9 TOOLS AND APPS TO REFRESH YOUR SPA MARKETING

Tracey Stapleton

What tools do you use for your marketing activities? Today we are spoilt for choice when it comes to digital resources that can help us run our businesses more efficiently and effectively, and there’s always something new or trending to discover. So I’ve gathered together some of my favourites, some of which are free and all of which are guaranteed to add value to your marketing strategy.

1. Canva

This has been revolutionary in making it quick and easy to design anything. It’s great for flyers, spa menus, social posts and presentations. The ‘pro’ version, which opens up premium tools and content, including a wider image bank, costs around £100 (€120) a year and is great value. It also gives access to your team and other Canva users so you can share documents.

Tracey Stapleton, founder, The Spa PR Company

2. Free image banks

Generally I’d recommend using your own images and video wherever possible, but occasionally you need a specific shot that you just don’t have. There are a wealth of free image banks to choose from, including Unsplash, Freepik, Pexels and Pixabay, covering a wide range of spa and wellness topics. These enable you to use their royalty-free images or videos often with just a credit to the photographer or content creator.

3. Google Trends

Google Trends is a great research and data analysis tool and one that PRs use frequently for identifying newsworthy topics to attach their client stories to. It can monitor how your brand is doing and alert you to what audiences are searching for during a certain time period and in particular geographic zones. It’s also useful for making business decisions, such as which keywords/phrases to prioritise on your website, and for SEO.

4. AnswerThePublic

There are over three billion online searches made each day and gaining access to this data provides a fantastic insight into consumer thoughts. AnswerThePublic tunes in to autocomplete data from search engines like Google, then cranks out every useful phase and question people are asking around your keyword, so you can shape your own content to appeal to them. Simply type in your subject, brand or product and you’ll be presented with a web of words.

5. Semrush Social

Want to know what’s working on social for you and your competitors? Semrush will save you hours of research by identifying when your competitors are active, the posts that get the most engagement and the best hashtags to use. Simply type in your own and your competitors’ social channel and you’ll have access to the insights for free. For the full suite of tools there is a choice of plans and prices.

6. Ahrefs

One of the most popular tools used in digital PR, Ahrefs is an all-in-one SEO toolset. It can help you optimise your website, analyse your competitors, study what your customers are searching for, learn from your industry’s top performing content and track your ranking progress. What’s more, you don’t have to be an SEO expert to use it!

7. Spa software

You may not consider your spa software to be a marketing tool but having the right cloud-based package, can help you create much more strategic campaigns. Industry leaders such as Trybe, Premier Software and Zenoti can give you a holistic view of your operations and customers in real time, so you can drill into this data and use their marketing automation tools to target them accordingly

8. Online travel agents

Don’t underestimate the digital marketing prowess of online travel agents. While you may not need to use them all the time, spa specialists such as SpaSeekers and Spa Breaks have huge spa-customer databases and can put your business in front of thousands of new clients. With SpaSeekers recently signing contracts with Tesco Clubcard and O2 Priority, this extends their outreach to millions.

9. Mindfulness and meditation apps

Not really marketing tools per se, but meditation and mindfulness apps such as Calm, Headspace and Buddhify can help create space in your mind. This ‘head space’ is really important when it comes to being able to perform well, particularly when you are trying to come up with new creative ideas.

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After a decade and a half in consumer public relations, 16 years ago Tracey Stapleton began to specialise in spa and wellbeing. Now managing director of The Spa PR Company, she offers a targeted range of PR and marketing services to spa and hotel operators as well as beauty and wellbeing product brands and services.