Marketing Advice

[Craig Fulton]

Hi Girls (and Guys),

Before we get started let me introduce myself.

So here it goes. I am Craig and I am a marketing professional (I practice a modern marketing philosophy called "permission marketing"). I worked as a Marketing Manager within the beauty industry for a number of years for a beauty distribution company. I loved my job and one of the best aspects was speaking to salons and offering advice to those who needed it. Unfortunately I was offered a position within a large corporate company out with the beauty industry and I accepted. So what can I say? I miss the beauty industry!!!

During my time within the industry and behind the scenes of one of these many companies that supply your beauty equipment (dermabrasion, IPL etc) and tan etc, I felt a lot of these companies did not offer enough support to Salons to help in promoting their business. The materials they also supply can be very cheap and unimaginative and often misrepresentative of your target markets. I was often discouraged to offer marketing advice as "a waste of my time" whereas I felt it was vital in ensuring the success of our clients. I love marketing as much as you guys love nails, tans, hair or whatever and I am always happy to talk about it whenever I can.

Therefore I will be available on Salon Geek to offer any marketing advice to anyone who needs it. It would be a good idea to use this thread to fire away any questions you have and I'll do my best to respond to everyone.

Thanks for reading =)

 

[JohnD]

Thanks Craig. These last few years i've really begun to understand how important marketing is in the business world, especially for us little fishes, who need all the help we can get.
We've had to do our own marketing and it really is an interesting part of the business and challenging creative wise. So i can feel your enthusiasm

 

[JohnD]

Thanks Craig. These last few years i've really begun to understand how important marketing is in the business world, especially for us little fishes, who need all the help we can get.
We've had to do our own marketing and it really is an interesting part of the business and challenging creative wise. So i can feel your enthusiasm

 

[Lynne Baker]

What a lovely gesture! Thank you!

 

[smooth]

Hi Craig

I heard about permission marketing about 6 months ago and they were singing its praises. What sort of things do you do and what results are expected?

 

[Craig Fulton]

First off hi guys nice to hear from you all!

John you are right. Marketing is the life source of a business and it is great you have realised it's importance! Your analogy as you guys being "little fishes" is superb and so very true. I will go into this in more detail soon. Smooth have a read at this first to get some solid background information before I go into permission marketing. First I think it would be a good idea to clear up some misconceptions of marketing.

let's start with the terminology of Marketing. Marketing does not mean advertising. Its very important to understand this as you will start to think more clearly and bring new innovation to the table. Often when salon marketing is mentioned the thoughts of direct mailing, flyering, newspaper adverts etc will come to mind. This is what we call interruption marketing. This can be expensive (in relation to your budget), produces a low hit rate and can often cause a negative perception of your business. Why can this cause a negative perception? Well it's just plain annoying! When your at your salon preparing a mail shot to your local home addresses you call this direct marketing. However when u are at home and you pick up your mail and you find an insurance offer or sign up to virgin tv what do u call it?...JUNK MAIL! Its a common mistake and it helps looking out your consumer mind set hat (you are one after all) and think "how would I react to this in my free time". though to understand this further we need to look at today's consumers and how they have changed.

I could cover a lot on this subject though to give you the general idea, consumers trust in advertising has declined dramatically, they now actively avoid advertising (or being interrupted) and a single person on average does 46 hours worth of activities in a 24 hour day. That means we multi task and are more stressed (activity overload) an therefore have even less attention span to advertising! in other words the consumer is not an audience as that would assume they are actively awaiting our engagement! rather they are too busy, too tired and too aware of interruption marketings agenda and over exuberant claims! A consumer is also exposed to over 3000 marketing messages a day. I also studies psychology and I can say the human mind is very limited to the amount of stimuli that reaches your short term memory, never mind long term. Now this brings us to our final misconception.

John you said that your are "small fishes" and you are right. Though tiny tiny little fish would be more accurate. You see often you will perceive your business to be competing against other salons within your area. So when you take out your newspaper advert you are competing against "stacey's beauty" etc. Well your actually competing against that orange advert and that new apple I phone editorial. Take your marketing spend for last year and work out your % against £16.6 billion (last years total marketing spend). Now you can truly see how small you are.

now this may seem all a bit doom and gloom. Though you will be excited to hear that the small fishes are perfectly positioned to produce remarkable and innovative marketing on next to no budget and the corporate fat cats are in for a scare if they don't adapt! I realise that I have written a lot and it will be best to let you mull over the above, discuss and if you have any questions then let me know and I'll happily answer them. Plus I am away to play football haha !

