Intro: Do you feel like you were meant to have a kick-ass career as a hair stylist? Like you got into this industry to make big things happen?
Maybe you’re struggling to build a solid base and want some stability. Maybe you know social media is important, but it feels like a waste of time because you aren’t seeing any results. Maybe you’ve already had some amazing success, but are craving more. Maybe you’re ready to truly enjoy the freedom and flexibility this industry has to offer.
Cutting and coloring skills will only get you so far, but to build a lifelong career as a wealthy stylist, it takes business skills and a serious marketing strategy. When you’re ready to quit, just working in your business and start working on it, join us here, where we share real success stories from real stylists.
I’m Britt Seva, social media and marketing strategist just for hair stylists, and this is the Thriving Stylist Podcast.
Britt Seva: What is up, you guys? Britt Seva here and I’m so excited this week to talk about a topic that’s a little bit near and dear to my heart.
In recent weeks, I’ve gotten quite a few DMs from you guys asking, “Britt, is there any way you could give some tips as to how to grow in a smaller community?”
I think that there’s a misconception… If anybody listening to this has not lived in a small community — and what I mean by small community is not just a sub community. So historically, I’ve worked in the Silicon Valley area and in that area, there are these little, almost subdivisions. Definitely different levels of affluence and different spending habits. And all of those things exist within these sub communities, but they’re all more or less connected to each other. Some are just a mile or two wide and then you’re into the next sub-community.
I don’t mean like that. I mean when you live in a one-stoplight town. I mean when the big city is an hour, 90 minutes, two hours away. I mean you are in a community that more or less is self-sufficient; there’s not a lot of crossover to other communities.
And oftentimes in these communities, it feels like hair stylists are in abundance. Competition is high, opportunity is low, and how do you build in a situation like that?
The reason this is near to dear near and dear to my heart is I grew up in a community like that and I now live back in that community.
When I grew up in this small town I’m in now, we were population 9,000 growing up here as a kid. Now it’s population 13,000, so it’s grown, but it’s still small. Our closest big city is just over 45 minutes from here, less than an hour, over 45 minutes. There are some communities that are another 30, 35, 40 minutes away, but essentially we all just stay here in our little division.
When I worked at the salon, I was in Silicon Valley. So I was very much in the big city. How I would market myself in that salon in the big city versus marketing myself here in this tiny community, my strategies would be completely different. I wouldn’t do any of the things the same.
The reason I want to bring acknowledgment to that is if you’ve lived only in a more suburban area or an area where there is a lot of foot traffic or these interconnected communities, you would assume that Instagram, hashtags, work everywhere. Geotagging works everywhere. Social media advertising works everywhere.
No way. Those things do not work everywhere by any means. Not all social platforms have any effect, depending on where you live.
I thought it was time on the podcast that we give a little love to those who are growing in smaller communities or these smaller divisions, as far as how to get your name out there and build a strong reputation for yourself, even if competition is high.
So, as I was preparing for this episode, I did a little bit of reflection on the stylists in the salons within my little community here of 13,000. I started to think about what some of the salons do well and where some of the salons fall short because the bummer is there are some incredibly talented, very seasoned, very experienced stylists working in this community who are not doing as well as they should. I know they’re losing business because I have some friends who choose to go to the city an hour away instead of seeing the stylists that I know — because I’ve seen their work — I know are talented right here in our own backyard.
Why would they make that choice? Branding, target market, lack of awareness, right? So when I reflected on what the local stylists in my area do well and what they do poorly, I want to talk about what they do poorly first.
A lot of these stylists and salons, I notice, shortchange themselves. They start to say things like, “Well, in a small town, we don’t do this. We don’t do that. We don’t do the other thing. Our website’s not that important. We’re more of a local community salon.”
As soon as you start to downplay your business like that, you have to expect weak results. If you’re going to put minimal efforts, you’re going to get minimal results. It only makes sense, right? So even if you’re in a small town, I encourage you to go all-in as if you were in Manhattan, as if you’re in Orange County, as if you’re already in a hotbed of hair salons, if you are competing with the top dogs. That is how you should still attack your marketing strategy.
