Hi I’m Cody Schneider, a marketer based in Boise.
This post will show you how I helped grow the Instagram of my friend’s hair salon by 500+ followers in 30 days.
All followers were real people from our community and resulted in more likes, more comments and most importantly new clients with a lifetime customer value of over $60,000.
This post will touch on why Instagram marketing is the most important channel for salons, the theory of Instagram marketing for salons, and the data from our 30 day test.
Instagram Is The Most Important Marketing Channel For A Hair Salon Or Stylist
I met Breanne at a mixer.
While getting saucy on free beers at a local Boise brewery we chatted about new age diets, CrossFit and eventually tip-toed our way into business.
It became apparent quickly that Breanne understood the world of hair salons like no one I had met before.
The most interesting conversations are the ones with business owners who are knowledgable and passionate. It’s baffling the insights that occurs from an obsession and belief in your in your product/industry and I look forward to these conversations because they provide perspective for my own projects.
During our chat some topics that came up were how a high end hair stylist in Boise should easily make $150K+ a year (that number shocked me), the reasons why most salons fail and the challenges Breanne has faced over the years while owning salons.
While talking one thing in particular struck me.
All Breanne’s and her employees new clients came from Instagram.
Not Facebook.
Not Twitter.
Not local advertising.
Instagram.
I went home that night thinking about this and found myself searching for why Instagram has become hair stylists channel.
After some exploration of how the salon industry works I found the elements that develop a customer purchasing decision. They’re listed below:
People choose haircuts based of photos.
The haircut you want is a deliberate purchasing decision, not involving much impulse.
It’s a reoccurring purchase so relationships matter.
It’s about beauty which, is a popular category on Instagram.
After uncovering these elements, it made sense why Instagram would naturally become the marketing channel of choice.
It fits the needs of communication for the market the most simply.
The next day I reached out to Breanne to ask if she would be interested in doing a case study with me where I help grow her new salons Instagram account.
She was in.
Fast forward and few months and in 30 days I helped Hue Salon in Boise gain 537 new followers from the Boise community resulting in 11 new clients who found Hue on Instagram (they hadn’t interacted with the brand before this).
The average appointment price for Hue is about $130, so these 11 resulted in $1,430 revenue for the month but more importantly added about $60,000 in customer lifetime value (CLV) to Hue. We’ll explore customer lifetime value more thoroughly below.
To share with you how to do this with your salon or personal stylist account I will first talk about the theory of Instagram marketing.
Instagram Marketing Theory For Salons
To begin let’s talk about the purchasing decision a customer makes when they want to get their hair cut.
There are two types of customers who are looking for this service.
Customer A will make their purchasing decision quickly often choosing the best priced option and Customer B will make their purchasing decision over the next weeks or months and will choose a more expensive option that helps them acquire a look their going for.
Hue is a high end salon who caters to customers that want a look and want to develop a relationship with their stylist.
Hue serves Customer B.
This means that the purchasing decision their target customer makes isn’t one that happens immediately, but rather occurs over weeks or months.
With this in mind, a high end salon needs a prospective customer to interact with their brand to develop a relationship and influence that purchasing decision when the time comes for them to get the look they are wanting.
It’s a branding challenge, which means that we’re trying to be the first person someone thinks of when they think hair services.
Instagram is the best tool for salons to use to facilitate this branding because it allows daily posts, the ability to comment and DM, and the use of an Instagram feed as a photo catalog for different cuts and colors. These characteristics are why Instagram has become THE CHANNEL for hair stylist and salon marketing.
With this is mind let’s look at the technical application of growing and Instgram.
How To Market Your Salon On Instagram
So many businesses do Instagram wrong and I get it it.
Most small business owners adopted it late and don’t understand the social norms around it.
Below is the simple prescription to grow any Instagram. These techniques are what I used to grow Hue.
Take Good Photos – This is a no brainer, but I see so many small businesses that suck at this. Lighting, framing of the subject and simple backdrop is all you need. For your salon buy a light like this from Amazon to help, choose the best wall in your facility and make sure you’re the right distance from the subject.
Post daily & Post Consistently – As a salon this is easy. Your staff is seeing multiple people per day so consistent content is readily available. Post once or twice a day. Make your feed consistent. With Hue we focus on 8 posts of hair and one product. Breanne then does some other more personal content on her story to show realness.
Respond To Comments – We’re here to build community of people and being inactive on Instagram in your comment section is worse than not having an Instagram. Having comments is a form of social proof for your brand and due your new customer are finding you through a digital channel it helps validate your business. People want to know you’re real, show them you are.
Follow & Unfollow People – Following targeted people is what we call a forced engagement.
A forced engagement is like a tap on the shoulder. What we’re trying to do is get the attention of someone on Instagram by instigating an interaction with them. Of these people we tap on the shoulder a certain amount of people we get the attention of (normally 10-20%) will follow us back.
This 10-20% only happens if we tap the shoulder of the right people. For Hue, we wanted the attention of a demographic of women with higher incomes. To find our target demographic I followed people who followed other high end accounts in our geography.
Examples of accounts where I followed people were an artesian ice cream parlor, a local organic grocery co-op, and a botanical garden which hosts community events.
This targeting is at your discretion or you can hire me.
To grow your followers go to their followers and mass follow people who follow their accounts. I guarantee you’ll get people to follow you back.
With that said, don’t create too wide of a split between your followers and who you follow. On Instagram an unspoken “coolnees ratio” exists and accounts that follow more people than follow them by a large volume have less likelihood of getting followers back.
This implies that as you follow people you also need to unfollow people in your community. Again this is a tedious process and I am for hire to do this for you (scroll to the bottom to connect).
Like People’s Photos – Another type of forced engagement is liking other peoples photos in your community.
To find these photos use local hashtags or places and then go through these posts and mass like them.
For this method we’ll go and like people who use specific hashtags.
For example a hashtag we used was #boisehair and a location was Boise, Idaho.
That’s it. Those are the core fundamentals of marketing your salon on Instagram.
The next section shares the data from 30 days.
How To Grow Your Salons Instagram Followers In 30 Days
Hue’s Instagram started off at 973 followers. Breanne had been trying to break the 1K follower cieling for months.
I did it in the first day and got this text from her.
As time went on our follow back ratio started to increase as I got more data on where people were following us from the most.
Here’s a graph showing Hue’s Instagram followers growth over a 30 day period. 
From Hue’s follower we got 11 new customers in this 30 day period.
To reiterate, because Hue makes about $130 per booking these 11 customers account for about $1,430 of revenue in our thirty day window.
More powerfully though is the added customer lifetime value (CLV) from these people.
CLV is the average amount of a new customer will make your over their entire purchasing lifespan with your business.
To find your businesses CLV you have to know the average cost per service, the average number of time that purchase is made per year and the average number of years a new customer stay on.
For Hue these numbers are $130 per haircut, 6 times per year and 7 years total time spent going to hue.
In turn a single customer is worth 130*6*7 = $5,460
So 11 new customer in a month equates to about $60,000 in customer lifetime value for Hue.
I hope this post helped you understand the value of Instagram marketing. If you’re wanting to help your business learn more below.
Hire Me To Market Your Salon On Instagram
If you’re wanting to do for your salon or personal hair stylist Instagram what I did for Hue I’d be happy to help.
I’m a digital marketer with 7+ years of experience. I’ve worked for small businesses, startups and large marketing agencies. Message me on Facebook.