Though I will show you how to create solid brand values that will set the foundations for successful marketing tomorrow. I will also explain how marketing is so much more than advertising. Like the smell of your salon, the way your receptionist says goodbye and lots lots more.

No problem lynne it's not a chore for me, more of a hobby! So I'm in the right place with other geeks haha =)

 

[Halls of Ivy]

I absolutely love this thread infact I think it's one of the most interesting threads I have read in a long time.

I am currently in the process of writing up some notes for our salon team that supports your theory. In our salons team meeting we discussed customer service and going back to basics of clientel care. Some of the things we identified were the way the salon smells, the first person the client is greeted by when they walk through our door, the fresh towels, how to deal with problems, all of this is part of our business development that I'm just writing a post on now.

Most of us business owners I'm sure will agree... I sometimes wish there were 2 of myself. One of me, runs the academy and salon, deals with staff, everyday salon tasks and running the business, the other one if me working on our business development strategies and building separate days in for this in an already busy week. Aswell as being a devoted mother and wife.

It's fantastic to have someone on salon geek offering their support in marketing, an area which is not many of ours strong point. We as a business have recently discussed appointing someone as a marketing/PR personnel but in a recession this may not make perfect business sense.

I agree with your theory relating to direct marketing flyers/mailouts/emails. It's very difficult sometimes and costly to capture the audience we are targeting. I'd like to hear your thoughts on alternative paths to Market effectively.

Welcome to salon geek

X

 

[gilly123]

Craig this is fantastic!!! cant wait to hear more from you.:hug:

 

[taggyboy]

Wow, I'm hooked being one of the tiny, tiny fishes. Will watch this thread with interest and hope to learn lots. Thank you

Sent from my HTC Desire

 

[hellishbellish]

How lovely, thankyou!

 

[Sarah22]

Wow, this is really interesting!! Can't wait to read more tomorrow!! Thank you very much :-D

 

[Princess_emily1]

This is so exciting! I have hardly been on here the last 2 months and this is the first thread I read! I hope I haven't missed to many amazing threads like this!

Welcome to salon geek x

 

[Verve Designs]

Welcome Craig. Always nice to have another expert in their field on here....we'd have a massively talented corporation if we ever put all our heads together one day, we seem to have a specialist in everything on this forum!

Permission marketing was something I was talking about myself on another thread last week - although I think it got a bit missed as I was talking about it pertaining to Data Protection and I went off on a tangent or two.

I was suggesting people ask clients if they'd like to be "marketed to" in advance, because not only does it cover them for marketing legislation it's a vastly more efficient use of (often smaller)resources because offers and information are only sent to people that are actually interested in the product or service.

 

[JohnD]

John you said that your are "small fishes" and you are right. Though tiny tiny little fish would be more accurate. You see often you will perceive your business to be competing against other salons within your area. So when you take out your newspaper advert you are competing against "stacey's beauty" etc. Well your actually competing against that orange advert and that new apple I phone editorial. Take your marketing spend for last year and work out your % against £16.6 billion (last years total marketing spend). Now you can truly see how small you are.

Great, now i feel like an Amoeba :cry: Seriously Craig, thanks for taking the time to post. It's a great read and you definitely have my attention, which is a rare thing nowadays

 

[Pinkbunny28]

You are more than welcome amongst us!! Thank you, look forward to hearing more x


Sent from my iPhone using SalonGeek

 

[K3lly]

Excellent thread and I'm looking forward to hearing more!x

 

[serenitykim]

I'm just starting out and am so looking forward to continue reading this thread, a must read from now on!!! X




Kim Serenity Beauty Treatments

Sent from my iPhone using SalonGeek

 

[redsadie]

Thanks Craig

It's very kind of you to offer to help with our marketing as I find it a struggle sometimes to differentiate between the two and end up advertising when I should be marketing!

xx

 

[Craig Fulton]

Hi everyone,

Thank you for the positive replies and I am very pleased you found the above interesting. Halls of ivy you are very much on the right tracks and I will explore relationship building in detail shortly. The aim of all of this is to alter your perceptions of marketing so you are in the right frame of mind to enhance your whole business!

Unfortunately I did want to cover brand values today however I have been tied up in meetings for most of today and have a conference call in 10 mins (it's a late one for me). I thought I would give you a heads up that I will post on brand values tomorrow morning as I know I have a spare half hour I can dedicate to yous all. I know I have a few pm's requesting some assistance and I aim to help you all as soon as I can =)!

Have a good night everyone!!

 

[Tillypops]

Looking forward to reading more.