In today’s digital landscape, breaking through the noise is increasingly difficult. With competition across so many channels, how do today’s audiences decide where to direct their attention? It ultimately comes down to personally aligning your brand with your company values.
Your brand is built from carefully chosen elements. This includes visual aspects supported with your mission and values. In turn, these values should align with the clients you are aiming to reach and connect with.
As your brand presence takes shape across a growing number of platforms, inconsistencies in those brand elements will directly undermine their impact. Brand consistency builds a strong foundation from which audiences will better be able to understand your salon business. The desired result is brand trust, loyalty and ultimately, become one of the driving forces of repeat business.
Brand details must be carefully thought through and communicated clearly to avoid limited impact. A successful brand is one with longevity. It is built up over time by being flexible enough to adapt to current market trends and expectations while remaining consistent.
Brand Strategy is a long-term plan developed to help your salon achieve specific goals. Brand consistency is core to how that strategy creates a unified experience for target audiences to build lifelong clients and engagement based on brand trust.
Important Elements of a Brand:
Logo: Your logo is arguably the most memorable piece of a brand’s collateral. Logos provide an opportunity for clients to automatically associate products or services with any given brand.
Tone & Voice: What does your brand sound like? This may fluctuate between channels. For example, emails may be slightly formal and social media more casual, which is absolutely fine. But, there should still be a unifying factor. Always remain true to your mission statement, both when promoting the positive aspects of your salon brand and also when you have to respond to negativity, such as poor reviews or online complaints.
Colours: You know your branding is done well when seeing certain colours immediately calls your clients’ minds to your salon brand. A good colour scheme can go a long way. Obviously, there are an unlimited amount of colours out there and when your brand colours are even slightly off, people notice.
Fonts: Similar to colours, there are about as many variations as you can imagine and even slight inconsistencies will catch people’s eye. It can be hard to distinguish which fonts should be used when. Having clear guidelines for which fonts should be used as headers, descriptions, posts, emails and various marketing materials will streamline the correct ways to positively promote your brand and help remove uncertainty that leads to inconsistency.
Images: The images you share, regardless of the platform, should take into account all of your other elements. This means they should reflect the tone your brand has set out for itself, follow your colour palette and include your brand’s logo. Be methodical in your selection, approvals and permissions to guarantee that your visual identity is as strong as your written one.
Next thing to consider are important components of a potential buyer/client – if you can piece together your clients’ routine on a typical day, you’ll have insight into what occupies their time, what is and what isn’t important to them. Learn to align consistent messaging around what your clients care about and link it to a relevant value proposition, then your salon brand could have a place in their natural thought process.
What keeps the buyers up at night? How do you validate and connect on an emotional level? Part of brand consistency includes also being resourceful. Are you providing information that solves their hair/fashion/image issues? The brands that earn brand loyalty often provide solutions outside of their product alone, providing genuine support that makes their clients lives better.
Every salon business faces objections. As potential clients work through their concerns, they will want to see that your brand walks the talk.
What groups do your buyers belong to? Where do they get their information? Are they super passionate about their hair? Everybody wants to be part of the club of their choice. Ideally, your salon brand could be one of those choices.
With any growing salon brand comes a need for content creation. Content is how your showcase the expertise, quality of work and knowledge your salon is built around. Your content allows your clients to begin to identify your salon. It can offer advice, provide ideas, give step by step guide to solving particular problems.
Once you are satisfied you have the foundation for your brand presence, next you’ll need to take steps to ensure that your brand is promoted across various channels. Make sure to know what content exists and are able to easily keep track of all your marketing assets.
Once your content is being used, hopefully your brand presence will begin to grow. Then keeping track of where your salon is finding success and there it isn’t is vital to continuous improvement. Monitoring your content also includes evaluating your metrics and what content exists where. The control of your brand consistency extends only as far as what your brand creates and circulates. Also monitor how others are talking about and interacting with your salon brand. All of this information will paint an accurate picture of how your brand is performing digitally.
Metrics to Measure: As you continue to optimise with brand consistency, remember to keep an eye on content performance. To begin the process of monitoring your salon brand, here are some metrics that you can measure to begin seeing the full picture of how your brand is interacted with online:
- Monitor your keywords to determine which result in the most click-throughs to your website homepage.
- See which blog content drives the most comments and social shares.
- Find out which email content drives the most business.
- Learn which landing pages result in the highest bookings.
- Test which links get the highest click through rates on various platforms.
- Find out the social media content which results in the most engagement.
- Measure your growth rate of your social media accounts by selecting a reporting period, calculate your new followers over that specific period by dividing your new followers by your total followers.
There is more opportunity than ever, but also more competition. Clients have adapted the way they learn about and choose a salon brand they decide to book with. The result being that the client is looking to identify with a salon brand they can trust and salons looking to provide that value through genuine brand consistency, outstanding customer service and fantastic quality work.