I don’t mean in the same way on social media, but I mean the way that your salon looks, the way that your salon feels, the way that your website works to attract clients, the way you show up on social media channels that are appropriate — all of those things need to happen as if they would if you were in a huge metropolitan area. And none of that changes.
What I want you to let go of is the mindset of, “Well, what kind of like a mom-and-pop. We’re kind of a small salon, so we just do things like this.” You have to let that go. If you continue to only respect your business, minimalistically like that, you should very much so expect minimal results.
Number two, community domination is going to be the name of the game in a small, local salon business.
By community domination, I mean, you want to be the best of the best, want to be painfully obvious that you are so, and that is possible. And I’m gonna lay out a plan to make that happen here on this episode.
Number three, you need to be more modern, more friendly, more professional, and more community-oriented than all of the other salons.
When I say that, it makes us nervous. Why? Because you’re raising the bar, and the salon or the stylist (or any business) that raises the bar generally has some fear that sets in because that fear of judgment of others who are not choosing to raise along with you is really serious.
Some of those other businesses may be jealous and to that I say if you like what I’m doing, why don’t you head this direction with me? There’s room at the top for everybody.
I was thinking about it and in my town of about 13,000, we have seven hair salons and about 40 stylists. That means there’s still plenty of heads of hair in this community for all 40 of those stylists to make a beautiful living for themselves.
Like beautiful. They could all be top dogs and all do really well. The problem is most of them are not going all in so they’re losing business to stylists and salons in bigger areas who have chosen to double down in a way that a lot of local stylists don’t.
What I encourage you to do is to release that idea of, “Well, I need to play small because that’s what everybody else does.” No, you need to raise the bar and then be helpful when others want to raise along with you. Or if somebody looks to you and says, “I don’t understand why you did that,” let them know why you’re making the choices that you’re making, but you can’t hold yourself back because the community chooses to think small.
You have to be the one that steps forward first.
Then number four, specialize. I always say, be special, have a specialty, right? Big city, small town, whatever. The more specialized you are in who you are and what you do, the faster you’ll grow.
I like to use the example of if a professional athlete takes a fall on the field, a professional NFL player takes a fall on the field, just shatters his ankle. I mean, the thing is destroyed. He’s carted off the field. Do you think he’s like, “You know what, take me to my general practitioner, the same guy who sees me when I have a runny nose, the guy who does my annual physical every year. Take me to that guy.”
0% chance.
That NFL player wants to see the nationally renowned ankle specialist. All that this doctor does is work on ankles. And he specializes within the specialty because he only actually works on professional athletes. He’s contracted with the MLB, the NFL, the NHL. He literally just works with professional athletes. Who do you think that NFL player wants to see? 100% the specialist.
It’s the same with clients.
Does he see a general practitioner? Yeah, for the basic stuff. He doesn’t send him referrals. He’s not a big deal. The specialist wins.
And so I want you to specialize in what you do. We have lots of other episodes talking about specializing. Thrivers Society is all about specializing.
But those are going to be the four keys in the mindset shifts you need to happen to grow in a small community.
The first element that I believe is important as a small town stylist is online presentation. And I know that might surprise you. You’re like, “What? Like literally none of the salons in our area are online.”
Yeah. Is that not a red flag to you? That is a huge red flag. I don’t care if you live in the tiniest, teeniest, weeniest town, do people in your town use the internet? If they do, they’d like to look you up and they’d like to like what they see and what they don’t do.
And oftentimes when we’re in a small community, we give ourselves a little bit of grace and we say, “Well, they see I’m trying.” No, you don’t get credit for trying in business. You get credit for doing it right.
So I want to encourage you if you’re in a community and a small community or a big community to prioritize your online presence. And by online presentation and online presence, I mean your online reviews and your website.
