How to promote your salon through partnerships

Does this sound like your salon business…

You deliver a great service, but you want to grow the number of clients for your salon or barbering business?

You struggle to balance your time between finding new clients and serving your existing ones?

You’re bored of reading generic articles on how to promote your salon business that don’t actually give you any practical, step by step instructions?

Wouldn’t it be nice if….

There was a clear and simple plan that was easy to follow?

You didn’t need to spend money on advertising?

You put the effort in once, but benefit time and time again?

You have a constant source of new clients for your business every month?

Then this partnership guide for promoting your salon business is for you!

What do we mean by partnerships?

It sounds like a fancy corporate word, but it’s actually pretty simple. And you may have already executed one in your business without realising.

In this article, we think of a partnership as providing something valuable to an organisation, and in return, they promote you to their audience. 

That’s it.

You may not realise it, but you’re not just a stylist or a barber. You’re in the content creation business too. Your knowledge, your experience and your skill is valuable. Capturing that and sharing it with organisations that have a large audience of your target client is the aim of the game.

By partnering with organisations that are not your competitors, but still have a large audience of your perfect clientele, then you have an opportunity to acquire new clients month after month, without having to spend a fortune on advertising

Here’s a quick example:

Sam runs a small salon that caters for men and women.

Sam is struggling to find new customers.

Sam creates a helpful, 2 minute video that teaches men how to prepare their skin before shaving. 

Sam shares this video with all the local Football and Rugby clubs, offering a 10% discount on any booking before the end of the month.

Collectively, 1000 people see the video and 10 people book an appointment to get a haircut.

For just a few minutes of recording a video, and the time it takes to contact 10 sports clubs, Sam has acquired 10 new clients. 

By the end of this article, you’ll learn everything you need to launch your first partnership.

The PEB strategy:

The PEB strategy outlines three key concepts, to help you set this up the right way:

• Partnerships
• Education
• Bookings

Partnerships

This strategy is based on your ability to find local organisations, that already have an established audience, that contain your perfect clients.

You will not be partnering with other salons and barbers, you’ll be partnering with non-competing organisations that just happen to have the audience you want.

Another important factor is to identify organisations that are already sharing content with their audience via social media and email on a regular basis, which we’ll learn more about later in this guide.

Education

The key to making this work, is to deliver educational content to other audiences, that is actually helpful and valuable.

You’re not going to try and “sell” your services to them because that won’t work. In general, people are extremely good at identifying sales messages and ignoring them. 

You’re going to create  useful content, they delivers value straight away.

Bookings

By sharing helpful and educational content, you’re demonstrating authenticity and building trust.

Once the viewer realises you’re based in the local area, the relevance of your content increases significantly. As long as you’ve targeted your partners correctly, a percentage of that audience will make an appointment with you.

We want to create a “rinse & repeat” strategy here, so that for every piece of content you create and share with a partner, it leads to a constant source of new customers for your salon or barbering business.

Step 1: Create a “wish list” of your top 20 ideal partners

What makes a good partner?

The partner has to have an audience that’s local to your business. There’s no point in partnering with an organisation whose audience is in London, if your salon is in Birmingham. 

The partner should have an established audience that includes your target clientele. If you specialise in women's hair, don’t target a partner with a predominantly male audience.

The partner should not compete with your business. This is a creative way of getting your business in front of potential customers, and that won’t happen if the partner risks losing theirs.

The partner should already be sharing content with their audience via social media and email on a regular basis. Creating content for an audience consistently is hard, so if you approach an organisation that already does it, you’re making their life easier, and they’ll be much more receptive to your pitch. 

Partnering with an organisation that doesn’t already share content on a regular basis, will be more of a challenge as it’s not something they normally do.

Don’t go for the biggest partners straight away

The size of the partner you approach must be similar to the size of your business or smaller. 

If you’re a one person business, then it’s unlikely a large organisation of many thousands of followers will respond to your request. They will probably want to work with an established salon that has multiple locations, and lots of staff.

Although it’s tempting to go for the biggest opportunities first, you’re actually more likely to succeed if you start with lots of smaller partnerships and build yourself up from there.

Create your list

As the old saying goes “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know” and this is the perfect opportunity to look at all your friends, family and contacts and see if there are any partnership opportunities available to you through the people you already know.

The next best solution is to focus on your contacts, contacts. Who are your friends and family connected to, that they could introduce you to? A warm introduction is going to make this process far easier and enjoyable.

