Why Social Media Shouldn’t Be Your Only Marketing Platform By Rachel Medlock

Yep, I said it. Social media should not be the only way that you’re promoting your business. Whilst it’s undoubtedly an integral and powerful way of communicating with our existing and dream clients, it’s not a platform that is actually owned by you.

The reason I’m sharing this is because I saw so many salons smash the panic button when local and international news was taken off our social media newsfeeds earlier this year. It was a cheeky reminder from Facebook that we, as users of their platform, have no control over the changes they make to the platform. For business owners solely market their biz from it, it was a scary wakeup call.

So, do we flip our entire strategy on its head and get off social media? Nope! Business as usual for now my friends! Social media is and will continue to be an absolute powerhouse marketing platform.

What we do want to do from hereon, is ensure that social media plays a role in a more diverse marketing strategy that includes both online and offline activities. I’ve chosen some of my favourites to get you started.

Grow your email marketing audience

Your email marketing audience is something that you actually own so it’s time to maximise it. If you’re not already attaining email information during your client intake process, this is a great time to change things up.

With their permission, you can add your clients to email marketing database to ensure that they stay up to date with your latest promotions, news and offers. Email marketing is also incredibly affordable with platforms like MailChimp offering zero-cost memberships for audiences with under 2,000 contacts and many of your booking platforms offering built-in options.

Is it time for a website glow up?

If social media was to disappear tomorrow, where would your dream client go to learn about your business and services? If you haven’t updated how your website looks, operates or sounds, this is a digital marketing power move you should totally make. Now, don’t panic! This doesn’t need to be a complete overhaul of your website. In fact, simple tweaks to a website can significantly improve your customer’s experience.

When tinkering with your website, I recommend prioritising a mobile-friendly layout with strong call to actions and an easy booking process. How does your site look on mobile phone or tablet? Remember, our phones are basically mini computers these days so it’s got to look amazing on all platforms.

Secondly, I recommend ensuring your imagery and logo is the highest quality available. There’s nothing worse than a beautiful website layout, only to see that the hero banner is blurry, or the logo is cut off. This shifts the customer’s perspective of your business. First impressions truly do count.

Finally, a game changing improvement to your website is overhauling how it sounds. Whether your business has evolved over the years, or you never had a pro write your copy in the first place, the way your website sounds to a potential customer might be completely different to what you’d intended.

Invest in a professional copywriter to review your existing website copy and tweak what needs rewriting or refining. From your menu descriptions to your businesses story, every word on your website should have the intention of creating an emotional connection with your dream customer and support getting them offline and in your chair.

It’s time to get blogging

If you’re not already blogging, this is an incredible space for you to take all the amazing knowledge from inside your brain and start sharing it with your audience. Engaging, well-written and packed with quality insights about your products, services and even the latest hair trends, blog posts allow you to be consistently adding extra value to your website and also set you up with a tonne of bonus content for your other platforms.

Think email marketing features, downloadable client education resources and even done-for-you social media captions! Blog writing is the gateway to recycling content across all of your digital marketing platforms, saving you a tonne of time in the long run!

Up your review game

It’s a no brainer that your clients are having a cheeky stalk of your business online before committing to an appointment. It’s what we do as modernday consumers! If Facebook or Instagram weren’t around anymore, how would these potential customers find reviews or social proof about your biz? The answer is Google and your website.

For many of us, we’ve put a lot of time and energy into boosting our Facebook reviews and star-rating but now, I want you to include Google in the mix too. Consider tweaking your review process (likely a text or email) to include a link to BOTH Facebook and Google so all those adoring fans can share their experience on both platforms. For them, it can be as simple as a copy and paste! clients choose you over competitors. By boosting the overall star-rating, your business is going to be shown at the pointy end of the list as one of the highest rated businesses for their particular search.

To nurture that customer acquisition experience even more, I encourage you to reply to all reviews, both glowing and not so glowing, to humanise your brand and showcase your exceptional customer service. Even those reviews that aren’t the 5-star rating you’d hoped for, responding and showing up tells a potential customer so much more about your business than ignoring it entirely.

Whilst you’re upping your review game, take a moment to share some of your favourite reviews to your website as a proud feature on your homepage. That way, regardless of how the client is finding you online, they can feel confident and excited to book with you.

Taking things offline

Don’t forget about the offline world! Customers have the ability to connect with your business at all times, not just when they pick up a phone or laptop. From the moment your customer walks through your door, you have the opportunity to engage them in your referral programs, loyalty offers and get them signing up to your email marketing lists.

Consider where your customer is going when they’re not visiting your business and how they can learn about your services. This could include flyers or brochures at your local gym, a special offer for bootcamp members, a flyer on your local day-care news board or even a special offer for clients of a local skin clinic (and vice versa). Whilst many of our clients will search for us before they book us, there’s nothing like speeding up that process with valueadding information that they can physically touch and read.

Tech giants will forever keep us on our toes and it’s up to us to ensure that when they flick those switches, our marketing strategy doesn’t come crashing down. Embrace your social media audience, keep producing incredible content but make sure that once they log out, they can still engage with your brand.