While your salon or restaurant is closed or operating at a reduced volume, here’s some ideas of what you can do to generate revenue. Your clients care about you and everyone is looking for ways to help each other and to support businesses. Provide your patrons, clients and fan club with the information they need and want to support you!

Online Gift Cards

Set up online gift cards on your website or online booking. If you don’t have a website or online booking set-up, no problem, you can use the SquareUp option below. See resources below for options on setting up online Gift Cards.

Gift Card Promotions

Once your online Gift Card is set up, advertise a Gift Card promotion to encourage larger Gift Card purchases:

Examples:

Salon Gift Card Promotion Ideas…

“Purchase a $100 Gift Card for future services and receive a FREE Deep Conditioning Treatment upon redemption.”

“Purchase a $300 Gift Card and receive a complimentary Olaplex treatment upon redemption.”

Restaurant Gift Card Promotion Ideas…

“Purchase a $100 Gift Card and receive a free appetizer upon redemption.”

“Buy Your Staff Lunch: Buy a Gift Card for 25 Lunches for $250 (Regularly Valued at $275)”

Salons: Accept Pre-Payment for Future Services

Instead of canceling your services with no recourse, re-phrase your client communications and ask clients to pre-pay for future services by purchasing a gift card.

Advertise Your Gift Card & Promotions! Communicate your new online Gift Cards option and promotions to your clients through email, text and social media posts. Your clients are looking for ways to help, and they will appreciate you extending this option to them.

Restaurants Add Food Delivery Service.

While being quarantined, consumers are dying for ways to change things up and many areas have very few food delivery options. Give your patrons the solution they need to get your amazing meals by adding food delivery. No driver, no problem.

Here’s links to popular food delivery services that will deliver for you.

https://get.grubhub.com/

https://www.ubereats.com/restaurant/en-US/signup

https://get.doordash.com/

Resources for Gift Card Set Up:

Here’s a list of popular gift card options for 2020.

SQUAREUP

Benefits:

-Works with any website or without a website

-Easy to set up

-No additional fee/ No double fee

Some Gift card platforms charge their own percent fee, in addition to your payment collection fee.

https://squareup.com/us/en/gift-cards

Salon Online Booking with Gift Card Option

Booksy

https://booksy.com/blog/gb/2019/11/18/3-new-ways-to-drive-revenue-for-your-business-with-booksy/

Booker

https://blog.booker.com/the-booker-blog/how-to-create-great-customizable-gift-certificates-this-valentines-day

Vagaro

https://support.vagaro.com/hc/en-us/articles/204348080-How-to-Sell-and-Redeem-Gift-Cards-On-the-Desktop-Version-

StyleSeat

We were unable to find info for StyleSeat Gift Card set up. If it’s not available use SquareUp. 

Best Gift Card Options for WordPress Websites

WooCommerce- Plug-in Software for WordPress with a great Gift Card function. 

Benefits:

-Accepts PayPal and most payment options

-No additional fee

https://wordpress.org/plugins/pw-woocommerce-gift-cards/

For assistance with WooCommerce set up on your WordPress website contact our WordPress design partner Jefferies Designs https://jefferiesdesign.com/ 239-601-2833

Compliments of Gibranna LaCava, Digital Advertising Expert, Social Butterfly Marketing

 

One of our most frequently asked questions by our clients is,
“Why should we feature our tenants/ stylists/ employees in our social media?” Simple.
A strong social media strategy is not created around me, me, me, sell, sell, sell, sell.
Please put some thought into whether your social media is adding value to the potential audience you are trying to attract. Are you just selling to them?

In a sea of social media, straight selling is a dead end. You will not stand out from your competitors, you will not be respected by your audience, your potential clients and you will not create a thriving community or raving fans in your social media.

We firmly stand behind our strategy of featuring tenants/ stylists/ employees weekly for MANY reasons:
Featuring Tenants/ Stylists/ Employees Shows Potential Tenants/ Clients:
-Your business does more to promote their business than any other salon suite
-You are grateful to our tenants and care about their success
-You will help them to succeed
-You are proud of your tenants and their services regardless of race, color, ethnicity, level of success
Featuring Tenants Helps the Tenants:
-Get exposure to their business
-Encourages them to leverage the power of social media, leading by example
-Gives them a post to share, since many do not have the resources to create nice posts
-Sets a higher standard for their social media
Do you want to stand out, be better, be more than your competition? Then be that!

