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How To Get Salon Influencers To Promote Your Business – Salon Marketing Q&A #11
By Chris Brennan
On this episode of The Salon Marketing Q&A, we look at attracting salon influencers to help promote your business.
The Salon Marketing Q&A: How To Get Salon Influencers To Promote Your Business Transcript
Welcome to the latest episode of the Salon Marketing Q&A. My name is Chris Brennan, and as always, every single episode, you ask the question and we answer it live on Facebook. If you've never tuned in before, what we're gonna do is we're gonna actually answer one of your questions in depth for the duration of this video. I know that it can be tricky watching this all live because I know you guys are quite busy on an ongoing basis, so you can check this out afterward on Facebook, or you can actually go to our YouTube page, and you can find the full playlist of every single episode of the Salon Marketing Q&A.
So, how about we get in to today's question. Shall we? This question comes from Amber in New Jersey, and she asks, "I keep reading about bloggers and online celebrities, that they can be great to promote businesses, but how do you do it? How would you get them to talk about my salon?" That's a really good question. Funny enough, we've been circling it in and abouts with things like our Instagram master class where we talked about takeovers and trying to get people to talk about your business online. It kind of goes with a little bit of online reputation as well.
One of the big things that is so important anymore is to get a great reputation online so when people start researching your business and trying to find out if you're the place to book an appointment with, they're gonna find amazing results, amazing statements and reviews about you guys. This is kind of like a beefed up version of that where it's not just your clients reviewing you, what you're trying to do is you're trying to get an influencer, like somebody who's got a huge audience online, an audience of devoted fans that are gonna listen to what this person has to say. What you're trying to do is get that person to talk kindly and complimentary about your business to their fans so they in turn are gonna be touting you, and their fans would hopefully book an appointment with you or come to check you out and see if what they said is true about you. That's kind of the plan that usually goes through when you're trying to attract an influencer or some kind of celebrity online or a blogger to actually do something for you.
The question is how you go about this. I would say step one would be to first off define your goal. What actually are you aiming to get out of this relationship, out of this transaction, out of this effort to locate and get on board an online celebrity or an influencer. What are you trying to get out of it. That could be a few things. Would you like them to just simply review you on their blog or on their video? Would you like them to come into your salon and do a profile piece? Maybe, like we said in previous episodes, you'd like them to take over your Instagram account during an event or a high moment in your salon or your business. First off, define what you want them to do, because you don't want to just contact them and ask them what they wanna do with with your business. It's important to have a great, clear, concrete understanding of what you're trying to get out of this. First off, define your goal.
Secondly, we wanna make a list of influencers. Now we know what we want to get, let's find out who we think would be the most opportune person to actually help us achieve that. So, what we're gonna do is we're gonna start looking up which influencers we can actually start working with, which kind of online celebrities, which kind of bloggers with a big fan base could we actually go for. My recommendation for priority would be to look at the influencers within your city. Basically, if you were only a product driven company, you can send them a product. Say authors, for instance, would send their book to a book reviewer and things like that. But what you usually are trying to sell is the experience of going into your salon.
That is really your priority, and I would recommend that you aim for people within your city that have a huge fan base or have a large audience. They can really take into account that they went into your salon and this is the experience they had. Otherwise, it's kinda be tough to get a celebrity from another part of the world to say how great you are because, unless they'd actually step foot in and experience what it's like in your business, it's gonna be a tough sell to their audience. So, make a list of influencers and fans and bloggers on social media and on their own blogs and stuff and find out who is the ones that have a big audience that share your audience. So hair, beauty, spa enthusiasts, people that would potentially become your clients, we wanna locate them online.
There's ways you can do that. Funny enough, one of the ways you can do that is actually talk to your clients. Find out if there's any celebrities or any local influencers or bloggers that they enjoy following. You could even put out a survey to find these people. You can use your software or put out an email and just ask them for people that they might know of that you'd like to talk to. That's a really nice way of doing it. Otherwise, you can check out online. You can even Google the question like beauty bloggers London, for example. Things like that. What you wanna do is you wanna narrow it down, and you wanna check them out in advance.
