Every wellness, salon, and spa startup wants more customers, subscribers, sign-ups, and followers on social media and digital platforms. The more attention these businesses attract to their brands, the higher their chances of boosting their conversion rates and acquiring more long-term customers.
Giving your startup a boost is easier said than done, however. The trick lies in finding more potential customers quickly and efficiently without paying astronomical sums to fulfill your marketing strategies. Luckily, the secret to giving any wellness startup a kick-start doesn’t involve outspending the competition.
Instead, these businesses need to get creative with their marketing approaches and use outside-the-box thinking to capture the minds and hearts of their target audiences. This creatively fueled growth is often known as ‘growth hacking’, and it’s a fantastic way to promote a business across all of its key channels.
Here are 10 unique marketing strategies to use to give your wellness, salon, or day spa startup the boost it deserves.
Create A Referral Program
There are few better ways to develop a significant customer base quickly than to take inspiration from referral marketing tactics. Research shows that a staggering 92% of people trust personal recommendations over all other forms of marketing!
Setting up a referral program rewards your existing customers for recruiting new customers on your brand’s behalf. Not only does it expand your customer base effectively. It also engages your existing customers and keeps them coming back to you while encouraging them to spread the word about the quality of your services. Everyone wins.
You can build a referral program from scratch or use a referral tool like Ambassador to streamline the process for you.
Launch an Interactive Challenge
Viral marketing is a great concept, but it can present its flaws. One of these flaws is that often, target audiences find it challenging to tell exactly what the marketing company offers. Even if their digital media is captivating and highly shareable.
You can resolve this issue by making your products and services the focal point of any marketing campaign. Find the specific needs your business solves and turn them into a challenge that others can solve as well. They will automatically think of your business whenever they do so.
Show Up at Trade Shows and Conferences
The wellness industry is packed with regular conferences and events that offer unique networking opportunities for startups. While online marketing is growing rapidly, offline marketing still has its advantages—and if you don’t participate, you could miss out.
Attending trade shows and events allows you to forge new working relationships with other brands, businesses, and influencers in your industry. This network helps to promote your products and services, announce new additions to your industry, and keep up to date with the latest trends and movements that could influence your startup and your future marketing approaches.
Share Your Expertise
As a spa and wellness startup, your organization probably has plenty of health-related knowledge to share with the world. If you want to earn your business a significant uptick in web traffic, share this knowledge by getting featured in a major online publication.
If your brand or one of its representatives can be featured in a renowned health and wellness-related publication, you could see a major spike in traffic and engagement. The key is to start building relationships with large publications by sharing their content, keeping in touch with editors, and being authentic rather than excessively promotional.
As these relationships grow, you might be able to make announcements through these publications and enjoy a surge in public interest as a result.
Find Your Community
One of the best ways to build a customer base quickly is to understand exactly what your ideal customer looks like and where they spend the bulk of their time online.
Once you have an ideal customer persona in mind, you can create and share content specifically geared towards this community. This ensures more effective marketing campaigns that attract people who are most likely to become paying customers.
Support Your Own Business
This is another excellent organic marketing strategy for startups. Adam D’Angelo, the founder of Quora, propelled the platform to success by becoming one of its most active users in its early days.
You could achieve similar effects by regularly trying out your business’s products and services and leaving honest reviews that prospective customers can check out. Many customers are more comfortable trying out your services, knowing that you trust your own business to deliver a quality service.
Host Competitions
Competitions and contests are highly effective methods of attracting new customers to your business. Platforms like Facebook and Instagram are already optimized to facilitate business-related competitions. All you need is an engaging idea and a tempting prize to make it work.
Be sure to encourage your existing customers and participants to tag their friends and family members in the competition post as part of the rules to maximize your brand’s exposure.
Convert Your Competitors’ Customers
It’s easy enough to identify potential customers that will enjoy your products and services. Look around at your competitors’ customers and you may find that many of them fit your ideal buyer personas naturally. You can target these customers who are using similar products and services to yours but not achieving great results to grow your own customer base.
Use a stealth email campaign to target these leads and outline why your products and services may better meet their needs than their current solutions. For example, you could highlight the fact that your spa only uses all-natural, vegan cosmetic products to address a target audience that wants to support ethical practices.
Connect with Your Fellow Brands
Some startups are simply too small to attract massive audiences by themselves. If you’re in this situation, it might be time to team up with other companies that are more well-established to get the word out.
Finding strategic partnerships with other spa, salon, and wellness brands in the industry can give both businesses a boost and help you to gain valuable brand visibility within your markets of operation. Remember to partner with other brands that make sense in the context of your own. This means that, depending on the nature of your business, a holistic wellness supplement supplier may be a better partner than a small business that sells specialized sports supplements and protein powders.
Don’t Neglect the Simple Methods
Sometimes even the simplest of marketing strategies are highly effective. For example, some brands discount clients’ invoices if they regularly have the same treatments, or if they purchase products worth a certain amount. Many brands and businesses have also enjoyed great success after handing out printed freebies like stickers, nail files, and other small and useful items to prospective customers.
Giving away merchandise ensures that the recipients have an immediate positive experience with your brand and continue to associate it with that favorable experience for long after it’s happened. Items with visible branding will keep your business fresh in their minds and help to ensure that they call you first whenever their need arises for spa- and wellness-related services.
Maximize Your Marketing Potential
You don’t need a perfect marketing strategy to get your wellness startup noticed. What you do need is a unique and intriguing approach that uses out-of-the-box thinking to capture the attention of your ideal target audience.
Instead of spending thousands of dollars on traditional digital marketing, try the approaches mentioned above to give your business the exposure it needs to thrive. Offer your customers incentives to return and to spread the word about your brand, team up with like-minded brands in your industry, and make your products and services the central focus of any marketing campaign you launch for the best results.
Meta Title: 10 Unique Marketing Strategies | Day Spa Association
Description: Your spa, salon & wellness startup deserves a boost. Kickstart your sales with these 10 creative marketing strategies that will engage your target market.