-Gibranna LaCava, Digital Advertising Expert

Google Chrome officially announced the browser is saying goodbye forever to Flash Players in December of 2020. What does this mean to you? If your website is still using Flash to play videos, animation and Flash supported functions  at first Google will “ask” viewers permission to run Flash (which will confuse them), and eventually disabling Flash by default. Google stated, “We will remove Flash completely from Chrome toward the end of 2020. Three years ago, 80 percent of desktop Chrome users visited a site with Flash each day. Today usage is only 17 percent and continues to decline.” That is a staggering large number of Flash supported functions considering Dec is only 10 months away. So website owners, you’ve been officially warned, update your Flash to Open Web technology… December 2020 is coming quick.

To read the full article on Google click here… https://www.blog.google/products/chrome/saying-goodbye-flash-chrome/

Social Butterfly Digital Advertising is thrilled to announce we have moved our headquarters to Boulder, Colorado and are proudly providing video ad creation, social media, digital advertising, google ads and more in the Denver, Boulder and Colorado Front Range areas. We also provide digital advertising to large organizations and franchises throughout the US.

With our new location, we are excited to have the ability to offer in person photo and video shoots to create authentic video ads for Facebook, Instagram and Google advertising to our Denver area clientele.

For more information or to schedule a digital advertising consultation contact owner and Digital Marketing Expert, Gibranna LaCava [email protected]

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.

ppc 600x338

There’s a right time for each advertising channel.

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.)

ppc expert 600x338

Not all your offers are ???

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
Create custom audience from customer file

Creating Facebook Custom Audiences from past website traffic

Want to target people who have previously visited your website? If so, this Custom Audience is the one to use.

To create audiences based on your website traffic, you first need to install Facebook Pixel. You also need the Pixel for tracking conversions, so there’s a good chance you’ve got it set up already.

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

  1. Go to https://mapsconnect.apple.com/ and log in with your Apple ID and password. If you don’t already have an Apple ID then you will need to create one at https://mapsconnect.apple.com/getappleid.
  2. Once logged into Apple Maps Connect, click on “View My Businesses”
  3. Click the “+Add” button in the top right and you’ll see the next screen below.
  4. Enter your business name and location then click the search button.
    • If your business isn’t found then you should click on the “Add New Business” link and follow the instructions from there.
    • If your business is found then you should click on the blue “Claim This Business” button and and follow the steps there. This may automatically initiate the verify by phone pop up to display, but you can simply click on “Not Now” come back to that in a few minutes.
  5. Next fill inn all necessary business information, correct the location of your map marker and select up to three appropriate categories.  Be sure your correct hours of operation are displaying and also make sure your company website along with your other social media and other listings are entered.
  6. When you’ve finished with all your entries, Apple Maps will give a chance to review all the details.  Make sure everything is how you want it to be and click “Submit to Apple” to initiate the phone verification process.  You’ll receive a call at the phone number on your Apple Maps listing, so be ready for it.
  7. Once verified, it will take some time for Apple to review and approve any edits.

Apple Maps Connect has a helpful FAQ to help you through this process, so be sure to to look it over if you have any difficulty.

Twitter has just made a big change to the way tweets work.

From today, Twitter is cutting back on what types of content will use up its 140-character limit.

Now, @names in replies, media attachments (like photos, GIFs, videos, and polls) and quoted Tweets will no longer be counted against the valuable 140 characters that make up a tweet. This allows for richer public conversations that are easier to follow on Twitter and ensures people can attach media to tweets without sacrificing the characters they have to express themselves.

Twitter first announced this update back in May but didn’t quite confirm a date when these changes would reach Twitter’s 300m+ users. However, today the company confirmed the update has been rolled out. 

twitter-update

What’s changed? Full details on Twitter’s 140 character update

This update has been much anticipated by many Twitter users and on their blog, Twitter shared the full details of what’s changed:

  • Replies: When replying to a Tweet, @names will no longer count toward the 140-character count. This will make having conversations on Twitter easier and more straightforward, no more penny-pinching your words to ensure they reach the whole group. [Editor’s note: It appears this update hasn’t quite been rolled out yet]
  • Media attachments: A URL at the end of Tweets generated from attaching photos, a video, GIF, poll, Quote Tweet, or DM deep link will not count towards the character limit (URLs typed or pasted inside the Tweet will be counted towards the character limit as they do today).
  • Retweet and Quote Tweet yourself: We’ll be enabling the Retweet button on your own Tweets, so you can easily Retweet or Quote Tweet yourself when you want to share a new reflection or feel like a really good one went unnoticed.
  • Goodbye, .@: These changes will help simplify the rules around Tweets that start with a username. New Tweets that begin with a username will reach all your followers. (That means you’ll no longer have to use the ”.@” convention, which people currently use to broadcast Tweets broadly.) If you want a reply to be seen by all your followers, you will be able to Retweet it to signal that you intend for it to be viewed more broadly.

twitter_may24

How ‘new’ tweets are displayed

The diagram below, shared by Twitter on their dev blog, shows the high-level change to Tweets:

tweet-structure

This diagram shows that when displayed to users, @mentions, URLs and media will all appear outside of the tweet itself, leaving a full 140 characters to play with when composing the text for your tweet.

