Marketing Internet

I’m definitely not talking about my hair with its grey strands and reddish black color… this is about salons, spas, and day spas in particular. Every salon no matter what services or products it provides needs to have a sustainable way to keep customers coming thru their doors and returning for more. Day spas are an evolution of what is currently being provided in out of the way places with hills and fields of grass for miles.

The niche market for day spas are those who don’t have 3 or more days to go out of town and want the same pampering located just downtown or near their neighborhoods. Day spas in downtown Dallas provide similar services as those

day spas located near lakes or nature preserves, with the exception that they provide what I call serenity services inside a concrete jungle. With the tide rushing toward the IT age more and more day spas, nail salons, and practically all other service industries are finding their clients are coming in with wirelessly enabled laptops, pda’s and other devices to while away their time. Having cable or the latest music on just isn’t enough anymore.

An attract Rx - what every business’s marketing plan is really about, brings more customers into the fold, retains and provide new services or products for the ones your business has provided great service to and sustains a credible viral marketing strategy. With any prescription

there may be meds or solutions you have to use in order to stay healthy and the need for a good attract Rx includes several components of which a few will be touched upon for effectiveness.

An integral part of an attract Rx is eMarketing, widely known as an Internet marketing tool, and relates to ‘the targeted way’ that businesses market their services or products online. The age of technology, requires an Internet presence and it does directly affect the success of any business - a perfect example today is cyberMonday and cyberTuesdays, prime shopping days that come after holidays. From an electronic commerce site to an informational site, eMarketing starts at the first page your visitors see when they

come to your website.

A businesses homepage is the beginning and therefore has to ‘taste’ good otherwise the visitors will simply go somewhere else. eMarketing is vastly dependent on planning, cobbling together different options while easier than creating any real eMarketing plan does not make it a plan. Plans have goals as we all know, plans have markers to signal if goals are being met or not coming along as expected. Sometimes eMarketing plans need tweaking or fine-tuning, so results need to be monitored to make sure you are spending enough time and not too much money.

One portion of our Search Engine Marketing strategy is the amount of response to our email marketing efforts vs. the increase in traffic,

to see what programs are successful and which programs should be given to the children for bookmarks or used in scrap projects. Very often, the people who first recognize the potential benefits of professional SEM (search engine marketing) are not the head honchos in charge when it comes to a company’s salon marketing Internet strategy. Be patient and stay the course with search engine marketing, over 80% of traffic comes from search engines.

A brief mention of two more eMarketing avenues to establish - the first is RSS Feeds and that stands for really simple syndication. While your customers are waiting for their appointment you could be sending them RSS feeds about the specials that are being featured today or

even over the next few days. For customers who visit in a African American day spa Atlanta services and products would be as unique to their part of the world and as different as the customers going to a day spa in Austin with the RSS content focusing on famous areas like the Underground in Atlanta. For the day spas in Austin, Texas the environment, services and products would be different because of climate and other factors than would be for customers going to a day spa in Chicago, RSS content would be respective of famous areas in their cities like the House of Blues. As we mentioned before the advantage of RSS Feeds and these salon marketing tips would give info to customers who seek coupons, sales on products and services including joint marketing ventures with related businesses.

The other phase of eMarketing should also provide a blog or web blog with salon marketing tips focusing on specific customers in the target market. A day spa for men in Fort Myers, Florida would employ similar salon marketing ideas or a salon marketing Internet strategy by using a blog for clients where they would post comments on how their hair style helped carry the night when they went to a play or some similar function. All it takes is an invitation to give their viewpoint and away the stars for the day will go… Black day spas have a high

potential when it comes to Internet marketing strategies, don’t wait too long for yor competition to get ahead of you with the tools available to everyone.

Daviyd Peterson: 10-year consultant, instructor, trainer of
digital divide solutions for both home and business. Helps
African American and minority Small Business Enterprises bridge the digital divide by becoming wireless Small Office Digital Offices (SODO).

[mailto:daviyd@bluebottle.com]daviyd@bluebottle.com