One great way to see how successful they are, it's a vanity metric, but check out how many followers they have. That's a really important one because if they're selling themselves as an influencer, then they should have a list of followers or fans that you can see that they actually communicate with. And don't just check out the number. What you wanna see is on their social page, what's the engagement like, what's the interaction like. If they're on Instagram, you don't wanna see an account full of followers but the posts individually, they don't have any interaction with it. So, we wanna make sure that the audience that they're talking to are engaged, because when they're gonna talk about you, then we're gonna get that same feeling of engagement, and that's what they're actually gonna be selling. So, make that list of influencers.
Next up, we want you to decide on the value of this connection, the value of this promotion. What is it worth to you. I'll be clear. It's probably not gonna be free to get these people to tout about you and to review you. I'm not saying that it needs to be necessarily money either, but if someone's gonna take their time and leverage their audience for your benefit, they probably should get something in return. That might not be money, by the way. That could actually be just a free treatment or a free trip to your salon and that's the payment. You provide a beautiful package for them and in return they're gonna review you online.
What you wanna do next is once you've identified them, find out what the value of this campaign is gonna be to you, because that's what you're gonna be offering them once you contact them. Let's say that you finally have decided what your goal is, you find out a list of people that you potentially wanna work with as influencers online, you set how much you're gonna actually give them, what the value of this relationship is gonna be, and next we're gonna reach out and offer.
I would recommend in this offer, you find out what's the best form of communication. It's gonna be basically email or it's gonna be Facebook DM or Twitter DM or an Instagram direct message. Find out what platforms they're very popular and active on and try to use the private direct message to introduce yourself. Introduce yourself, and I'd say we don't really know how busy these people are, so don't be too long winded. Kind of get to the point that you love what they do, you believe you have a shared audience, and you'd like to work together in a partnership or work together to see if you can both benefit. I would say you wanna sound confident. Don't be too needy. Understand that you're a professional too, and you don't wanna give all the power and persuasion to them just because you're trying to work with them.
If you ask for a favor, that's why it's probably not best to do this for free or try to ask for free, because then you're asking for a favor, and it puts a lot of the control in their hands because at any point they could turn around and go I don't really wanna do this. But if there's a transaction involved and they know they're benefiting, then they're gonna be more susceptible to working together with you in a positive manner.
You wanna kind of organize the pitch as an opportunity for then. Like hey, we have a shared audience, and I've got this new treatment that I'd love for your audience to check out, and I thought if I could invite you in and you could try it out, and if you liked it maybe you could review it on your website. Something like that. I understand there's different audiences and and forests, so you can hopefully carve out your own example from that template.
But that'd be it. That's kind of it. At the end then, if they say yes, then the last step is to liaise with them and define exactly what you'd like them to do with your business or in your business. If it is an Instagram takeover, say you have an event that's coming up in your salon and you wanted to leverage their audience to get more invitations in, so you wanted more people to come in and you invited them to basically take over your Instagram account and run a story for the day and put up posts and have a lot of fun with it, I would recommend that you first define what it is that specifically you'd like them to do. The more information you guys share together, the better it's gonna be for you.
That would be it. That's the tips. That's how I'd recommend for you to approach online influencers and celebrities and bloggers. And I'd say that these guidelines here should probably work no matter who you contact. If you start finding that they're a bit tough to deal with, then potentially it's not for you because you gotta put a value into what you're gonna get out of this. If you're gonna be working really hard to deal with a difficult person, then potentially this is not the person to work with. That would be the final piece of advice.
I hope you enjoyed this episode. I hope it was useful for you. If you have any questions that you'd like us to cover on a future episode of the Salon Marketing Q&A, please let me know in the comment box or just drop us an email at letsgrow@phorest.com, or you can hit us up in our private message in Facebook or Instagram or Twitter, because we're always available to chat.
Okay guys. Thank you so much. My name's Chris Brennan, and as always, I'll see you next time. Let's grow.
Chris Brennan
Chris Brennan is a salon marketing specialist, published author, award-winning filmmaker, host of the Salon Owners Summit 2016 and expert speaker, travelling the world to help salon owners and managers put the plans into place to hit their salon targets. For the past 5 years, Chris has also co-created a variety of diverse campaigns (from 30Days2Grow to the award-winning Salon Retail Week) that have helped salons all around the world grow their average bill and generate more referrals than ever before.
See all articles by Chris Brennan
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