, this is the most obvious choice but here’s a few other ideas.

     Open houses and anniversary events. For my third anniversary I found out the gift included crystal. I called Nail Tek and asked for a deal on 100 of their mini crystal files to give away at my anniversary celebration. They were glad to help and gave me quite a deal on the files. I promised to follow up with a photo and a press release, which I did and it landed in Nail Pro. Press for us and press for Nail Tek, win win. Contact manufacturers for deals on small samples for your goodie bags. When you get good at getting press they might even give you free samples. Don’t forget to ask your distributors. They often times have access to samples for the right occasion. Post photos of your work on manufacturers Facebook pages. Many consumers “like” their pages as well and your work is there for all the world to see. Tweet photos and use your manufacturers name with a hash tag on Twitter and interested consumers will find your work there also.



      Check manufacturers websites often. I often use their marketing copy for my newsletters and posts. Check the trades as well, many manufacturers put their trend releases into the magazine as an insert. Don’t just flip past it, scour it for marketing opportunities and ideas. There is already so much available to us for just the asking so why not work smarter not harder? Partner with these beauty giants and your marketing efforts can be colossal!
(Original post August 2011)

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