Day spa marketing done right

Marketing your day spa can be overwhelming. If you’re winging it, you’re probably wasting more budget than you’re generating returns with. If you’re flying solo, you most likely aren’t dedicating enough time to your spa’s marketing efforts.

Above all else, agencies and truly qualified in-house marketing talent are expensive options — not a wise idea for an independent brand that’s just starting up and looking to reach breakeven or profit ASAP.

So what do you do?

While there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to marketing, you do have options. It all depends on your marketing stance: are you measured, manic or somewhere inbetween?

What’s your marketing stance?

We know: this isn’t something the average day spa owner or manager thinks about. That’s exactly why we’re talking about it. It matters.

A measured marketing stance presents itself when you think and act strategically about your marketing budget. If you have funding, there’ll be a portion permitted for allocation toward marketing costs. If you’re self-funded, you’ll probably base your marketing budgets and other decisions on your revenue or turnover.

A manic stance, sadly the one we see most often, is to thumb-suck and work on assumptions. We hope this isn’t the one that seems familiar to you: the boss sets a budget, chooses the channels or marketing platforms, dishes out a revenue or a booking target and then tells everyone to go make it happen. The on-site manager is so caught up with staff rosters, leave schedules, product inventory, cleaning material orders and handling escalated customer queries on a daily basis that they’re left with little to no time left for the fun stuff: selling the story that’ll have people lining up for treatments, WITHOUT slashing prices.

Some spas are run with a mix of the two marketing stances. There’s an effort to plan things but it doesn’t really always go to plan. There’s nothing wrong with this but there’s probably no structured analytics step to help with making the next set of decisions.

We can help with that:

Sort out your spa’s website

It’s not negotiable. Your website is your digital foundation as a day spa, and the centrepoint of your online marketing effort. A good day spa website should be able to do the following things:

Show up in search engine results pages at the right time and for the right keywords
Attract clicks once people see the search result options
Provide easy-to-use navigation
Offer just enough information to be useful for customers and at the same time not overwhelm them
Make it easy to book AND pay!

Achieving these things is possible when you choose the right website developer. You should budget roughly R10 000 – R20 000 for a good website. There will be cheaper options but we’re willing to bet that those providers don’t have enough of the skills you really need and you don’t have enough expertise to tell the difference.

Need pointers? Contact us for a better website. We’ll even help you review the quotes you’re getting from other providers to make sure you get a return on your investment.

A website should make your business money, not drain the life from it by frustrating your customers and offering them zero convenience.

Social media matters

There are some common mistakes we see day spas and wellness centres making with social media almost every month:

Missing the key step of setting quality standards for social media marketing providers.
Focusing on likes and following instead of leads, bookings and revenue.
Miscalculating budgets and exposing the business to too much risk or not providing enough budget to really deliver on targets.
One of the first steps to overcoming these kinds of hurdles is to understand the two types of social media marketing for your day spa: organic vs paid social.

Organic social

Organic social is a ZERO BUDGET initiative. Done right, your no-cost posts should:

Be batch-created to save time on copywriting, design, review and publication.
Always cite original content sources if you’re using anyone else’s images, links or written excerpts: NEVER PLAGIARISE!!!
Allow for rhythmic repetition: organic social posts are not all seen by all of your potential and actual customers at the time they’re published.

Corporate communication specialists think about conflict before it even appears. They think about media law, compliance issues, brand positioning, sensitivity to culture and psychographic profiles. It’s not just about getting an ad live, it’s about starting, continuing and concluding communication episodes appropriately, with purpose and being able to reflect on the progress and outcomes of each campaign.

Paid social

Paid social media campaigns are not that simple if you want to make the most of a small budget. You need to constantly be testing different elements for better performance and you need to understand the ever-changing user interfaces to really know how your social media campaigns are driving your bookings:

Are people calling in?
Are customers using social media messaging to check availability?
Are people going from your social media pages to your website and completing bookings there?

If you’re in the dark about how people actually find you and book with you, ask us anything and we’ll help you figure it out.

Special offers and deals should be special

Newsflash: customers actually HATE it when your specials page features hundreds of options and they get stuck in infinite scrolling mode.

You paralyse your customers and actually prevent them from making a buying decision!

When you set your specials for each month or quarter, limit them to a handful of options that are different enough from one another so that people can actually choose the one that’s right for their particular need. Here are some ideas to get you started:

Stress relief
Physical therapy
Luxury experience
Romantic option
Signature saver deal

Keep your rules simple for your packages and voucher redemptions otherwise you’ll be stuck trying to figure out which dates and times are valid for which packages: it reduces the quality of your establishment’s customer service. This means it drives people away over time instead of attracting them back for another treatment.

Need to freshen up your packages? We know how. Get in touch with us to recentre your treatment centre

For a chance to get complimentary guidance on how to drive more bookings at your treatment centre, complete this 3-minute survey: https://9r5zmi5dj0k.typeform.com/to/TOOX6PcX.

It needs time, careful planning and strategic thinking to really win at modern day marketing. If you’re an independent establishment it’s hard to compete with the budgets of bigger franchise brands, more so if you’re not located within a hotel or wellness centre.

If there’s one thing we hope you learned today, it’s that your day spa’s marketing efforts deserve more love and devotion. If you’re ready to invest in stress relief for your spa staff and take marketing to new heights for your treatment centre, it’s time to reach out to one of our Fractional CMOs and bring in leadership you can count on, from as little as R3000/$200 monthly.