Using Facebook To Fill Your Appointment Books

There’s nothing worse than looking in your appointment books and seeing empty page after empty page – I’ve been there, and it’s not fun.

Whether you’ve a huge salon to fill or you just need a couple extra clients, you have to get marketing to reach your optimum number of business bookings.

There are a huge number of different marketing techniques, but today I want to discuss social media.

Social media is your online network platforms, like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Linkedin and so on.

They have been created to help people like you connect with other people that may wish to buy what you sell; namely nail treatments.  These are all huge subjects in themselves – but I’m going to touch on the biggest one today: Facebook.

It’s hard to ignore Facebook and its sheer ability to help create and grow a business – but it’s vital you don’t confuse ‘playtime’ on Facebook with good old hard work.

Having your own ‘friend’ profile as your business page is a recipe for disaster.

The two need to be ever so separate, so if you’ve not created a ‘business page’ through Facebook, this is very much a must.

Do it today!  (Not sure how?  Watch my video about that here.)

These pages don’t just grow organically, however.

They need to be worked on – but a thriving page can be one of the most cost effective marketing tools currently available to us in the current market – and when you understand the best way to work with it, you can expect brilliant results.

Here are some simple steps to follow:

Choose Your Market

In order to attract the right people to our business, we need to work out who the right people are.

Think about age, gender, distance from your business, their interests and so on.

What Do You Want Them To Do?

When advertising through Facebook, you’ll need to work out what you want your target audience to do from your advert.  Do you want them to like your page, comment on a post, click to your website, give you their email address or something else?   This will help you plan which way to advertise.

It’s easy to get carried away with Facebook – so set yourself a budget.

You can budget anywhere from £5 a day upwards – so you won’t get any nasty shocks!

You only pay when someone clicks through to your advert too remember, so lots of people will see your adverts and it won’t cost you anything until they click (assuming you chose to pay per click and not per impression).

Split Your Budget

We are lucky that our industry is sparkly and lovely, which means we have lots to say.

You may want to do multiple things with your budget, for example I may have a few campaigns running that do different things such as:

– Alert people that we’ve extended our opening hours

– Promote vouchers for an event such as Valentine’s Day, Christmas, Mother’s Day etc

– Increase bookings for our hen do packages

– Offer a monthly prize draw for all people on our mailing list with a link to a sign up button so I can collect email addresses

– I allocate different parts of my daily budget dependent on what’s coming up – so if it’s a week before Valentine’s Day, I will allocate more budget to my Valentine’s campaign to try and generate more sales

Change your target market

– Different campaigns will appeal to different people, for example one of my Valentine’s Day campaigns is targeted at men.

– A hen do campaign would be targeted to people who’ve listed their profile as ‘engaged’.  There’s no point targeting single women or men for hen dos!

Split Test Your Adverts

Facebook gives us the option to try different images for different adverts – at no extra cost.

You can currently choose six!

We can try and predict what images will generate the most interest but we can only be sure when we see cold hard results – so maximise opportunities with lots of images.

Remember  – you must own the rights to the images.

You’ll either need to use images of your business, or you’ll need to use stock images that you have the legal rights to use like a company such as Shutterstock or iStock.   Do not pinch them from Google images!

Track The Results

Facebook will give you a lovely table of your results – such as who saw your adverts, how many clicked through etc – but you’ll want to monitor the results beyond their clicks. Facebook insights and Google Analytics will help you look into this further ad are great free tools so you can get an idea of what your clients are up to.

As always, the key to success is test, test, test!

Try it out, see if it works and then try and better it the next time.

Let me know in the comments if you’ve had success with Facebook advertising!

Do you want to grow your business in 2016?  If so then you MUST check out my new training; 5 Free And Easy Ways To Get More Bookings.  

Just click here – it’s FREE!

This article was adapted from my column with Scratch Magazine.  You can read the original piece here.