When it comes to marketing, I want to make sure you really understand what you need to include for a complete system that gives positive and repeatable results. And to start…you need to have an eagle’s view of what spa marketing entails.

Unfortunately, I see most of you missing the big picture with your marketing, and it’s messing up your efforts. If you want clients, you need visibility. And in order to get that visibility, you have to share your message across multiple platforms in order to increase conversions from looker to buyer.

You might feel overwhelmed just hearing me suggest you add to your list of to-do’s. Maybe you don’t think you have time to add more platforms to your marketing system but, I am here to dole out a little bit of tough love - if you need clients, you need to prioritize your marketing system.

Sometimes it’s just a time management problem, so here are a few steps that can help get you organized.

Before you do anything:

1. Block off Admin time: DO NOT CREATE STRATEGY BETWEEN CLIENTS. If you are continually switching between putting together a marketing plan and servicing clients, you won’t be able to focus...on either one.

2. Open a Word document and name it “Marketing Strategy”: This is the same document we use for our Social Media Management clients and what I teach my private coaching clients. You will use this “working document” again each month by simply adding new content at the top.

3. Type in the month you are working on, Eg. September Marketing Strategy, and then type in what the feature is for that month. It could be a special you want to promote, but it could also just be something that you want to spotlight that month.

4. When you create your feature, it doesn’t have to be perfect right out of the gate. Just make it bullet points. For this example, we will use a service as our feature that we are creating.

   • Service Feature Name

   • Service Description

   • Ideal Client

   • Product Pairing

5. Chose a featured image. Just like many large companies do, you want to find an image that will be your main image for the entire campaign (ya, you get to use that word now!) and repeatedly for all your marketing of that particular feature.

Once you have gathered all the necessary information, you have your marketing message which you can repurpose across multiple channels.

5 Core Marketing Systems For Marketing Your Spa Business

1. Website. You’ll want to swap out your feature image on your home page or specials page each month or season (depending on how you have organized your marketing plan). You should also add a bit of copy about the feature as an overlay or text block. Who is it for, what are the features and benefits and how can they book?

2. Email. Ideally, you should be sending out an email twice a month. The reason for this is that your clients will start to get bored with only promotional emails, so if you send out your promo email with your new feature of the month at the beginning of the month with a Call To Action (CTA), you can send out an educational email mid month to break things up.

3. Social Media. You really need to be posting a minimum of 3 times per week. If you are posting less than this, the odds are against you in getting any real organic (unpaid) reach.

   Promotional posts (ones that say “book now”, “buy today”, etc) on social media should only be 20% of your posts. If you have too many posts that have Call-to-Actions (CTA’s) the algorithm will pick up on that, and your ranking will go down. You want 80% of your posts to be educational, inspirational or entertaining.

4. In-spa Conversations. This is the area where I saw a considerable improvement in my own spa business. When we created the intent to keep 80% of the treatment conversations spa-focused (interesting products we had heard about, weird spa things we had seen on the internet, new beauty trends) it made the transition to telling a client about the monthly feature or recommending products so much easier. It’s just about deciding how you are going to manage those conversations.

   I encourage you to have a staff meeting at the beginning of every month, so your staff understand what the monthly feature is, how much it is, what the features are, the benefits, and who the Ideal Client is for best results.

5. Networking. Did you just get the heebie-jeebies when I said that word? #SorryNotSorry! Networking gets a bad rap, but it doesn’t always mean going to “networking events” and awkwardly talking about your spa business to total strangers. Networking can be as easy as talking about what you do in social settings and getting the word out to the community. It can be a natural sharing of information in a fitness class, the school parking lot or book club.

I understand that for some of you none of this sounds very fun. But I am going to suggest that if you have a million reasons why you can’t do this, you need to rethink your priorities. Because diving into learning and creating good marketing is the only way you are going to get new clients asap.

If you need any help with your marketing system, I am here to help. My team and I do everything from helping you get started with your Marketing Strategy to Done-For-You Spa Social Media Management Packages, and we will be adding Email marketing to our menu soon!

(Sorry but you will have to do the in-spa conversations and networking yourself!)