On this episode of The Salon Marketing Q&A, we look at how to successfully build your thriving salon audience on Facebook.
The Salon Marketing Q&A:Â Reaching My Salon Audience On Facebook Transcript
Guys, welcome to Phorest Salon Marketing Q&A on Facebook Live. My name is Chris Brennan. This is a show where every single week we are going to answer the questions you have for us live on Facebook. Now, as well as that, if you missed this live, it’ll actually go out as a post on our Facebook page right afterwards, so you can check it out at your own convenience. We also export the video and we put it on our YouTube page as well. We give you guys plenty of access to the questions that you have and the answers that we provide.
I’m going to get into what our topic of the day is going to be but, as usual, I want to catch you up with what our week has been so far. Funny enough for me, over the past week, I’ve actually been in Boston at the Inbound Marketing Conference so I spent an entire week learning all the new tricks and tips on all things marketing. I want to give you a couple of takeaways on that because it was incredibly informative, and it really charts not just your marketing ideas but our marketing ideas for the next couple of years. There’s some really nice stuff in there, too.
Instead of getting into the nitty-gritty about SEO and things like that, I thought that what might be more beneficial to let you guys know that one of the biggest takeaways we have is more about the tone of marketing rather than the channels you use. Over the years, the audiences have become a lot more savvy to the marketing content that we put out. It’s important these days to be a lot more authentic than sales-y. People really want to know legitimately what you want. I think that’s really important. Even in our content to people, we don’t want to hide what we’re trying to do or try to manufacture this fake persona. We like to be real and you can tell this because we’re on Facebook Live and this is Chris. I think this is a really nice idea and a great takeaway from the Inbound Marketing Conference that I was at. As well with tone, empathy seems to be the biggest key, not just in hair and beauty, but especially in hair and beauty, but in all the other industries as well.
I think that over the past year, what we’ve realized and all the research has proven that the campaigns that went out that had a more empathetic quality to it like I understand your issues and I’d like to help kind of tone, they were the ones that were more successful. I thought that would be really interesting for you guys because I know you put out SMS, I know you put out marketing like email marketing and some Facebook posts as well, so I thought it’s probably in your interest as well to be more empathetic and authentic. When I say interest, I mean literally you probably will be more comfortable talking that way instead of trying to develop this fake, cool persona of what your brand should be. Realistically the brand is you and it looks like the data we’re getting together over the past year is the more you that you can be, the more they will react and the better off your brand will be. That was pretty cool.
Another takeaway from the Inbound Marketing Conference in Boston was that video is going to be huge. Now, I know they say that every year but the fact of the matter is every year video becomes much more significant. I mean even on your Facebook feed yourself, if you’re on the bus or if you’re just taking a quick five minutes to scroll, just look in your newsfeed at how much video you’re scrolling past. You’ll see just how important it is and just how significant video has become to people’s marketing campaigns. To bring it back to here, we’re on Facebook Live like the new Facebook Live platform. It’s a big deal and I think it’s important for you guys to understand what you can achieve using video and what your ability is to do. I don’t mean besides overcoming your fear or your frustration over having to do video. I think that has to happen and that’s something that can’t really be taught. That’s more of something that you just have to overcome yourself.
I’ve been told before about how … Well, Chris. It’s easy for you to say. You’re comfortable in front of the camera. But that wasn’t always the case. In fact, you can even go back to the earlier videos we did in Phorest a couple of years ago and you’ll see how awkward I was. It’s just a skill. It takes experience. I’ve developed over time in front of the camera, in front of you guys. I’m just saying that because that’s one of the biggest barriers a lot of salon owners and managers have about video. It’s just the fact that they don’t want to be in front of the camera. They don’t like the idea of it. But the fact of the the matter is that’s where your audience is interested going. That’s what they’re engaging with the most. Potentially we should look into some video ideas for you guys so you can actually maximize on your audiences’ interest.
Those are the main takeaways I’ve got from Inbound Marketing Conference in Boston that I thought would really benefit you. Let’s go onto today’s topic. The question I got for today was how can I reach my audience on Facebook? By Sue Carter. Sue, that’s a really good question and that’s one that we do get quite often. In fact, that’s why our very first webinar was the Facebook webinar. It was our first one that we did that I hosted.
