The number one question our ad agency gets is, “How can I get more clients for my salon or beauty business using social media?”

Well, that depends. If you’re a brand new start-up with a limited marketing budget, you can get a lot of new brand awareness, clients and followers using Instagram. Instagram is especially effective if your target audience is ages 18-35.

If you’re a seasoned salon owner, with employees and multiple locations, you are likely using Instagram already and know many of the tips mentioned below. You are ready to take your business to the next level with highly effective, targeted paid ads. We would be happy to manage your ads for you, please contact our office. If this doesn’t describe you, read on for some great, do-it-yourself tips.

Apps for Instagram: Here’s an article with a full list of the best apps to edit photos for Instagram.https://mashable.com/article/best-instagram-editing-apps/#J1rl_4BtNiqq

Content: We always recommend using authentic content, especially for salon and beauty businesses. Stock photos are very run of the mill for salon, skincare and med spa businesses and won’t attract attention unless they are professionally designed. To capture great content use video and pictures of your business, you working with your clients and pictures of your products displayed and video of you performing procedures and services. Try capturing your treatments using the time lapse feature on the iPhone.  Use a Beauty Ring Light to hold the iPhone for you to capture video. For longer service and treatment videos experiment with the time lapse video feature which captures a 20 min treatment and speeds it up into a 2 min video. Instgrammers love behind the scenes videos and pictures.

Frequency: We recommend posting at least 3 times a week or more. Our agency motto is “Quality over Quantity”. A great time to post is 7-8 pm. The volume of Instagrammers are on Instagram in evenings and at night.

Geolocation: Always use the pin on map function and tag your location in your Instagram posts. Instagram’s Geolocation is powered by the Google Map Business Listing, is your business listed on Google? If not visit https://www.google.com/business If your location doesn’t come up yet on Google, tag the salon suite or shopping center your business is located in.

Hashtags: Use the following 3 types of Hashtags.

Brand, Location & Service

1. Brand Hashtags #yourbusinessname or #yourbusinessinstagramhandle
2. Location Hashtags ***Location Hashtags will get you the most local followers & show to potential clients. #city #citystate #county search on Instagram to find more location hashtags. Each post should have at least 10 location hashtags
3. Service Hashtags: Examples #balayage #botox #fillers #prp #microneedling (these will show your post to other skincare or salon people using these hashtags nationally if they are not attached with a location, so use these sparingly) 
4. Hashtag and tag any product lines or distributers. example #coolsculpting #redken

*Tip: Add all the location hashtags you frequently use to your “Notes” app in your phone, so you can easily copy and paste into each new post.

Happy Instagramming!

Facebook  offers many audience types based on your objective. Audience types vary based on how you want to convert your leads into sales.

A cold audience is people who have never heard of your brand before.

As you take good care of them and nurture them with high-quality content and other perks, their ice-cold hearts start to gradually melt down…

Ok, let’s not get too dramatic here.

But you get the idea: the more you nurture a cold audience and familiarize them with your brand, the warmer they’ll get.

And that’s when the right advertising channels and ad messages come to play.

You need to match the conversion intent and advertising channels to target potential customers at the right moment.

As you can see, social media advertising’s somewhere in between the two extremes: people indifferent of your product vs. diehard fans.

Your Facebook ad messages need to match the temperature of the audience.

If you’re asking a cold lead to buy your product… Why would they do that? (Unless you offer an irresistible discount, which will sooner or later bankrupt you.)

In the Facebook advertising land, ice cubes are usually the people you’re targeting with a Saved Audience (the one composed of interests, demographics, etc) – they’re likely to never have heard of you  before.

By using Facebook Custom Audiences, you’ll be able to reach the audience on the warmer side of the scale.

These people have visited your website or engaged with your branded content, and have a high potential to sign up for an offer or buy your product.

Which makes them a lot more likely to click on your ad and complete the conversion on the landing page.

The reason we saw a huge increase in our ad campaigns’ conversion rate was that we started targeting warm audiences instead of cold ones.

We had previously relied on Facebook Saved Audiences to deliver our ads to potential buyers. But switching to smaller, yet super targeted Custom Audiences, made all the difference.

There are multiple types of Facebook Custom Audiences, and it’s up to you to find the most suitable ones for reaching your goals.

Here are all the types of Custom Audiences that you can select based on your advertising goals.

Types of Facebook Custom Audiences

There are four different options to create a Custom Audience:

1. Customer file
2. Website traffic (specific website visitors, converters, non-converters)
3. App activity
4. Engagement on Facebook

There are 15 different identifiers to choose from, the most frequently used ones being:

1. Email
2. Phone number
3. Mobile advertiser ID

The average CTR of retargeting ads is 10x higher than that of regular display ads.

If you want to increase your Social Media ROI and have a custom audience created for you,

please call Social Butterfly Marketing today 239-290-8681