One of the best spa marketing tips I can provide is how to cut the social media posting overwhelm.

What do I mean by “social media posting overwhelm”? Well, spa owners who are already doing their own social media probably know the feeling well. Essentially, it boils down to three core gripes:

• “I don’t know what to post.”

• “I don’t have time to post.”

• “I don’t feel like posting.”

If you are currently in this mindset (or have ever been!), then you’re in luck: in my latest episode of Spa Business Mastery, I sat down with the Marketing Director of the digital marketing & online business management portion of my company, Virtual Spa Business Management, and outlined our smooth-as-butter three-step process for creating and scheduling twelve high-value posts a month for our spa social media clients… and I’m listing them again here for your reading pleasure!

Sit down, grab a pen and paper, and be sure to bookmark this page for future reference: cut your social media posting overwhelm by more than half with this actionable social media marketing advice.

Spa Marketing Tip #1: Create a Social Media Posting System

Earlier this month, Delia asked in my private spa-owners only Facebook group, Spa Business Mastery, what spa owners considered their biggest hurdles when it came to managing their own social media. 

The common thread that tied together the majority of the responses? That not knowing what to post (or trying to curate posts ideas) was the biggest source of overwhelm on average, and that it created a “paralysis” surrounding posting. This can be thought of as a circular situation: not posting due to feeling overwhelmed and yet feeling overwhelmed by not posting. 

The key to curbing this cycle comes in two parts: focusing on value added and consistency. And to focus on that, you need a social media posting system.

Now, if you know anything about me then you know that, on top of helping spas thrive in their marketing and business development, I am all about spa systems. Simply punching the word “overwhelm” into my expansive blog list generates pages upon pages of spa system-oriented how-to’s and advice. 

The same holds true for the social media marketing portion of your spa’s marketing: you need systems. 

Here are the emotional benefits of creating a spa social media posting system:

• Less, “Ah shoot, I need to post today!”

• Less, “Eek, I haven’t posted in three weeks!”

• Less, “Oh no, I’ve realized I only post when I’m trying to sell something!”

• Less, “My follower count keeps going down, not up! Am I posting too much? Too little?”

And, of course, there are the stats-backed upsides of creating a spa social media posting system:

• Creating valuable posts with a consistent posting schedule boosts your page’s favourability within social media platforms’ algorithms

• Creating valuable posts with a consistent posting schedule helps foster brand trust and familiarity in an era where brand trust and familiarity is harder, on average, to establish

• Creating valuable posts with a consistent posting schedule works to generate leads for your website, up your spa business’s SEO, and widens your chances of being referred by clients, among many other perks

A basic social media posting system can be as simple as deciding on a day of each month that you batch-create your posts and a set schedule at which you roll them out.

Spa Marketing Tip #2: Divide and Conquer Your Social Media Post Types

To balance sales posts and educational or conversational posts, my social media management team applies the 80/20 rule: 80% educational or conversational, 20% sales.

Why?

While each post type is crucial to include for your spa business, each fulfill a specific role in your spa’s social media marketing:

• Sales: one of the oldest rules in marketing, “the law of seven” states that consumers need to be exposed to your brand or offering roughly seven times before they will commit. The law of seven gives consumers the chance to overcome common hesitancy, like feeling like they may not need your offering, feeling like the price is too steep, and/or feeling like they are not familiar enough with your brand.

  • As Delia first points out in the initial Facebook Live version of the Spa Business Mastery episode, spa owners who run their own social media seem to have a squeamishness surrounding pushing their spa or its offerings. We here at Kirsten Foss Coaching and Virtual Spa Business Management say to own it! Go full throttle with your 20% sales posts and let the 80% portion of your posts soften the overall tone and ensure that your clients feel like you aren’t just selling to them.

  • A secondary bonus of this is that we in the spa business industry tend to accidentally push sales at the same time! Ensuring that you aren’t only pushing your offerings around major holidays heightens your offerings’ chances of being seen and bought.

• Educational: what is your niche? What are you particularly passionate or knowledgeable about? What common misconceptions do your clients come to you with? What education can you provide both existing and potential clientele? Asking yourself these questions can help you build up your educational posts, which will make up the bedrock of your social media posts. Educational posts give you the chance to both educate clients on you and your offerings while also providing them valuable knowledge and how-to’s that foster trust and credibility. 