Now, as I highlighted in other episodes, we no longer do that Facebook webinar because we ran it for nearly two years and then we just weren’t getting … Everybody wanted to participate participated. But you’re in luck because we actually recorded it so I can actually share that with you in this box, in the comment box so you guys can have access to it. You can check out the Facebook webinar at your convenience in the recorded version. That will cover a lot of things, as well as how to reach your audience.
Now I’m highlighting that because while I’ll go through today is exactly that question but I think it’s nicer to legitimately see how we walk through it and as well beyond the Facebook webinar, we’re actually just about to release the brand new updated Facebook salon owners marketing eBook. We’ve had an eBook in the past but because Facebook changed so much and you’ve probably recognized a lot of the changes so we’ve updated it to cater for today’s Facebook page and today’s Facebook users. I’m actually proofing that today so it should be out relatively soon. If you want it, would love to hear about you so all you have to do in the comments is let us know if you’d like it so then once we have it ready we’ll drop it to you.
I highlight this as well because this could give you a really easy step by step how to process on what I’m going to discuss today. It’s difficult for me to just say it off the top of my head. Imagine what the Facebook ad manager is like and you check it out. We have you covered in a couple of areas: the webinar and the eBook.
Let’s get into the actual nitty-gritty of the question. How can I reach my audience on Facebook? I hear like that’s more of a post question in terms of how to attract the audience to engage with you. I won’t really go into what kind of post you should be putting out specifically. That’s a really good question but that feels like a question that would have its own episode dedicated to it. Instead, I want to talk to you guys about how you get your audience to actually see your material on Facebook and that itself is its own topic.
Right away, as you probably have noticed whenever you post something on Facebook organically, and by organically I mean for free like you didn’t pay Facebook to boost it or to advertise it for you, when you put it out organically, it doesn’t reach that many people. If you have, say, an audience about 100 people like if you have 100 likes on your page, one, we need to get you more likes, but just for this example, if you had 100 people on your page and you just put out a post just without boosting it, without money behind it, they call it organic, you might only reach 2 to 16 people organically. That’s as many as Facebook will allow you to reach your audience without actually paying for it.
I know it’s a nuance from our side of things. But when you look at it from Facebook side of things, that’s where they make their money. But also, they are trying to protect the audiences that don’t have business accounts because if you could reach your audience every single time you’ve posted, then people’s newsfeeds would just be cluttered and crammed with business posts and advertisements. They had to constraint it somehow and this is the method they came up with.
Right away, if you are trying to reach your audience and you’re not actually boosting your posts or you’re not actually using the ad manager, that is step one. You need to maneuver yourself into that new format which is get a budget and start boosting the material that you want people to see. You don’t have to boost every post but boost the most important stuff and also study what people react well to and then you’ll have a good idea about what the content is that you should be boosting.
Aside from that, I think with reaching your audience, it is possible to organically grow your audience but they have the algorithm built where if you put something out organically and people start to like it, they’re telling Facebook we want to see more so Facebook will open up that post specifically to a wider audience. It is technically possible to grow your company, grow your page through organic but your content has to be so good that people are commenting, liking and sharing it so they’re telling Facebook this is worthy content that needs to go out there. But my experience with salon owners, it’s better to guarantee that the post go out and to build that engagement through budgeted concerned marketing campaigns rather than like I hope one day this stuff will take off because if it does, it might take months and we don’t really want to wait months, especially because it’s not too expensive to boost posts and create campaigns on Facebook.
How to do this would be in your newsfeed of your business page, you can actually type in your post or you can put in your URL or whatever the campaign might be. Maybe you’re advertising a new app that you have. You can post now but there’s another button that says “boost post” and that’s where you can do it. Alternatively, if you go up to the top right of your Facebook page, there’s a little drop-down button. It looks like a triangle pointing down. In there, you can go to a section called create ad or manage ads. That will be your ad manager. That’s where you can do a lot of material. It’s where you can handle a lot of your marketing on Facebook. It’s really good to jump in there and just figure it out.