Research potential partnership organisations through the following:

• Local social media accounts (Food bloggers, local influencers)
• Local social media groups (Buy sell groups, local business groups)
• Local clubs, societies and membership organisations

Be sure to identify the relevant persons name and contact information (Email, phone number, direct message etc)

Keep researching until you have a list of 20 potential partners to contact.

Step 2: Create educational content

From your research in step 1, you’ve identified partners who need content to share with a local audience, that could become your customers.

You should create a short piece of content that is useful, practical and relevant to your target audience.

You don’t want it to appeal to everyone, you want it to REALLY appeal to a smaller subsection of that audience

Ideas:

• How to prepare for a shave properly
• Quick tips to style your hair for after work drinks
• How to freshen up post workout hair
• Etc

With videos becoming the most widely shared type of content, this is the preferred medium. Don’t get hung up on production quality, just take out your phone and create a quick video that helps people.

At the start of your video, introduce yourself and be sure to state what the viewer will be able to do if they watch it all the way to the end

At the end of the video, be sure to tell your viewers how they can stay connected (E.g. Visit our website on www.something.com to book an appointment or follow us on Instagram @yourprofilename)

If you’re not comfortable with creating and sharing a video, then create a written article that can be shared. 

Once you’ve created your content, make sure it’s shareable with partner organisations. If you’re using video, consider uploading it to YouTube or if you’ve created an article, send it in an email or direct message.

Step 3: Pitching your first partnership

Your goal is to establish an ongoing relationship, with a number of local organisations that are happy and willing to promote your content to their audience. 

To do this, you need to pitch this to potential partners the right way.

How to write your partnership pitch

There are three parts to a successful partnership pitch:

• Setting the relationship
• Win/Win benefit
• A clear ask

Setting the relationship - This is where you explain how you’re connected to the partner, so there’s a legitimate reason to get in contact with them. Even if you don’t know them personally, you can say you’re a fan of their work or have friends that are connected to them in some way.

Win/Win benefit - This explains why this will benefit them and their audience.

A clear ask - A final question, that is very easy for the partner to say “Yes, I’m interested” or “No thanks”.

An example partnership pitch

Here’s an example where an owner of an independent salon, pitches a local Rugby club:

Hi Simon,

Sam here from the Elegant Salon on the high street in town.

This might seem random, but a friend of mine shared your recent Facebook post about your win on Saturday (Congrats!)

I couldn’t help notice that most of the team in the picture have beards, and I wondered if some male grooming tips might be something they’re interested in?

Here’s a link to a short video I made, that teaches men how to prepare their skin before shaving to reduce cuts and shaving rashes (you want the team to look good before your next match!)

As a special offer, I can give members of your club 10% discount cards and a free beard trim if they book an appointment before the end of the month.

Is that something you’re interested in? 

Sam

Setting the relationship

• You’ll notice this message doesn’t start with “To whom it may concern” or “Dear sir/madam”
• The message starts by setting the relationship, so the recipient understands how you’re connected
• By congratulating the recipient on the recent win, it demonstrates friendliness and relevance
• This increases the chance of the recipient reading and responding to your message

Win/win benefit

• The letter highlights the players on the team all have beards
• People who have beards may or may not want some help in keeping it well groomed
• For those that do, some free help and information is valuable
• You’ve made it easy, because you’ve already made the video and shared it straight away
• You’ve delivered value, before you’ve asked for anything in return

A clear ask

• The second to last sentence outlines an offer that is better than most people get, just because they are members of that rugby club
• The offer is extremely clear
• The final sentence ends with a straight forward Yes / No question, which makes it an easy decision for the recipient

Step 4: Pitch all of your partners

Now that you’ve done this once, it’s time to send this pitch out to all of the partners on your list.

Adapt the wording each time, to make sure it’s relevant, and ticks all the boxes that we’ve talked about in this article.

By the end of this process, you will have created a valuable piece of content that will get shared by a percentage of partners on your list.

More people will be aware of your salon, which will lead to more enquiries and more appointments.

Step 5: Rinse & repeat

Everything covered in this article can be repeated on a monthly, weekly or even daily basis. It only takes a few minutes to record a helpful video on your phone and is limited only by your creativity.

It might take a bit longer to research different partners to contact, but they’re out there. 

You only need a few partners with large enough audiences that are happy to share your videos on a regular basis.

This will bring in a steady stream of new clients for your business, without the need to invest in advertising, month after month.

And if you really want to impress your clients…

Why not take a look at our affordable salon and barbering apps, that provide powerful features such as online appointments, email reminders, team profiles, price list, a style swiper tool, reviews and an online shop and more!

Check out our Salon and barbering apps here.