Leave Marketing To The Professionals (Part 1)

Part 1 of a 3 part series, Stephen Wiggins, Head of Product at ProSolutions looks at the struggles of beauty business marketing.

Like most business owners, I wear many hats: some by choice, some by necessity.  One hat I was required to wear after the 2008 recession was to act as lead marketer for ProSolutions.  Although I was confident in this new role, I would come to find that it takes a lot more than confidence to market in the digital world.

My journey started by investing a substantial amount of time and money into print advertisements.  I was under siege from different beauty magazines and industry circulars about the astronomical reach of print ads and huge returns on investment, so I dove in headfirst.  Unfortunately, it took a few years (and a lot of wasted money) to learn that the days of print advertising are over and that simply creating a magazine ad and hoping for the circulation numbers you were promised was marketing fools gold.  Print is dead.  It was time to change strategies.

Being a Millennial, albeit an older one, I turned to social media as an alternative marketing strategy and began posting to all of the different social channels.  I didn’t take the time to determine who my target audience was: Salon and Spa owners? Managers? Booth renters? Consultants?  I didn’t understand how to engage these people, how to make them interested in what I was saying or doing, or how to convert this online noise into a business relationship.  On a deeper level, I didn’t understand the vernacular of online and social marketing: What’s a click through? How do I find out my bounce rate? What’s the difference between views and reach? How does having a landing page help me?  I was quickly learning that there was a huge difference between posting pictures on social media and “digital marketing.” There was so much I didn’t understand.

So there I was, posting, tweeting, snapping and gramming (is that even a word?!?) into this online black hole, never seeing the results I was promised by the various marketing consultants who told me how important social media was for my business.  To make matters worse, everything I was doing was manual, swallowing up a substantial amount of my workday and leaving me with little time to respond to my current clients in a timely and meaningful matter.  In fact, I was so busy trying to GET clients that I began LOSING clients.  It was time to seek professional help.

After speaking to some experts about my business’s online marketing strategy, I realized there was more to digital advertising than my social media obsession.  The entire online experience is an interrelated web that needs a cohesive and holistic approach, which requires an extensive lesson in branding.  In part 2 of this 3 part series, I’ll explain what I’ve learned about online branding for small businesses and why it’s important to digital marketing.

Stay tuned for more…