The beauty industry is one of the largest in the world. Carving out a space for yourself here is not going to be easy, but effective branding is something that you can count on.
On the surface, branding may look like it’s about visuals. Great-looking logos, compelling colors, and stylish fonts. But true branding is more meaningful. It’s about the solutions you provide to your consumers, the way you do it, and how it makes you better and more reliable than the competition.
Visuals are just a way you convey this information.
In this article, we are sharing essential dos and don’ts of salon branding so that when you are starting a successful salon business, you can do so by avoiding the common pitfalls and banking on prevailing best practices.
Essential Dos
These are the basics of starting any business on strong footing. Today, we’ll focus on how to apply these best practices to achieve your beauty salon’s success.
● Consistent brand visuals
The foundation of a brand’s strong visual identity starts with a logo design. Its importance cannot be overestimated. When you create a professional beauty logo that’s clean, modern, and has a very streamlined effect, potential clients are more likely to choose you over a salon with a generalized logo that looks vapid or uninspired.
As important as a great salon logo is, the consistency in visuals is of greater importance. Meaning, your logo should maintain a consistent identity across channels — including website, social media, salon signage, business cards, and such.
In addition to consistency in logo design, the colors and fonts in your branding must also remain the same throughout the larger branding. A brand style guide can help you achieve that. Use that to lay out the rules of your salon branding. Details about your salon logo variations, how many are there, and when to use which. Hex codes of all the colors you’ve used, to ensure all replications use the exact same shade. Font details too, including sizing, kerning, colors, and such.
Maintaining consistency in brand visuals will ensure that wherever people see your brand, they can recognize it immediately and thus develop a better brand recall, and hopefully improved brand perception, too.
● Targeting niche market
As a salon entrepreneur, you have to realize that you cannot serve a huge target market, especially in the beginning. If you’re just starting out, your resources are going to be limited and you cannot spread those thin to cater to a wide client base.
So the best thing to do is carefully identify a smaller niche market and give them the best services that you possibly can. Delight them, surprise them, and inspire them. Win them over to your side by consistently being on your A game and providing high-quality services to everyone who walks through the door from the initial booking to the end of their salon session.
Having a slightly smaller but specific target market will help you achieve and establish those high standards of service. It will also enable you to hone your abilities and perfect your skills. So when the time comes to expand and grow, you’ll have a bankable set of skills plus a loyal customer base that’ll follow you wherever you go.
● Efficient online presence
It’s 2023, so if your salon brand doesn’t have an active online presence, chances are you’re leaving a lot of money on the table. People not only look to their social media searching for new products or services but also trust the brands they find there.
So, not only you should be online, but have a strong and positive presence there too.
Instagram and TikTok deserve your main focus as they are the most popular social media channels for beauty entrepreneurs, salon owners, beauty bloggers, etc.
Posting there regularly with high-quality content including videos, images, client reviews, and such will help you establish a trustworthy brand presence, and make it easy for new clients to find you online.
Taboos
To succeed at salon branding, avoiding pitfalls is as important as following the best practices. Here are a few to keep in mind.
● Ignoring the importance of a responsive website
Being on social media is good but having a great functional website is even better. While an active social media presence will give your salon business recognition and credibility, a good website will legitimize it.
A responsive website — one that adjusts itself to fit different screen sizes and dimensions — is essential to providing your clients with a great user experience. Since most of us use our phones to go online, a responsive website will ensure that everything on your website — your service menu, booking features, and all the other content — is available with the same quality on a smaller smartphone screen too.
● Ignoring staff appearance and behavior
As a solopreneur, you are the face of your brand. The way you present yourself directly impacts the brand image. If you aren’t paying it much attention, that’s a disservice to your brand-building activities.
Keep in mind that a beautiful-looking brand logo cannot do much for a brand where the service levels are compromised. You may get an initial influx of customers who may be impressed by your salon’s visual imagery, but if your behavior is lacking or your appearance has a rushed or neglected feel to it, your customers may not feel too confident in your hands.
● Neglecting brand evolution
A common weakness of having an established routine is that it can quickly turn into a rut. If you aren’t paying attention, aren’t constantly reinventing yourself, you may become complacent and lose the spirit that first brought you to where it all started.
As you begin to gain success, remember to keep your business ahead of the change. Whether you are a hairstylist or a nail artist, learn constantly. Know what’s new, listen to what customers are saying, and train yourself to acquire new skills or methods.
Constant evolution will help your salon brand stay relevant to a diverse clientele of varying ages, backgrounds, and lifestyles, and ensure your standards of service remain high-quality.
The Takeaway
Branding isn’t something that you can do and then be done with it. It’s going to be a constant affair. In a salon business, especially, where you’re constantly meeting new people and exposing your brand to new faces, you have to treat every interaction as a way to strengthen your brand message.
Keep your eyes on the big picture — the vision and mission of your brand — and let great customer service become the way for you to achieve branding nirvana.