There are plenty of benefits to using social media in your business:
There are plenty of benefits to using social media in your business:
This is probably the number one reason most businesses use social media.
If you get your marketing right, you can increase your brand awareness by putting your brand in front of a huge audience who could potentially become your next client or lead your next client to you.
Having a coherent look or theme to your posts will help your posts be recognised instantly by browsers or followers, therefore increasing your brand awareness.
Choosing a colour scheme or specific layout is the simplest way to achieve this. There are plenty of Apps with a choice of Insta grid layouts and theme ideas to aid you in this.
Being consistent with the style of your posts will help give your online presence a real identity and increase your brand awareness.
This is essential if you are relying on social media posts to generate clients, therefore sales for you. No point in creating amazing engaging content if only your friends and family see it, you need to spread that net wider and grow a larger audience.
It’s easy to be tempted to ‘buy’ followers and likes to propel your page into the mega thousands to grow your audience but wouldn’t you rather have real organic followers who potentially could come to you for treatments, or recommend you to someone else who will, rather than your followers being people who will never do this? Your content is precious, it takes time and effort to create and put it in front of only those who count!
A simple and easy way to grow our audience and gain real followers to your page is to simply Borrow Other People's Audiences.
Yup, someone else out there, nearby, who does same or similar treatments that you do, or are likely to have clients interested in your type of services; they already have followers so let’s put ourselves in front of their audience to grow ours’!
Now this takes time, and you need to put the work in but using the simple steps below you can watch your followers i.e. your audience grow. In this instance we are focussing on Instagram:
Try to do this exercise at least once a day but limit the number of accounts you follow to eg 30 each time. You don’t want Insta to think you’re a bot! Watch your audience grow over time with real people who potentially could be interested in your services.
Other ways to grow your audience are to again, find a salon nearby, click on their profiles and see who is engaging by liking or commenting on their posts and follow their followers.
Consider using your personal social media to help grow your business social media audience. For example, in this instance Facebook. Ensure your business is mentioned in your personal pages too (of course, many people choose to have these separate and that’s ok) but duplicating posts from business to personal and asking friends and family to share these to their friends list will again, be throwing your net to a wider audience and therefore, growing your audience.
Remember: Borrow Other People's Audiences.
Think about social media accounts that you follow: what makes you connect to them? What prompts you to stop scrolling and linger on their post? What prompts you to like or comment or share that post? What are they doing that has made them connect with their audience i.e. you?
Engaging content is everything and everything is content!
Use Insights feature on Insta for example to see what posts, be it reels or photos, have connected with your audience the most. Use this information to plan future content and create more of what is connecting your audience to you. Your content doesn’t have to be solely about your services, some examples of other content to connect with your audience is to create posts about you, your salon, a day in the life of, product spotlight, educational posts etc.
Audiences connect for all sorts of reasons and in all sorts of ways. Some audiences will prefer to connect with your grid or feed, other audiences will prefer tik tok, stories or reels. Times of the day will see more engagement in your posts than other times, there could be seasonal patterns to consider too. Staying relevant and consistent is essential to keep a strong connection with your audience. Again, think about how you engage with someone on social media, e.g. are you a story browser mostly? If you click on a story does this lead you to look at the feed?
Is Tik Tok your thing? If so, creating a page to include reels about you or your business can lead to engagement and exposure to a much bigger audience. Play around with the differing social media platforms out there, see which one connects you to your audience more and experiment with types and timings of posts.
Figuring out how to connect with your audience is a big task, ever evolving and changing so unless you are a whizz with social media strategy perhaps engaging a professional Social Media Manager to do this effectively for you may be money well spent. However, a more accessible avenue to connect with your audience is to plan your posts on all your varying platforms by using scheduling Apps such as Business Suite. This handy tool allows you to plan your content and the times in which you wish this to be posted.
Creating engaging posts which showcase your craft is an effective way to generate sales in your beauty business as this allows clients to see exactly what you can do for them, what problem you can solve for them or simply show them something new to them that they would like to try for themselves.
Your social media is your shop window allowing potential buyers to look before deciding to buy. Therefore, presenting your social media in such a way should always be in the forefront of your mind: exciting, engaging, interesting content will generate sales in your beauty business just as an exciting shop window will.
Think about before/after reels or photos: these will reach out to potential clients who see themselves in the before images who desire to look like the after images.
Think about posts offering aftercare advice, about how to get the best from the services you offer and products you have available to purchase in the salon.
Think about posting images of returning clients receiving your services and letting your audience see you have clients who come back time and again.
All these content ideas could lead to generating sales, either in product or bookings ultimately.
Utilising social media in your beauty business summary
Blog by Isobel McMahon @lotuslashes (Eyelash Excellence Brand Ambassador)
