Marketing Budget & Total Support

Using your monthly fee we calculate the number of total hours per month. This is a simple calculation of your fee divided by our hourly rate = total hours.

We then set aside some time each month for the Total Support element of our service which is described in detail below.

This leaves a balance of Marketing Budget hours per month. This is described below.

Marketing Budget hours

This is the time our team uses to provide all the website and marketing support like:

  • quarterly marketing plans
  • regular calls to agree on updates to the plan
  • client newsletter and offer emails
  • seasonal, product and services blogs
  • social media guidance
  • Facebook & Instagram adverts
  • Google Adwords
  • recruitment campaigns
  • offers and deals
  • online stores, online booking and payment gateways
  • website design and content updates
  • team, prices and hours changes

- and a great deal more. 

Total Support hours

Ensuring that more than 200 salon and clinic websites & marketing systems are all working perfectly, 24 hours a day and 365 days a year, requires the best behind-the-scenes technical support, software and expertise.

We call this discreet, but essential package of services Total Support and some time is set aside each month from your payments to cover this.

What is included in Total Support

  • Our single biggest external cost is our global network of Amazon servers that can deliver our websites incredibly quickly anywhere in the world. The cost of this network is a key part of the Total Support fee.
  • Our servers include high-end security software to prevent hacking and data breaches plus automatic backup and recovery tools. This software is updated constantly.
  • We assist all clients with their domain names, SSL certificates and subdomains.
  • Our in-house "Zimbra" email platform is included at no extra cost and with unlimited mailboxes. Technical support is also available (if required) to help you migrate your emails from a previous host to a new one. We support all major email providers, including Zoho, Google Workspace and Office 365.
  • We have our own newsletter email delivery software and servers so that no Salon Guru client has to pay any fees to send emails to their clients.
  • Getting our websites to the top of Google searches is an absolute given. To ensure that happens we invest a lot of time and energy studying the constantly changing Google algorithms to make sure that our SEO expertise is the best in the industry. 
  • Changes to search algorithms will also mean actual changes to the way we handle images, page titles, page text, FAQs and a myriad of other website features that Google evaluates before awarding search rank.
  • We plan and check daily updates to a vast range of software tools that our sites use like online stores, image galleries, payment gateways, video handling, gift vouchers, social media feeds, forms for client data, spam handling, client review management tools, chat boxes, membership systems, Klarna and Paypal in 3, Google Analytics, team members tools - and so much more. 
  • Support includes fixes to all of our websites if things go wrong (even the best systems sometimes have bad days).
  • Website load speed is a vital issue for clients and Google search rank, so we invest a lot of time and money on tools to improve website speed through server caching, image loading, video handling, localised data, load balancing across servers - and much more. 
  • Website speed is so important that we run tests every night on every client's website to warn us if any page needs attention due to a slow load speed.

The cost of Total Support

Please note that salons that joined Salon Guru with the new pricing introduced in mid-2024 will have one of the Build Packages plus optional Marketing hours after launch. Those clients do NOT pay Total Support fees in Year 1. Their fees will start on day 1 of Year 2.

An element of your monthly payment is set aside to cover the Total Support described above. We ensure that is fair and reflects the size of each business and its website traffic using a sliding scale of charges.

Most of our larger websites will have approximately 2 hours a month set aside for Total Support. 

Smaller sites will have approximately 1 hour a month set aside for Total Support.

The smallest micro-sites will have approximately 1/2 an hour a month.