What salon/day spa owner doesn’t want more sales and healthy profits? I can’t say I’ve ever met anyone who doesn’t. So why are so many owners/managers suffering? Simply stated, they’ve a bad case of marketing malaria.

Symptoms of marketing malaria are:

• Working on ideas that are not meaningful (busy work rather than result-oriented work).
• Re-inventing the wheel (burning precious resources, time, money and energy).
• Salon/Day Spa “dizziness” caused by lack of targeted marketing focus.
• Convoluted thinking caused by always doing the latest thing, rather than concentrating on the basics.
  Weak follow through.

So why do owners/managers get marketing malaria? They get it because they’re not applying proven marketing strategies to their fullest. They resist the proven, tried and true, in other words, the basics of marketing because of their mindset.

Owners/managers with marketing malaria fall into any of these four categories:

Perpetual Learner: They get excited about new ideas, but rarely apply what they’ve learned.

Intellectual Manager: They learn the new idea, try to apply it, but don’t have a full, real-world understanding of what it really takes to make it work in their specific business.

Tentative Leader: They learn new ideas, get all excited, but don’t feel comfortable at implementation because they either fear failure or fear financial loss.

I Don’t Have the Time Owner/Manager: They’re either always too busy or haven’t ever made the time to quantify the true value of an hours worth of business development time. They do $7.50 an hour work (e.g., stocking shelves) instead of profiting from implementing a $10,000 growth strategy.

If your salon/day spa’s profits aren’t where you want them, you may have a low-grade case of marketing malaria. Before doing anything else, you’ll want to adopt these four marketing mindset principles.

Once cured, you’ll use the following principles to pick and choose which marketing strategy (among dozens of ideas) that will give you the biggest bang for your buck.

• Every strategy you choose to use must be able to be implemented immediately using your existing team and resources. If you have to figure out how to do a particular strategy, in all probability you won’t implement it.
• Every strategy you choose to use must cost very little or nothing to implement, or at least to test to validate the results. Why? You simply can’t afford costly errors.
• Every strategy you choose to use must produce immediate profit increases ranging from 5%-20%. Now some may take a bit of time to reach those levels, but you will see immediate results the day you implement the strategy.
• Every strategy you choose to use must be applicable universally, whether your business is a day spa, hair salon, retail store, or a chiropractor’s office. Why? Because it will keep you working with strategies that are already proven to work.

With this new mindset, you’ll cure your marketing malaria and produce measurable results without risk, a substantial time commitment, or requiring special expertise.

By Andrew Finkelstein, The Beauty Resource www.thebeautyresource.com