  • Another reason why we recommend batch-creating posts (as mentioned in the first section!) is that, if you decide on your “monthly focus” ahead of time, you can make it so your educational posts support your sales posts. For example, are you running a specific facial offering? Then your educational posts can be about the benefits of facials and how clients can prep their skin for one at home or sustain their results!

• Conversational: the other half of the 80%, conversational posts exist to add a personable shine to your social media posts. Whether it be asking your community questions, telling a funny story, or introducing the community to yourself or your spa team, conversational posts are the fastest way on social media to both retain existing clientele and ease prospective clients into knowing and trusting your spa biz.

  • A statistic worth remembering is that, more and more, prospective clients and consumers are more likely to trust a face vs. a brand. Get your face out on your spa’s social media and focusing on transparency, personability, and adding value to your audience’s lives goes on a long way in furthering your spa business on social media.

Pro tip: for dividing and conquering your post types for the month, my team and I personally love Google Docs. On top of being editable in real-time for everyone involved in the curation process, they are easy to add to… meaning that you can create an ongoing Google Doc that you use monthly to ensure that you aren’t using the same post topics over and over again!

Spa Marketing Tip #3: Emphasize Brand Cohesiveness

Have you ever looked at another spa business’s feed on Instagram and felt some serious FOMO?

“Feed envy”, as we’ve nicknamed it, is a common onboarding conversation that we have with our social media marketing clients. However, is brand cohesiveness only important on Instagram?

In a word, no!

While the Virtual Spa Management team focuses primarily on marketing for clients on Facebook and Instagram, brand cohesiveness comes in two forms, tone and visual, and both are vital regardless of your spa business’s primary social media platforms.

While tonal brand cohesiveness is achieved through your social media captions (such as using a consistent “I” or “We”, common phrasing, or branded hashtags), visual brand cohesiveness is achieved through a consistent colour scheme, recurring elements, and established fonts associated with your spa business’s brand.

Just like how website visitors base their opinion of you and your site off of 0.05 seconds of looking at your home page’s design, having cohesive branding across your social media platforms ensures that, at a glance, audiences view you and your spa as professional, put together, and distinct. 

Our tip? Limit the use of stock imagery. Nowadays, creating beautiful designs for social media has become accessible due to platforms like Canva, which provide an intuitive interface and ready-to-use templates for those who are brand-new to the realm of design. Design doesn’t have to be hard; whether you use Canva’s basic free plan or its pro plan in order to upload brand palettes and a wider range of elements, you can get designing today!

(For ourselves personally, after going through a client’s spa identity, goals for social media marketing, existing branding, and branding ideals, we curate up to six customized templates in Canva every 2 - 3 months that are then used for image quotes and client testimonials. The result is stylish templates that are easy to tweak and tie a client’s feed together seamlessly!)

Bonus: You Know How We Mentioned Batch-Creating? Ramp Up Yours By Using an Online Scheduler

Batch-creating: the bread-and-butter of the Virtual Spa Business Management’s team’s seamless system for creating monthly social media content calendars for clients.

While Facebook has now rolled out Facebook Business Suite, which has scheduling and management tools for both Facebook and Instagram, we both vastly prefer Later for scheduling our spa business client’s social media posts.

An official partner of Instagram, Later is an all-in-one scheduling, reporting, and Instagram feed-designing tool that is easily shareable between us and our clients. The result is auto-posted posts that are easy for clients to approve, easy for us to design, and even easier for us to optimize as Later continually gathers analytics on best posting times, best performing post types, and most effective hashtags. 

The best part of Later? Like Canva, it is completely drag-and-drop, meaning that it is one of the most beginner-friendly scheduling and management platforms currently available. 

(Word to the wise, however: like many similar platforms, multi-image posts need to be manually posted. However, Later lets you schedule them in its calendar and will give you a helpful nudge to remind you that you have to post! The images will automatically be downloaded to your gallery and the caption will be auto-copied to your device’s clipboard. Easy-peasy!)

Think about it this way: how great would you feel to know that not only is your social media for the month is done and dusted ASAP and that you don’t have to remember to post, but also that those posts are as high-value and optimized as can be? The answer is, “Pretty darn great!”

How Excited Are You to Cut the Social Media Posting Overwhelm?

As always, reach out today if you have any comments or questions surrounding how to maximize your spa’s value on social media (while diminishing the time and effort it takes to do so!) 

I can’t wait to hear from you. Delia will be joining me once a month for spa marketing topics just like today’s, so be sure to follow Kirsten Foss Coaching on Instagram or Facebook to be the first to know about upcoming talking points!