Also, when a tweet is posted in reply to another account, the name will be displayed in a format similar to below graphic, giving the feel of a threaded conversation (when a Tweet is in reply to multiple people, the name of the person whom the author is directly replying to should be prioritized):

tweet-reply

5 Ways to Make Full Use of Twitter’s 140 Characters

1. Provide more context in replies

One huge benefit of this update is the fact that user @names will no longer count against your 140 characters. Now, whenever you start a tweet in reply to another user, you still have room to say everything you wanted to in your tweet, without having to consider the length of their Twitter handle.

This opens up more space to provide additional details that previously may have taken a couple of tweets. For example, if you’re responding to a customer service question, you could share your reply in 140 characters, but also add a GIF saying “Thanks for reaching out” or a screencast video to further explain how to fix their support issue.

2. Utilize visuals more often

Visuals are a great way to stand out on Twitter. Studies have shown that visual and media attachments on tweets are a big factor in boosting engagement and retweets. One study by Twitter found that photos average a 35% boost in Retweets and videos get a 28% boost:

However, until now, it’s been tricky to convey the message you’d like in your tweet text and also include a media attachment in 140 characters.

When these changes are rolled out, Twitter users will be able to utilize the full 140 characters to share their copy and still include media, without infringing on that limit. For marketers, this means more opportunity to include stunning visuals, videos, product demos, and more within our tweets. For customer support teams, it also provides the chance to share additional content such as screenshots and screencasts to help customers with their support tickets.

3. No more need for the .@ to begin tweets

These changes bring an end to a long-standing Twitter peculiarity where tweets that began with usernames were visible only to users who followed both the person tweeting and the person named. This lead to many users beginning conversations or tweets that mention other users with a ‘.’ before the @name, for example:

tweet

This quirk has always been a little confusing for some of Twitter’s users, both new and old. And Jack Dorsey hopes this change will help to make Twitter a bit easier to grasp: “Unfortunately those rules are hidden, and then they find out later,” Dorsey said to The Verge. “So then they have to learn this weird syntax that kind of looks janky. So we want to take that away first and foremost to remove some of the confusing aspects of the service.”

4. Quote yourself to share longer thoughts

It’s become fairly common to break up a tweet into a couple of sections to fully elaborate and share thoughts. However, with Twitter’s quote option, you can share two tweets that are intertwined and easy to follow – meaning users won’t have to scroll in the timeline of visit your profile to see the first part of your tweet. This gives you 280 characters to play with.

How does it work? Simply share your first tweet, and then quote that tweet and add the rest of your message in the 140 characters available to you in the second tweet.

5. Opportunity for better conversation

Twitter, at its heart, is all about conversation and connecting with others. One of the most important factors in this update is that we now have the opportunity for better conversation on the platform. With usernames not counting against character counts, we can fully embrace the 140 characters available to us to express ourselves.

Previously, having a conversation with two or more participants could become a little difficult as usernames could take up anywhere from 5-20+ characters, leaving little room to get your thoughts across.

In an interview about these changes and how they’ll benefit conversations on Twitter, Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey, told The Verge:

“Generally, we want to make sure we’re encouraging a whole lot more conversations on Twitter. This is the most notable change we’ve made in recent times around conversation in particular, and around giving people the full expressiveness of the 140 characters. I’m excited to see even more dialog because of this.”

How this update affects Buffer

Here at Buffer, we’re keen to ensure everything works as it should when Twitter roll these changes out. The updates have a significant impact on tweets, and we’re working to have these changes in place when Twitter open these character count adjustments up to the public.

Over to you

It’s incredibly exciting to see these changes come to Twitter and I can’t wait to see how everyone begins to make the most of their 140 characters alongside all the great media-based content that’s shared on Twitter.

I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on these updates in the comments below: What are you most excited about? Will these changes affect how you use Twitter? I’d love to continue the conversation with you.