Probably the best thing you can do is just search around it. Click in there. You’ll see a lot of how it’s built. It isn’t as confusing as it first was. They really made it a lot more user friendly than they previously had it. It’s not too difficult. In there, you already start seeing what you would like to do. Would you like to get more likes? Would you like to boost a post? Would you like to get more engagement? It’s pretty good.
Once you do that, once you can boost a post, we got to figure out where it’s going and this is the key to reaching your audience on Facebook. One thing you can do is you can target the people who like your page. You can also have the choice of targeting people who like your page and their friends which is pretty nice because generally speaking the friends are people who are friends on Facebook. Usually that means they’re in the same area and your marketing should be dedicated to your city because that’s who will convert into clients.
We can also create a customized tailored audience. I think that’s where we should be looking at for you guys because with this customized tailored audience, you can pick the gender, the age range, the interests and the location of your audience. The beauty part of that is you can very specifically tailor exactly who you want to locate. Let’s say you are in London, for example. You can type in London, your audience are women, your audience generally are between 25 and 35 and their interest, because you might be a beauty salon, might be with pedicures, manicures. In the interest, you should type in what you guys do and what kind of interests that are more keyword terms that the audience might enjoy. You’re really tailoring and building this audience specifically to you. If you live in London, you are this age and you like this stuff, I want you to see this post and that’s what Facebook can do.
Now you can actually boost that post and you can put as much money on it as you’d like. If you’re new to that, I’d recommend you start with a small budget and got to get comfortable first. You might want to put on £5, $5, €5 for each posts and just test it out. This I know is a little bit of a nuance but this is how to work Facebook. Once you get it right, it’s incredibly powerful. Just like public speaking, it just takes a little practice, a little experience and you’ll be zipping past and killing it in no time.
You can also do a couple of really other cool things as well besides just creating an audience. If you have a database, if you’re a Phorest client, you can actually export your client database and you can upload that to Facebook and target them specifically which is great. That is amazing. The people who know and like you, you can advertise to on Facebook as long as you can upload their email address and their details. When they’re on Facebook scrolling through, they will see your content. As another thing you can do with that as well is you can actually create a lookalike list based on your client list. You can upload your client list and then in the ad manager section, you can create a lookalike list which is going to go people who resemble these contacts as in the age range, the location, the interest, these things. People like this, I want to replicate a fresh new list to and you can advertise to them.
When you take all that into consideration, you have targeted people who like your page. You’ve targeted people who are in your area that are interested in what you’re all about. You’ve targeted literally your client database and finally you’ve targeted people who are in a lookalike audience to your database. That’s exactly how to use Facebook to reach your audience. That’s legitimately where you need to be. I might not go into much more detail than this because that’s quite a lot to take on right now. I prefer if you guys master that skill first. Then in another episode, we can talk about what to post and things like that.
It’s a really incredibly powerful tool. I’d say more importantly than talking about what to post in this episode, I’d rather encourage you guys to try it out. We don’t work for Facebook. We’re not big advocates for advertising other companies but the fact of the matter is Facebook is a platform that your audience is at and it’s important that you understand exactly how to use that tool and that platform to its full advantage so we can drive people into your business and we can make you more money and grow your salon. That’s really important.
As I would say, I suggest that you check out the ad manager in your menu screen. If you’re on Facebook, you go to the top right and in the dropdown you can check out create ad or manage ad. If you know how to use that, great. You’re ahead of the game. If you’re new to it, I would say just some evening, just open it up and just start snooping around. You don’t need to worry about paying something or you might accidentally some money. There’s a very clear section at the very end of the process that says, “Pay for it now,” and you’d have to put in a budget in order to get away with it. Don’t worry about risking accidentally spending something. I think right now is more important that you’d get comfortable with the ad manager. All you have to do then is just dig around, search it out and look at what you exactly have to do to reach your audience.
I hope you’ve enjoyed that episode. If you would like me to cover any other specific topics, I would be more than thrilled to answer. You can let me know by either dropping in the comments below or you can hit us up on our email address letsgrow@phorest.com. I’ll be back next week with another episode of the Salon Marketing Q&A. My name is Chris Brennan and let’s grow. Thanks guys.
