We’ve caught up with Strategic Digital Media Expert in the Beauty Industry, Karen Davis to talk Coronavirus and your salon. Here’s her advice.  

‘Well, I bet none of us thought we’d have the business closed when we were doing our 2020 planning last year. It’s not only a shock, it’s a place none of us have been before and we’re having to play catch up with skills and our emotions, so let’s just take a breath and see where we are:

GRANTS

Have you applied for every grant or loan possible? If you need funds here’s a quick rundown of what’s available:

• Support up to 80% of salaries to a max of £2,500 pm. Only for designated furloughed workers. Submit information to HMRC about the employees that have been furloughed and their earnings through a new online portal
• If you have less than 250 employees you can reclaim SSP for a maximum of two weeks per employee
• Time to Pay arrangements for any outstanding HMRC payments available – call 0800 0159 559
• VAT payments deferred for 3 months to 30 June 2020
• July Self assessment payment for Income Tax delayed until January 2021
•  Grant support of up to £10k for the smallest businesses via your Local Authority
• Business Rate holiday for hospitality and leisure businesses for 20/21 tax year

SELL ONLINE

You probably didn’t have much of an online presence before this, did you? A website, social media handles and, possibly, an email list. Get yourself an online store with something like Shopify. I know the arguments against but this is key to your future success. Take a free trial for a month and sit down and see if you can make a store – there are masses of tutorials out there to help but online sales is something your clients will always want going forward.

HOW ARE YOU SCORING?

When we come out of this, and we will, your clients will remember how you reacted during this time. Did you hear the message on cleaning and have you altered in-salon procedures and communicated this to clients? Did you treat your staff well? Did you stay in touch with your customers and anticipate their challenges (nails coming off, how to cover up roots) with timely advice? Did you support your local community? Communicate to your clients what you are doing.

DIGITAL PRESENCE

Every week you should be emailing your clients with news, little video tutorials, showing behind the scenes as you deep clean before business re-opens or just Facebook Live so you can answer queries. Get something out every week with positive, but real, messages – have a look at something like Mailchimp which is free if you have under 1000 email addresses. The real key is to remember to only write to them about hair or beauty – they’re getting funny memes off their mates and that’s not what they want from you, stay in your lane.

REVIEWS

Now is the time to spend a few hours asking good clients for reviews. These make a huge difference to potential customers trusting you and can be used all over your website and social media. Go on, you know you should.

RETURN OFFERS

It’s too soon to put these out there but start thinking about what you want to do. Get a marketing plan at the ready so that you can hit the ground running. Don’t think just in terms of discount, think about mini goodies you can give away or mini trial treatments to entice people into booking a longer course of treatments.

Key to your business post-Coronavirus is realising that the world has changed. Online retail will be even stronger, it’s what your customers want and what your competitors will be offering. Ramp up customer service, client want more videos, more tutorials, more engage. Don’t just post at clients, make it a two-way conversation. They’ll book a course of treatments because you did a demo video online showing them what it is, how it works and why they need it – brilliant! They’re coming back to you because during lockdown you worked really hard to treat your team well, look after them as a client and you helped local heroes. In short, not only do they want great services from you when you re-open, they want to be proud of you and of belonging to your salon. That should keep the brain cells going this week.

About Karen 

Karen is a strategic digital PR expert working with salons and beauty brands to create strong digital worlds for their brands.  She’s also an Amazon #1 bestselling author, an international speaker and a presenter on Wellbeing Radio. For more info contact karen@morethan-marketing.co.uk.