How To Grow Your Salon Business

Planning to start a salon business but don’t know how to market it? Or you already have a salon running but stagnating and you don’t know how to generate more business? 

Ensuring a business keeps growing is very important. If you don’t grow, your competitors will catch you sooner or later, and you’ll lose your customers to them. However, making your business better and generating more business can sometimes be very challenging.

Not sure how you can grow your salon business? You’ve come to the right place.

Here, we will share important tips on how you can grow your salon business, but let us first discuss whether it’s actually the right decision and the right time to grow.

Does Your Salon Really Need To Grow?

While it’s true that you should always look to improve your business in one way or another, growing or expanding too quickly can be counterproductive. Overexpansion and growing too fast are two main reasons why many small businesses fail.

So, does your salon really need to grow? Is it the right time? How fast would you need to grow?

Here are three main considerations:

1. The market in your location is growing

Pretty self-explanatory, if your market is poised for growth, then it’s a clear sign that your business should also grow along with it. Keep monitoring your market and industry situations. If there are untapped markets you can pursue, go for them.

2. You have stable cash flow and a strong team

You have to be financially prepared for growth, and your team must be ready to handle the expansion. Hiring is challenging and time-consuming, and you wouldn’t want to aggressively grow your business only for your team to be unable to provide consistent services to your salon’s clients, which will end up causing you to lose clients instead.

3. Growing demands from your clients

If the wait time/queue for your salon is already long and you have more business than you can handle, then congratulations, it’s probably time to grow your business and expand into a bigger salon. If your clients demand more of your services, faster waiting time, or more types of salon services from you, then that’s a good sign.

Growing a Salon Business: Three Main Methods

Decided it’s time to indeed grow your salon? The question is, how should you do it?

There are three main strategies you could try:

1. Get More Clients

Pretty self-explanatory, the most obvious way to grow your business is to acquire new customers.

Here are some actionable tips on how you can do so:

Understand your existing customers better

The idea is, by figuring out what made your existing clients choose your salon over your competitors, you can understand what marketing strategies are currently working for your salon, and which are a complete waste of time.

Perform thorough market research, and interview your clients to figure out their pain points and why they chose your business.

Identify your Unique Value Proposition

What makes you different from other salons in your area? If you really want to grow, you have to identify your Unique Value Proposition (UVP) and build your unique brand identity around it. Again, you can interview your clients to gather more insights about this.

Build a better online presence

One of the key ways of attracting more clients in this digital age is to establish a stronger online presence, and you should focus on four key areas:

1. Your website: nowadays we have many affordable and even free options that we can use to build a professional-looking website. And, even if you’ve already got a strong social media presence, it’s no excuse not to have a functional and well-designed website.
2. Online reservation: having the ability to receive 24/7 online reservations is now a must. Make it as easy as possible for potential clients to book their appointments, and this is why you should integrate a reliable appointment booking software to your website and social platforms.
3. Social media: regularly post your content on social media, and if possible, invest in paid social media options and influencer marketing.
4. Google Maps SEO: Make sure your Google Maps listing is available on the top spots when potential clients search for queries like “salons near me”, “hairdressers near me”, and similar ones. You can check out this guide on how to successfully implement local SEO or Google Maps SEO.

2. Sell More Services

The second way to grow your salon is to sell more services to your existing clients in their visits.

You can do this by:

• Offering more services. For example, if you are a hair salon, you can offer nail services.
• Upselling add-on products (i.e. hair care products) and cross-selling complementary products during their visits
• Developing new types of products and services you can offer. For example, shampoos and pomades.

3. Deliver Your Services Faster

If you can finish up services for one client faster, you can take more clients on any given day, so you can grow your revenue.

In short, you should improve your efficiency.

You can do this by:

• Training your hairdressers and staff so they do their job more efficiently
• Investing in new tools and equipment that can help your staff do their work faster
• Hiring more employees in key areas so you can execute tasks in parallel and minimize wait time
• Also, don’t forget to improve the quality of service, as simple as improving your WI-Fi speed if it’s too slow, better seating for waiting customers, using a barbershop appointment software to speed up the booking process, and so on.

Wrapping Up

While growing your salon business can be quite challenging, it’s very important if you really want to stay ahead of your competitors.

The key to growing your business, not just salon business, is to better understand your existing customers so you can attract new clients that are similar to existing ones, sell more services to existing customers, or improve your efficiency so you can deliver more services.

By following the tips we’ve shared above, you can grow your salon business as soon as possible.