If You Want Your Spa Marketing To Be Successful Forget Branding
One of the biggest buzzwords that’s come as a result of the social media phenomenon is “branding”. Listen to me: if you want your spa marketing efforts to be successful – drop the term “branding” from your vocabulary. The next advertising sales rep who waltzes into your spa and starts blathering on about “building your brand’ should be run out of your spa on his ear!
Why do I feel so strongly about this? Because traditional brand-building advertising is a massive waste of money! The line of thinking with brand advertising is that if somehow enough people see your logo, or pretty pictures associated with your business, they will somehow gravitate to your spa. The ad agencies that push this kind of nonsense often talk about “capturing mindshare” and other ridiculous drivel.
Does brand advertising work for anyone? Sure, it does, if you’re McDonalds, Apple, or Federal Express and you have a multi-million dollar advertising budget that you can use to simply saturate the marketplace with your “branding” message. I trust you don’t have that kind of money sitting around.
The only type of spa marketing you should ever do is direct response marketing. The components of any effective direct response marketing piece are:
1) A benefit-driven headline (note: the name of your spa is not a headline)
2) A compelling offer: something that makes the target market say to themselves “that’s a great deal, or even better… ‘I’d have to be stupid not to do this”.
3) A deadline. People must be given a reason to act, or they won’t.
4) Copy that appeals to the propect’s emotions, not to their logic. Saying a new skin cream you carry is going to help the person have younger looking skin appeals to logic. Saying they’re going to catch younger men staring at their radiant face across a crowded room appeals to their emotions.
5) It should be trackable and held accountable for results.
Now, you may be thinking “that sounds like couponing. I hate coupons”. Call it what you want – coupons, certificates, vouchers, whatever. If this is what you think, it’s probably because you equate an “offer” with being a discount. That’s not necessarily true.
Even though a discount is one form of an offer, it’s usually not a very good one. If you discount your services, there’s always a competitor who can (and will) try to under-price you. Racing to the bottom is a game where no one wins in the end.
A better spa marketing method is to offer packages, with standard services coupled with items of high perceived value, but low cost (i.e, ‘Buy a couples massage and get aromatherapy and ear candling for free’). Now, when a person compares you with another spa, they are comparing “apples to oranges”. Although your price may be higher, you offer greater value for the money.
