QR Codes Marketing for Hair Salons

Mobile marketing is a growing trend and QR codes are starting to make headlines all over the world. Coming from Japan, the idea of having these two-dimensional codes is making it easier to do business. From growing your Facebook presence to providing discounts for customers, QR codes have been making waves will soon be a must have for just about any business.

Small businesses have long been trying to survive with staying adrift among the waves of larger, multi-national corporations. Small individually owned hair salons sometimes struggle against the influx of large corporations and large salons thriving in local neighborhoods, while the small salon is having a hard time staying afloat.
It is known that foot traffic is essential to keeping business alive. The more people that walk into your business, the higher the revenues are. When there is less foot traffic, less money is going into the business, and if this keeps going there is serious threat of survival.

Most small businesses find it too expensive to come up with large budgets for huge billboards or a commercial on the TV. Advertising like that costs a lot of money and can be very difficult to track and measure ROI. Instead, there are many cheaper and more effective ways of generating business thanks to the internet and advancing technology.

QR codes can be very effective, especially if your target market includes people who do have smart phones, and in addition to this, are able to install a QR decoder into their phone. Now days, pretty much everyone has a mobile phone and a good chunk of them have smart phones. In fact, mobile browsing will soon become more popular than using the internet on a desktop PC.

Mobile phones will play a very effective role in marketing your salon business, through two main methods: through text messaging and multimedia service, which can include giving you access to information online.

You can have a sign in your salon and spread the word to get to these QR Codes… you can offer special discounts, grow a opted in base of customers to market to through SMS at anytime. Think about this – your customers scan your QR code and optin to receive these special offers. Now, let’s say on Tuesday that business is slow. You send out a text message to all of those customers offering 25% off any service for the remainder of the day. Do you think that would draw some business in? Of course!

These QR codes can be decoded and bring you to a website as well, where they can learn more about individual services, learn more about the staff or make appointments. When they scan the code, it could take them to your Facebook page (where of course, if they “Like” it they get a special gift or discount.. then their friends see that they’ve Liked you and so on). QR code marketing can be very effective at increasing traffic to your salon and helping grow your business. Have a look-see at this picture someone caught of a huge QR code sign.

How to Get More Fans for Your Facebook Page

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One of the most commonly asked questions about Facebook is, “How do I get more fans on my page?” After all, the fans are the whole reason you want to have a Facebook page for your business. It’s the fans that are your audience, that you interact with, they are who your Page is for.

Getting fans to your Facebook page isn’t all that difficult. Let’s go over some things you can start doing today to attract more fans to your Page.

Give Them a Reason

Why should someone like your Facebook Page? What’s in it for them? What are they going to get out of it?

Remember that your fans don’t care about you or your Page. They only care about what you can do for them. If you let them know right off the bat what they’ll get out of being a fan of your page, then they will be more likely to click that like button.

Set up a welcome page that has a message for non-fans telling them why they should like the page, and another fans-only page where you deliver some goodies once they click Like.

Invite Your Friends and Followers

Do you have followers on Twitter, friends on your Facebook personal profile, an email list of people who want to hear from you, connections on LinkedIn? Invite them to join your Facebook page! Make it enticing by having content that you only share on your Facebook page and let them know that’s the only place they can get it.

You may want to pick and choose who you invite, as well. For example, you probably don’t want to invite ALL your Facebook friends, because some of them won’t be interested. Instead, go through your list of friends and pick the ones you think would be interested and only send your invitation to them instead of blasting it out to everyone.

Link to Your Facebook Page

From your website. From your Twitter profile. From your LinkedIn profile. From your email signature. From your blog post announcing your new Page. From your author bio on guest posts.

Every time you have a chance to link to your Facebook Page and direct people there, do it!

Do you have a freebie that you give people when they signup for your list? On the thank you page where they download that freebie, link to your Facebook Page and invite them to join your community to get more goodies!

Print Your Facebook URL

If you don’t already have your custom URL for your Facebook Page, go to facebook.com/username and set one up. This gives you a shorter URL that is easy to remember and easy to include on print material.

Put your Facebook URL on your business cards, brochures, fliers, and any other promotional materials you are printing.

Display it in Your Physical Space

If you have a storefront or office where customers come, put up a sign for your Facebook Page so they know they can find you on Facebook. You could even have the URL printed on your receipts or put it on your store window or door.

Talk About It

You can mention your Facebook Page in your elevator pitch, at the end of talks or workshops, in conversations with people, on your webinars or teleseminars, and any other chance you have to tell people where they can connect with you further.

Facebook Advertising

Facebook ads are a great way to get some new fans to your Facebook Page. You can target your ad by age group, interests, geographical location and many other details so that you reach the exact audience you want. Facebook ads are pay-per-click, meaning you only pay when someone clicks on your ad.

