While the first week of May may seem too early to jumpstart your summer spa marketing, trust us: the farther in advance you strategize, the easier– and more effective!– the end results will be.

That’s why today’s iteration of Spa Business Mastery is dedicated to strategizing June, July, and yes, even August! We’re spilling the beans on how we sit down with both of our spa coaching clients and spa marketing clients to turn their sales goals into sales realities.

That means reaping the benefits of:

• Stronger strategic cohesiveness– meaning you can see the big picture, not just month-by-month efforts
• Saving yourself from “context switching” in your day-to-day
• Keeping your biz focused on the parts of your strategy that matter most

…And, most importantly, getting ahead so you’re not getting behind.

Let’s get started:

Assess Your Summer Spa Marketing Goals

Here at Kirsten Foss Coaching, we require our Digital Marketing clients to strategize their marketing plan at least a month in advance. 

Assessing last year's service and retail goals and sales for June, July, and August is an essential first step in any successful marketing plan for 2022. We recommend that at the end of each month, you should break each revenue stream down to see which were successful, which are in need of improvement, and which were complete flops!

Here are our top tips for making the most out of the assessing stage:

• Look at last year’s sales and determine what worked and didn’t work so that you don’t repeat mistakes
• Need cash fast? Pick services and products you know consumers want during the summer, like bikini waxes, for simple streamlined income. We call these “intentional seasonal features”, which have encouraged a boost in the number of visits per season and have made it so the spas we worked with more consistently met their sales goals
• Discounts are not always necessary! Discounts, when used in excess, can devalue your brand and disincentivize future purchases. We prefer to offer “features” instead 

Create Your Monthly Marketing Strategy

Next up is the meat of your marketing: the planning stage.

My marketing manager, Delia, and I do this on a Google Doc so we can see at a glance:

• What we’ve done for previous months (so we’re not repeating topics!)
• What coinciding spa events or specials our clients have lined up already
• What seasonal retail or service features align with the month we’re planning for

For each month, we then pick one service feature and two retail features that dovetail with our clients’ priority sales goals. 

As we say during this podcast episode of Spa Business Mastery, “Your marketing is another place where you need consistency about what you’re actually offering. So, for example, if your monthly feature happens to be a ‘Margarita Pedicure’ and you choose to retail products like a cleanser and exfoliant, they just don’t make sense to go together.

“When we here at Kirsten Foss Coaching pick a feature treatment, we choose retail products that mesh with that treatment: when we pick a facial for the feature treatment, we’re choosing two skin care retail items; if it’s a waxing feature, we’re picking two waxing homecare items. That’s a key part of the consistency we’re talking about in terms of strategy that we’d love for spa owners to mimic when doing their own spa marketing strategies.”

As a bonus? This phase is why we say that mapping your spa marketing strategy out in advance saves you both time and money– because you can repeat both your promotional and your educational content across a variety of platforms. Whether it be Facebook banners, posts on other social media platforms, direct links in your Linktree, topics in your newsletter, or even blogs or new pages on your website, one fully-fleshed out topic that easily expand into 10+ pieces of marketing content!

For maximum results, we balance promotional, educational, and engagement-oriented content throughout each month. Just like with skin care, marketing consistency is key and will pay off!

Batch Content Creation Ahead of Time

Once the first two phases of summer spa marketing are done, it’s time to dive into the actual content creation process.

If you’re already sweating, don’t be! Content creation gets a bad rep for being lengthy, hard to organize, and just a general pain in the butt– but we’re here to tell you that it doesn’t have to be that way.

Bookmark this blog to easily find our content creation batching checklist below:

1. Block two-to-three hours out in your calendar to focus on content creation (we highly recommend you do this in one go! Nothing’s worse than breaking your train of thought mid-batching)
2. Start with social media. To condense time spent on this, we recommend you refer back to your monthly strategy document, which you hopefully should have made while creating your monthly marketing strategy
3. Curate images and captions for each of your topics. We highly recommend turning to Canva for easy (and beautiful!) image quotes and at least one stock photography service to keep images varied. (Plus candid & high-quality in-spa photos to keep things real!)
4. Schedule your posts. If using Instagram or Facebook, this can be done via the scheduling apps Later or Meta Business Suite

Once these four steps are done, remember to repurpose the most important information to your email newsletter. This includes service and retail features!

When Should You Jumpstart Your Summer Spa Marketing? Right Now!

Ever heard the phrase, “The best time to start was yesterday; the next best time is now”?

Well, that’s the case with your summer spa marketing.

For optimal results, we recommend starting your spa marketing planning:

• For June: the first week of May
• For July: the first week of June
• For August: the first week of July

Remember: making a decision to do nothing is a decision. As a spa owner, you have a responsibility to your spa vision and business outcomes. 

Our challenge to you is to create your summer marketing plan as we’ve discussed today and see first-hand how powerful this approach can be when it comes to capturing as many bookings and retail sales as possible this season. Jumpstarting your summer marketing now will expand your summer sales opportunities and help you smash those goals surrounding new clients, increased bookings, eCommerce purchases, and much more!

And if this isn’t your first rodeo and you feel like you need a coach to help you maximize your efforts? Contact us today to hand your marketing off to someone who knows all the ins and outs.