Beauty Boss on… How to establish your online presence

Layla Tourh, MD of The Creative Beauty Group and founder of Beauty Boss HQ, an online platform dedicated to supporting beauty bosses in the running of their business, shares her top tips & words of wisdom…

Have you got a presence in the social space? Being part of an over-saturated market means you have to do more to be seen, and make it easier to be found.

The social media scene is bigger than ever, so don’t fight against the current and get lost in the crowd. More people than ever are using social media to connect with beauty businesses, but do you know how best to engage with them? Part of being a beauty boss requires thinking outside of the box and finding new and innovative ways to attract potential clients to your salon, while looking good in the process. It’s essential to keep ahead of the game and put your head above the rest. Make a success of this, and watch the appointment book fill up and the money roll in.

I bet you didn’t come into the beauty industry to just get by, so by establishing a strong online presence and marketing yourself efficiently and effectively, you’ll be on your way to creating the life you’ve always dreamed of and truly deserve.

In life and business, you’ve got to be present to connect. Embrace the digital world and use it to your advantage to reach out to potential clients the world over. Being consistent is the most important piece of the puzzle, but how is it possible while having to show up as a beauty boss? Planning, forward-thinking and organisation; it’s all possible.

PLANNING

Sometimes, old sayings and clichés are the best references when getting down to basics. All too often you’ll hear people say ‘fail to prepare, prepare to fail’, and this is so true and an essential truth when building your online presence. To make the impact and create the connections you want and need for success, you need to know what you’re saying, why, and to whom.

Adding social content and building your presence to the mix of an already busy week as a beauty boss may seem a bit impossible, but it doesn’t have to be.

Creating space and time each week or so to put a plan of action into place is easier than you think. Time-blocking is an important productivity tip in keeping on top of all things business, and with this organisation, making time for social media is all the more possible.

You’ll need to figure out the who, what, why and when but once these questions are answered, it’s just a case of filling in the blanks. Your ‘who’ is your ideal client, and keeping them in mind when creating content will help you to use the right language in your captions as well answering the ‘what’ by helping you to shape the type of content you’re posting and considering what they want to see. Establishing content pillars will take even more of the hard work out of the equation, and these are the bases around which you’ll create your content.

For example, behind-the-scenes pictures of your salon, before & after photos, services you offer, sharing your brand story (this is your ‘why’), and client testimonials. Split these over the week and prepare your content in advance so you’re not left scrambling to think of something on the day.

So you may be wondering how to keep yourself organised with all of this new content. There are some fantastic free content management systems available these days, we recommend using Trello for this as you can upload your images to your lists and watch your monthly content formulate before your eyes, plus you can add your captions and hashtags. Overall, it’s easy to use and has a lot of time-saving features.

You may think that you have to manually post social content from your phone all day every day, but that’s not the case! There are free scheduling platforms such as Later which enable you to upload your media and captions in advance across Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest and Twitter, saving you time during your busy work week.

CONSISTENCY

We’re all about aesthetics right? Don’t let this slip when it comes to your socials! Build your brand foundations to create visual consistency to communicate polished professionalism by establishing concise branding. You may already have a logo, and the next step is colour. Let’s keep it simple by choosing three complementary colours that can be used across your content’s stylistic elements; think post backgrounds and typography.

Be consistent in not only your visuals, but also your content and in showing up! To see what works for you, ensure you have an Instagram Business account so you can track your insights and see what your audience responds best to; adapt and evolve your content around this data. You can also use this to see which days and times your audience shows up most; post around those times for optimal exposure.

Showing us isn’t limited to only your feed and DMs, but your IG Stories as well! Show up daily, even if it’s a quick behind the scenes of your salon. Use this behind the scenes tactic to forum an emotional bond with your clients; people bond with people, so show the faces behind your business. Interactivity and engagement is key, so make it fun! Do this by creating polls, quizzes, questions and sliders in your Stories. Go that step further and create IG Highlights with the best of your Stories. This will make it easy for new faces to check in and see what you’re about, what you offer and why they should trust you.

Instagram has so many amazing features to take advantage of to keep your presence fresh and up-to-date with the latest trends such as IG Reels. Create fun and engaging content to show the humour and personality behind your business; the greatest thing about Reels is they’re short and snappy so you don’t need to overthink it and spend hours recording content.

CONTENT CREATION

Times are changing and really, you don’t need a design degree to create beautiful content anymore. Nowadays there are so many different methods at your fingertips but we 100% recommend using Canva for your social and marketing materials. One tip from us is to include your logo or social handle on your images to protect them, plus this goes towards directing people back to your profile and let’s avid scrollers know who is posting.

Canva also has loads of free fonts for your use; we recommend finding two complementary fonts and sticking with those to continue the visual consistency across your content. The great thing about this platform is that they know their audience and know how to make things easier for you, so they have post dimensions ready to go so you don’t have to worry about anything getting cropped, lost or distorted!

OPTIMISATION

There are some essentials to get ticked off the list when it comes to your social presence, and the first is doing everything you can to make sure people can find you! Often forgotten is the Instagram bio. It’s so important to optimise this so potential clients can actually find you in such a saturated market. We recommend replacing your ‘name’ in your bio to what it is you do instead of your actual business name; this makes it so much easier for Instagram users to come across you and increases your chances substantially as they trawl the app for beauty service providers. Next is your bio text, create a statement that clearly says what you do and who you do it for and why. Finally, finish with a strong call to action to contact you, add a link to your business website and you’re good to go!

Doing some research to which hashtags would be most effective is essential, consider what your potential clients would be searching for to find you more than what you do in a broader sense. As well as this, adding your location to your IG posts and IG Stories will assist in making you and your content more discoverable.

DON’T HAVE THE TIME?

It’s absolutely understood that not everyone will have the time to implement all of this, and it’s important to recognise your strengths, weaknesses, and where you can really flourish and show up. Social media managers are on hand to help with exactly this, they’ll work to free up time for you to commit yourself to other areas of your business, whilst helping you show up on your socials. Making space and time to be your authentic self is possible and important in communicating the face behind the name of your business, creating an emotional connection with your community and welcoming them to come to you for treatments.

Each of these areas is as important as the next and go together to create a recipe for success in establishing a strong social presence online. To grow organically, things take time and remember that it’s not just a number game; forming authentic connections with real people that could potentially come through the salon doors, means more than 100 extra likes from bogus accounts. Be present, be consistent and be real!

www.beautybosshq.com