Salon Owners: Bring New Clients in for Wedding Season

Whilst the summer time can typically be rather slow for salons, it is also the height of the wedding season and this presents an amazing opportunity to attract some higher end clients to your business.

First define your target audience

Before you start working on creating any kind of wedding packages or marketing plans, first take some time to think about who your target audience is. Surely it’s the bride to be, right? When most people think about a wedding they picture a young, slim, heterosexual, white couple, with the woman in a long white dress and the man in a smart suit.

As I write this article, we are in Pride month so you may already have begun to think about inclusivity around sexuality and gender.  Here in the UK same-sex marriages have been legal for almost 10 years. Not every wedding will be between a man and a woman.

Image of Mary Lambert’s wedding, by Darling Photography, via Mary Lambert.

It’s also not just about gender inclusivity. There are people of all ages and all sizes that want to tie the knot and some people can feel somewhat intimidated and alienated by typical wedding imagery. Try to include a real diverse mixture in your photos – short, gender-neutral hair, longer more feminine hair, slim and larger people, young and old, a mix of ethnicities and so on. 

Use high quality photos

No matter what kinds of people are getting married, there is one thing they will all have in common – they will want their wedding day to be one of the best days of their life and they will want to look their absolute best! People will typically spend anywhere between £100 and £500 of their budget on hair & makeup and so they must have absolute faith in your ability to deliver a top class service for them to choose your salon over all the others in the running.

You must use the best quality photos that you can. One tip here is that when you are doing wedding hair, ask if the wedding photographer can send you some of the photos to use in your marketing. Perhaps you can offer a small incentive here but you most probably won’t need to as the photographer will be glad of the publicity.

This way once you have done a few weddings, you’ll start to build up a portfolio of professional photos to use to in your future marketing. Keep updating your portfolio over time and remember to focus on your target audience.

Offer a free consultation

Some people will know exactly how they want their hair to look but others will just know that they want to look good but will need help in coming up with ideas. They will probably be looking through bridal magazines and searching online for ideas. We’ll talk later in the post about how your salon can be found by those searching for wedding hair inspiration.

But no matter how much research they do ahead of time, most people will want to meet their stylist in person and at least have a chat with them to see if they like them and get an idea of what they could do for them. Whilst it does take up the time of somebody in your salon to offer an initial consultation for free, it will be worth it if you get the booking due to the high cost. 

This is your time to shine and to impress. Use your most senior team members for this purpose and maybe consider having somebody as a designated wedding specialist. You can always book these consultations in for quieter times in the salon so that you’re not losing business.

For beauty salons: Think long term

Weddings are typically planned many months (sometimes even years!) ahead of time. Whilst having hair done is pretty late in the schedule there are many people (women especially) who will quite happily book treatments that are considered luxury, and might not normally be in their budget.

There are many services that you can offer a potential bride or groom such as skin rejuvenation treatments, chemical peels, various kinds of hair removal and even teeth whitening. Many of these kinds of treatments are long lasting and can be done a fair bit in advance of the wedding day which helps them spread the cost.

As the big day draws near they may also be interested in other treatments such as spray tans, waxing services and of course, manicures and pedicures.

This is quite a list and would make for a very lucrative customer! If you want to get somebody to book all of these treatments in then you will likely need to get them started a few months ahead of the wedding day. One nice way to do this is to create a ‘Wedding Countdown’ on your website which is a useful resource for them and also incorporates your all important treatments! Why not go all out and create an infographic for this? That is a piece of content which is easily consumed and people like to share.

Use SEO to bring in new clients

People love to search online for information. That’s probably what brought you to this post in the first place right? The wedding industry is absolutely huge and if you’re able to spend some time looking at the Google search data you will uncover an absolute wealth of ideas for targeting new clients. Here are some juicy stats for you to ponder:

• There are a staggering 24.5 million searches done every month in the UK alone for wedding related terms split across almost 2.5 million keywords! That’s just Google… Did you know that YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine in the world? You can add at least 50% onto those figures if you include searches done on YouTube.
• The wedding dress is the most searched subject – almost 5 million searches a month (that’s almost 25% of the entire wedding niche!) across over 240k keywords. If you ever get bored of running your salon, maybe you should start a sideline in wedding dresses!
• Wedding hair is a very big deal; Over 460k searches a month across over 26k (26,483 to be precise) keywords.  Now just think about that for a moment – that is 26,483 unique keyword phrases that people are typing into google every month just about wedding hair. If you dig into this data just imagine what you can uncover…So for example, with a little bit of filtering I found lots of easy to rank for keywords that show commercial intent. Here are a few gems for you:”shoulder length wedding hairstyles for medium hair”
  “chubby face wedding hairstyles for long hair”
  “wedding hair for short bobs”If you were to create content targeting those specific keywords and include appropriate photos you would have a laser targeted SEO resource. How many other salons in your locale are likely to be doing this kind of thing? This is how to can get ahead of your competition.
• A lot of people are looking for general ideas. Over 400k searches a month across 36k keywords looking for ‘wedding ideas’ of various kinds. These are fantastic keywords to target because it is so easy to fulfill the searcher intent. An example that I found was “viking wedding ideas” – very niche indeed, but imagine what fun you could have coming up with all sorts of Viking themed hair & makeup! Don’t be afraid to venture a little outside of your niche here. For example, the keyword “autumn wedding ideas” has 590 searches every month and has a low difficulty which means that it should be relatively easy to rank for. Now of course somebody searching this term is likely to be looking at things such as the venue, the cake, decorations etc which you don’t provide directly but don’t dismiss it. If you provide a genuinely useful content piece that includes all aspects of autumn weddings but then you make sure that you include the kinds of services that your salon offers, you then become a very trusted source of information that can bring the reader in as a new client.
• Avoid keywords that include words such as ‘cheap’. They can be tempting to target because they can have very large search volumes but if you manage to rank for them and bring in readers, is this your target audience? Unless you happen to be a low cost salon, most probably not! You want to bring in the kinds of clients that are happy to spend money on their big day.

Ok you are convinced of the value of SEO but what if you don’t have somebody in your team with the technical know-how to actually do the work? That’s where we come in! At Salon Guru we work with over 200 salons around the world and are experts in doing SEO and marketing just for that industry.

We can perform keyword research for you, come up with content ideas and can even help you create unique and engaging content for your audience. We can then help you promote that content on your website and on your social media channels. Get in touch with us now to speak to one of our salon marketing experts.