Benefits of Bringing Your Salon Branding In-House
Choosing a salon to service your needs is a bit like online dating. Each possible pick does their best to make a favorable impression by including their favorite photograph of themselves and conjuring up charismatic ‘about me’ pages. You wade through the list of potential contenders until a particular profile catches your eye and the rest is history.
In a similar fashion, potential clients will form their own opinions of your salon before ever seeking out your services. The good news is, in this scenario, you have the opportunity to push your salon’s profile above the others through personal promotion—this is where branding comes in.
Developing your brand strategy can be tricky business. You can hire outside help and bring in a consulting agency to boost your brand, but at the end of the day nobody knows your business better than you do. Would you want someone else designing your online dating profile? Probably not, which is why nothing beats building your brand in-house.
There are few more passionate about in-house promotion than the dynamic marketing duo that is Jordan Becker and Amy Pirro, of Interlocks Salon and Medspa. Jordan is the Director of Marketing and Business Development at Interlocks. She’s been with the company for over seven years and has had a helping hand in all of the rebranding they’ve done in the past. Amy is the Graphic Designer and Media Coordinator for Interlocks and her role continues to evolve as the salon puts more emphasis on perfecting their marketing scheme. Amy is primarily responsible for keeping the Interlocks brand cohesive across all of their various marketing platforms. These two clever ladies have come together to give you their best advice for bringing your branding in-house so that you can land all of the hottest dates—I mean, clients.
Consistency is Key
The biggest mistake business owners make when branding their company is coming up just short of cohesive. If you want to achieve greater brand recognition, consistency across all platforms is absolutely crucial. One of the things that makes the Interlocks brand so perceptible is the harmony they’ve achieved across their many marketing platforms.
Jordan and Amy like to think of their brand as their salon’s identity. If your business were a person, your brand is the personality that brings your business to life. Much like most of you strive to remain true to yourself no matter your setting, at Interlocks, these two savvy women work hard to maintain a consistent brand identity on their social media pages, their salon website and within their physical space.
There are Two Types of Branding
Jordan and Amy recognize two distinct branches of branding their business. For the first branch, you have your branded materials, which include your salon logo, your signage, your service list, and anything else that you consider to be a core component of your salon. For the second branch, you have your promotional content, which ranges across your many marketing platforms and could include physical flyers, promotional posts on social media, email blasts, and really any other pieces of your business that vary with new partnerships and publicity.
Jordan and Amy emphasize the importance of understanding these two branches of branding because you should be approaching them quite differently. While cultivating a cohesive relationship between these two branches is important, your company’s core components require absolute coherence and your promotional content is more about compatibility.
Your logo, signage and service list should consist of the same color scheme, font and format structure. However, your promotional content will evolve with each varying endorsement so you can kind of play around with this propaganda, nevertheless you should always be weaving in aspects of your brand identity to preserve the public perception of your business.
Quick Tip: You can even rebrand promotional content from your partners! Say you’re putting out a promotion on a specific product and the parent company sends you a media kit with their own marketing materials included, don’t be afraid to take these materials and make them your own. Simply adding your own imagery for better brand recognition can encourage loyal customers to partake in your promotion—it’s a win-win for you and your partner.
Day-of Marketing Can Only Be Done In-House
When working with an agency, you have to plan ahead, sometimes months or even years in advance, and you’re required to stick to your schedule regardless of any major disruptions in the industry. For Jordan and Amy, one of the biggest benefits to bringing their branding in-house is that by pushing their own content they can adjust to the latest trends in real-time.
With this kind of flexibility, you can bend to the needs of your clientele without missing a beat.
If you see a gap in one of your services or a spike in the demand for a specific product, you can create the perfect promotion on the spot, launch it that day and receive a rewarding return on it immediately.
By building your brand in-house you have the ability to foster a stronger relationship with your clients. You have more creative freedom and at the end of the day you’re simply more connected to your community.
Re-brand Only When Necessary
Brand recognition is not easily earned, so you shouldn’t rebrand unless you absolutely have to. Of course, some occasions do require rebranding. Interlocks has revised their brand several times over the course of their 30-year lifespan due to changes in trends and the natural ebbs and flows of the beauty industry.
The Interlocks brand has evolved because it has grown. The salon initially opened under the title of a boutique and hair salon. Eventually they moved on to become a salon and day spa, they then re-branded again when they expanded their cosmetic department, and now they’ve transitioned into medspa territory, which required another full-fledged revision.
While rebranding is no small task, it’s wise to be open to the idea because in this industry it’s inevitable and when well-executed, it really pays off.
Put Yourself Out There
The second largest mistake a business owner can make when building on their brand is simply underdoing it. You have to put yourself out there in order to be noticed, so why not give it your all.
So yes, for a salon, branding is a bit more complicated than perfecting an online dating profile, but it’s still best when built by you. Your brand is your identity, it’s everything that your business stands for, and you have to find the best way to communicate that character to your potential clients. You want your brand to reflect your mission and your company’s core values tried and true, which in turn will translate into how your clients differentiate your salon from the thousands of others attempting to do the same.
To learn more about Jordan and Amy and their mindful marketing techniques, listen to the podcast that inspired this blog, episode 133. Be sure to also check out the Interlocks Salon website and social media pages to get a feel for what a well-established brand identity looks like across several different platforms.