Once you start looking for opportunities to mention your page and invite people to join you, you’ll start seeing them everywhere. Try some of the ones I’ve mentioned here, but keep your eyes open for other opportunities that will pop up as you’re out there running and marketing your business.

And remember that not everyone will join your page on the first invite! They may hear about it several times before they actually go and check it out. So don’t be afraid to keep mentioning it and keep putting the invitation out there.

As your fan base starts to grow, you’ll see more interaction from fans and you’ll be able to have conversations with them, to find out what they want so you can improve your content, and to make offers for things that they will be interested in buying.

Your Turn

What strategies do you use to get fans to your Facebook page? Which new ones are you going to start using today? I’d love to hear about it in the comments!

How a Pest Management Company integrates Social Media

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JP McHale Pest Management is one of the top pest control companies in New York and Connecticut.  We are a family run pest management company that is located in Buchanan, New York.  Through our integrated pest management, we use the most effective and eco-friendly materials when treating pest issues.  Please visit our website or contact us if you have any question or would like to know more about our services.

Here at JP McHale Pest Management, we integrate social media marketing via blogs, Facebook, and Twitter.  Our goal is to generate more traffic to our website and to reach out to other pest control companies and people in our community.  Every company has a website, but not every company utilizes the opportunities on the internet to drive traffic to their website.  Here at JP McHale’s, we use the following techniques to generate more traffic and exposure to our website:

Blog:

In addition to our pest control website that explains our services, we have a blog where people are informed of pests in the local and nationwide news.  We will occasionally post funny pictures or videos related to pests to give the readers a little laugh.  This blog helps people understand more about pests; how they act, what environments they are found in, and why they behave the way they do.  For example, if suddenly there was an outbreak of a certain pest, we can inform the readers of it right away, unlike a normal website. Through the blog we can interact with other pest control companies.  By posting our RSS feed, people can be notified of our updates.  We can exchange information with other pest companies to expand our knowledge on pests, and the interaction also give us link exchanges that boosts up our page rank with Google.

Twitter:

Twitter connects people worldwide in a matter of seconds, which produces a lot of opportunity for many people to be in contact with us.  JP McHale follows people in our service area and other pest control companies.  We organize our followers through TweetDeck.  TweetDeck not only allows us to organize our followers, but we can single out tweets with specific words, such as “carpenter ants” or “termites”.  By doing this, we can tweet at people who ask a question or are curious about a certain kind of pest, to which we can answer.  We will also post a link to our blog post when we publish a new story.

Facebook:

Facebook is the new craze from people in high school, to people in retirement homes.  Everyone’s on it.  JP McHale has a page that enables people to “Like” us.  When people “Like” us, we will come up in their newsfeed whenever we post something on our page.  Again, went we post a new blog entry, we can link back to our blog through the Facebook page.  Unlike Twitter, we can post photo albums to our Facebook page.  The albums we current have are pictures from the field, how to identify you weeds, and how to identify summer pests.  This enables users to learn about our company in a casual and friendly way.

There are many other social media sites that companies can use to increase traffic to your site. We feel these are the most beneficial sites to drive traffic to our website.

Is Your Link Building Really Helping?

Anyone having the slightest bit of information regarding SEO, marketing blogs, forums, and algorithms can easily understand how important link building is for a successful internet marketing campaign. Link building is an important part of SEO that cannot be ignored or underestimated; without back links you will have a really hard time in achieving a good search engine ranking. In case you do not know what link building or back links are; these are basically the links that go to your website and are also known as web votes in the language of search engines. The more back links you have on the web, the more votes your website has. However, there are a few more factors that make your back links effective; only building them does not get the job done.

There are literally hundreds and thousands of ways one can do link building and all are for different reasons. Some links are made in order to get a higher search ranking while others are there to improve PR. Well, it does not really matter what type of link building you do, what matters is that you know how to do it.

Many web site owners keep on building thousands of back links not knowing whether they are of any use or not. That’s right; building more and more back links does not mean that you will improve your search engine ranking. Backlinks should come from a variety of sites, forums and blogs – and there should be a good variety on the type of links.

Your website can get a pretty good exposure through link building. Now why should someone else put on your back links on his website? Well, simple; exchange back links with other good websites. Make them place your back links and in return you can place their back links. In the case of back links it is usually give and take so find out relevant websites and talk to their owners about exchanging back links. The more back links your site has, the better ranking it will get.

One of the most frustrating parts for many is getting backlinks indexed. Lots of people create RSS feeds and spam the hell outta RSS directories (feeds made from their backlinks), hoping they get indexed. One of the best ways I’ve found to help Google find your backlinks is Linklicious. Of course, if you really want to make it easy on yourself, why not get links that are already indexed? Yep, you can now – and you get your links lightning fast… same day… within hours… and very cheap! Check out One Hour Backlinks and let me know what you think!

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