While the beginning of April might seem early to start your summer spa marketing plans, the fact is, the more time you give to your strategies now, the easier (and more effective) the results will be.
The advice below is provided courtesy of Kirsten Foss of Spa Business Mastery, spa marketing coach helping estheticians and spa owners turn their sales goals into sales successes.
The following are what she identifies as the three main benefits of advance strategizing:
Your plans are more cohesive. You see the big picture goals, not just month-by-month (or worse, day by day) efforts.
You save yourself from “context switching” in your day-to-day.
You keep the business focused on the parts of your strategy that matter most.
And, most important: you’re getting ahead so you’re not getting behind.
1. Assess Your Summer Spa Marketing Goals
At Kirsten Foss Coaching, we require our Digital Marketing clients to strategize their marketing plan at least a month in advance.
The first step in your marketing plan: Assess the prior years’ service and retail goals and sales for June, July, and August.
We recommend that at the end of each month, you break down each of your revenue streams to see which were successful, need improvement, and which ones just didn’t work.
Top Tips for making the most 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 encourage a boost in the number of visits per season. This has helped the spas we worked with hit their sales goals more consistently.
Discounts are not always necessary! Discounts, when used in excess, can devalue your brand and disincentivize future purchases. We prefer to offer “features” instead.
2. Create Your Monthly Marketing Strategy
Next up is the meat of your marketing: the planning stage.
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 mesh nicely with our clients’ priority sales goals.
As we say in our marketing podcast episode of Spa Business Mastery, “Your marketing is another place where you need consistency about what you’re actually offering."
For example, if your monthly feature happens to be a ‘Margarita Facial’ and you choose to retail products like a body lotion, they don’t really go together.
When you choose a feature treatment, 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 encourage spa owners to do when planning their 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, topics in your email marketing, or even blogs or new pages on your website, one fully-fleshed out topic can 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!
3. 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 worry! 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. (DIY content planner)
Here’s our content creation batching checklist:
Block two-to-three hours out in your calendar to focus on content creation (we highly recommend you do this in one session. Nothing’s worse than breaking your train of thought mid-batching.)
Start with social media. To save time, we recommend you refer back to your monthly strategy document, which you hopefully should have made while creating your monthly marketing strategy.
Curate images and captions for each of your topics. We recommend Canva for easy (and beautiful!) image quotes and at least one stock photography service to keep images varied. (for example: Envato Elements, Adobe Stock Photos, Shutterstock) Also include candid & high-quality in-spa photos to keep your message authentic and personal.
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: deciding 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 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!
(Kirsten Foss also offers spa business coaching and digital marketing support. Visit her website to learn more.)