337 Why Predictable Growth Requires Predictable Marketing

0:00Hello and welcome to today's episode of the Grow My Salon Business Podcast. I'm your host Anthony Whitaker and it's great to have you here with us today. Every week I either bring a guest onto the show or I'll dive into a new idea or revisit the foundations of what it takes to succeed in the salon industry today. And with every episode I aim to bring you practical and actionable opportunities that you can run with in your salon today. So with that said, I'm excited for today's episode which is all about one of my favorite topics which is marketing. The most salon owners think that they have a marketing problem, but the good news is that in most or definitely in many cases they don't. But what they do have is a clarity problem, a strategy problem and a consistency problem. And until that changes,

1:00then nothing else is going to change. So if the productivity of your salon and client bookings feels random and in the lap of a hairdressing God so to speak and if you're relying on Instagram and boosting a post when you're quiet expecting something to actually happen or even if you've just said the algorithm hates me or something to that effect, then this episode is 100% for you. Because today I want to talk about what marketing actually is. Not just the hyped up version, not the constantly chasing trends version, but the real version of what marketing is all about. And why most salon owners are stuck in a cycle of disjointed marketing tactics that is quietly costing them thousands and loss revenue, loss clients and lost opportunities. You see marketing isn't about hoping and it isn't guessing and it isn't just about posting

2:02on social although that is part of it. Marketing is understanding how clients actually find you, why they stay with you and then building your business around that. So let's start with what I refer to as the big marketing fallacy. The fallacy is this. Marketing equals social media. It doesn't. Social media is just a tool and it's one of the many tools in your marketing toolbox. Marketing is the strategy behind the tool. But here's what I see all the time. A salon gets very quiet. The salon owner panics. They start to post more. They maybe boosts them post. Perhaps they run a giveaway promotion. Maybe they discount a service. Maybe there's a small spike in bookings. But then it drops again. So they rinse and repeat the same thing, hoping for a different result. That's activity. But there's no strategy behind it. And activity is not strategy.

3:10You can be incredibly busy marketing your business and still not have an effective marketing system that produces consistent results. You might have heard me talk about the difference between image building and business building. Image building is the fun creative stuff like the hairdressing awards and fashion week and celebrity clients and doing photo shoots. It's all important. But that is all what I refer to as image building. Then there is the business building side of marketing. Now maybe that is the boring stuff. It's things like building your database, email marketing, SEO, referral systems, rebooking systems, Google reviews, client surveys, having a clear pricing strategy and consistent messaging. It's not nearly as much fun or as exciting as the image building stuff. But when you're able to combine the image building with

4:10the business building, then that's what builds profit. Image building activities look exciting, but business building activities builds profit within the business. The problem is that most salon owners copy what looks impressive instead of building what actually works. So let's talk about what marketing is because marketing is not just about posting and it's not just about ads and it's not just about great design and clever graphics. Although again, all of those things are important. Marketing is understanding why and how you are different to your competition and then communicating that difference consistently to potential and existing clients. That's what marketing is. And if I break it down even further, there are really four layers. The first layer is clarity. That's layer one. You need clarity. Who is your ideal client? Not just anyone with hair,

5:14but who is your target market and what do they value? What do they spend? What are their needs and expectations? And what stage of life are they in? Marketing is about understanding what you want to be known for. Is it the best haircuts in town or is it blondes or is it extensions or low maintenance color or a luxury experience? So what do you want to be known for? That's clarity. Level two or layer two is positioning. Why should someone choose you over the salon down the road? Because you can be sure there's a salon down the road. And if your answer is because we're friendly, well, so has every other salon. Positioning is about owning something, a niche, a belief, standard, an experience. Without positioning, you're often just left to be competing on price alone. But when you intentionally position your brand to appeal to a specific target market,

6:21then you're competing on value and fulfilling the needs and expectations of the ideal client that you want to attract. Layer three is all about visibility. And this is a bit that everyone often jumps straight to. Visibility, social media, maybe SEO or paid ads, community partnerships, email marketing. But here's the problem. Most of them are in a skip clarity and positioning and they go straight to visibility. So what happens? Well, they amplify confusion. If you're unclear already, marketing just makes you loudly unclear and then you blame the algorithm. Layer four is about client conversion. It's the client experience. It's a relationship that you build between the salon and the client. It's your website, your consultation process, your price

7:21infrastructure, your follow-up system, your re-booking system. You don't have a marketing problem of people are seeing you. You have a marketing problem if they're not choosing you or not coming back. Conversion is where marketing meets the operations side of the salon. And that's where most businesses are leaking money. Now let's talk about the real cost of weak marketing because it's not just low engagement. It's that you attract people who shop on price alone. You get unpredictable bookings. You panic discount. Your team has gaps. Your cash flow fluctuates wildly from week to week. And slowly, subtly, you start operating from stress. And here's the uncomfortable bit. When you're marketing as weak, you start to blame your team. You say they're not re-booking or they're not retailing or they're not productive. And hey, all of that might be true. But two things can

8:26be true at the same time. And productivity is easier when demand is consistent. You cannot build a strong culture on unstable revenue. And revenue is unstable when marketing is just reactive. Growth is not just based on luck or you being good at doing here. Growth is consciously designed to happen. So what does good marketing feel like? Well, it feels calm. You know exactly who you're for. Your messaging is consistent. Your clients refers similar clients. Your average ticket grows naturally. You stop chasing trends. You stop copying your competitors. And you make decisions based on data, not emotion. Marketing becomes a system. The goal of marketing is not just to get more followers. It's to get better clients. So why don't most salon owners fix this?

9:29Because no one ever taught them about marketing and how to market their business effectively. As hairdressers, we spent years learning how to cut and color here. But you haven't learned how to position your brand or how to build demand or how to design a marketing plan that ensures predictable growth. So instead, you copy, you experiment, you boost, you hope, and when it doesn't work, you probably blame yourself. But it's not your fault, but it is your responsibility. Over the last 40 years in this industry and the last 30 years working with salon owners in over 50 countries around the world, I've seen the same patterns over and over again. Good people, talented stylists, hard workers, but no marketing framework. Instead, they just have a sort of a hot potch of random tactics. And so without a framework of joined up thinking, clear goals and a marketing strategy that's been thought through, everything is

10:32disjointed and chaotic. And as a result, it's ineffective. So on March 16th, we're running a free training. And this isn't a social media hacks session. It's not trends based. It's not how to go viral. It's a strategy. It's structure. It's a marketing framework that we teach inside our marketing course. I'm going to break down what marketing really means for a salon business. We're going to talk about the biggest mistakes costing owners thousands. And we're going to get into how to build predictable growth instead of hope-based growth. So if any part of this episode has made you slightly uncomfortable, good. That means that you're ready to level up. So register for the free webinar. Even if you're not sure, if you can attend live, register anyway, because predictable salon growth requires predictable marketing. And predictable marketing starts

11:33with a plan. So if you want to go deeper and add a structure your salon marketing for real growth, then join me on the 16th of March for a free 75-minute webinar titled From Random Tactics to Fully Booked, the salon marketing system that gets clients in and keeps them coming back. There's a registration link for this free webinar in the show notes of this podcast. You need to register to be notified of the dates and times. So do it now before you forget. And I'll look forward to seeing you on March the 16th. Bye for now.