y a W s e l c The Cir
THE MARKETING By Sharleen Lee
Hello, my beautiful hair friends! Let’s delve a little deeper behind the smoke and mirrors to look at marketing. So much confusion and intimidation around this little word but there are so many people and resources that can help you to make an impact for your business, and you can start close to home. I’m going to run through a few of the marketing principles we stand by here at Circles and then a few examples of past marketing strategies, with a case study thrown in for good measure, to show how we have maximised the power of marketing to translate into actual bums in chairs. To preface all of this, so much of what we do involves the power of digital marketing and AUTOMATION. I put that in caps as we are not using it enough! This is my personal area of passion as far as my business focus and I regularly present on this. This column unfortunately isn’t quite long enough to provide a masterclass in digital marketing automation, but I highly recommend dedicating some time in 2021 to ensuring you are moving towards full automation wherever possible. While I wish I could guide you all face to face, that may be a little far off- thanks COVID. However, there are plenty of online resources. I love the HubSpot Academy as well as anything from the SEO master Neil Patel who has a wealth of articles online you should all be reading. Also make sure you are up to date with the Search Engine Land site and Martech.com, for marketing info, as we know time is changing rapidly and we need to keep up more than ever. I could go on and on here so make sure you do your own research and learn from the best.
Now, here are some of our core marketing principles:
EFFECTIVE DIGITAL COMMUNICATION
Our clients are online and so are we. We are reachable 24/7 across all social platforms, which are used for meaningful and valuable dialogue. We focus on balancing the merging of old school WOM and the increase in peer 110
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review, with the ever-changing digital landscape.
FOCUS ON SUSTAINABILITY
Important to our clients, important to us. We are leaders in our home state of WA and continue to educate and inspire those around us on best practice and how to be involved at all levels from other salons through to our clients.
AUTHENTIC INFLUENCER ENGAGEMENT
This area is more important to us than most as our core demographic are heavily influenced by peer review and recommendation. We work closely with them, instead of just ‘doing their hair’ we work with them on new innovation e.g. trend focused colour work and extensions, as well as utilising them fully for in salon collateral and education and we currently have access to around 2 million followers.
AUTOMATED SYSTEMS
We effortlessly drive engagement through multiple channels from one platform, tracking customer touch points. This inbound system helps organise, track and nurture every easily visible journey. We tailor landing pages with strong calls to action and personalise our blogs, while building good fit leads by generating relevant content. Our goal is simple- spark new relationships and rekindle old ones!
INNOVATION
We never stop pushing when it comes to marketing innovation within the industry. I recently created an exciting innovation with Shortcuts as, quite frankly, if I can’t find it, I’ll try to make it! So, to show how we put a lot of that into action, here is a little case study. One of our most important marketing highlights shows not just the power of planned marketing, but also how an unexpected event can have such a huge impact when leveraged quickly and effectively. Our transformation of actress
Katherine Langford became a global sensation and we were able to generate a concrete impact on our sales and client acquisition ongoing. Katherine sits right in our core targeted demographic. She came to us looking to do something a little adventurous with her hair as she was on a break from filming commitments, with the challenge to create an attention getting look which wasn’t so dramatic it would affect continuity for her next round of filming. Following her consultation, we decided to take her natural brunette through to a rich copperjust enough of a transformation to make waves! Following her visit, we kicked into marketing mode.
My goal was to position ourselves as trend leaders and innovators, leaving existing clients proud of Circles and new clients curious to convert.
THE EXECUTION:
• We leveraged imagery and a transformation video across social media channels, after obtaining permission of course. • We encouraged Katherine to provide credit when revealing her new look to her fans, which thankfully she did! • We sent a Press Release to media with follow up interviews then scheduled after they saw the new look. • Then, our automated digital strategy drove