I learned firsthand how important both of those things are. If you’re an avid listener to the podcast, I shared an episode a couple of months back called A Tale of Two Clients where two friends of mine shared with me stories about finding stylists, losing stylists, and why they made those choices.
One of my friends was saying she was looking for a stylist here in our teeny tiny community and she explains the troubles she went through in doing that. And when I said, “How did you start your search?” she said, “Well, of course I started by Googling.”
I said, “Okay, and then how did you decide of the seven salons you saw which to go to?”
“I chose the one with the best website.”
That’s not me. And listen, she knows what I do for a job. She doesn’t know the nuances of what I coached to. She has no idea. So the fact that she said the first indicator of where to choose was the salon with the best website. That means something that’s huge.
Then I said, “What did you do next?”
“I looked up their online reviews.” That was step number two. Why? Because consumers today like to see opinions of strangers, they just do. 70% of consumers trust an online review as much as, or more than, a referral from a personal friend. We liked that crowdsourced feedback.
Number three: she looked at their social media.So when she’s deciding between the seven local salons, it was website reviews, and social media, and whatever salon had the best of the best of all — three of those categories based on her criteria — they won her business.
Now the other thing to remember when you are building a local community is where are your potential clients hanging out? I can only speak from my local community here. If you were attempting to build on Instagram, Facebook, Yelp, or the Nextdoor app, you would do fairly well. Google My Business as well.
If you were limited on time, I would, without a doubt, tell you to double down on Nextdoor and Google My Business. I would honestly say you can put Instagram, Facebook, Yelp on the back burner because I’ve watched how stylists in this community build. It’s very word of mouth.
But even if you are referred to a stylist, those clients who are considering you still look up your website and still want to see some kind of digital reviews. I have watched stylists bound to the top on that Nextdoor app, especially in teeny tiny communities. I think the power there is major.
I searched before I recorded this episode — I went to my local Nextdoor app and I took a look at how many times the word hair stylist was asked for in a query. In the last year, 41 times in my teeny tiny community in six months, somebody posted something about, “Does anybody know a good stylist?” “If anybody’s looking for a stylist, you should see my girl, Blah-blah-blah.” That’s a lot of just shout outs and queries on one app, specifically looking for what we do.
Think about in your community, where are people having these conversations? I’m a huge fan of Facebook groups, especially in small communities. Instagram is a little tougher to build in a smaller community. The hashtag game around here is poor to very poor. I mean, there’s nothing. Geotags here poor to very poor.
You have to think about where your social media efforts are going to give you the biggest bang for your buck and double down in those places.
Then next we need to have a solid referral program. And when I say solid referral program, most people are like, “Whew, got that far. At least I did one thing right.”
Just having a referral program is no good at all. A referral program only works if you talk about it. “Well, I’ve definitely mentioned it to my clients.” Well, you’ve mentioned a lot of things to your clients, but if we want them to take action on something, we have to talk about it all the time.
Because as much as we love our guests and they love us too, we’re not the center of their universe. So if you’re not talking about referrals and asking, “Do you have any friends who would like to see me?”, if you’re not doing the healthy things that we need to do to gain referrals all the time, I’m not surprised that your referral program is gaining traction.
So not just having a super solid, well set-up referral program, which we do talk about how to do in Thrivers Society. So not just that, but talking about it frequently is going to be key, crucial, and important.
Last but not least, the real gamechanger strategy when you’re building and growing in a small community is going to be what I call local network marketing. And if any of the salons in my area want to reach out and talk to me about this, I think this is an area where a lot of the salons are not putting enough effort.
What I’ve noticed is in this area, there’s a couple of stylists out of the 40 that are here, there’s maybe two names I hear tossed around quite a bit. What I’ve noticed is they both specialize and there’s a certain segment of the community who likes this one stylist and there’s a certain segment that likes this other stylist.
I think because they’ve specialized, it’s huge. One of these stylists has done a really good job networking with the high school kids. If I can be totally honest and I’ve watched how that’s really grown her business, because all the high school kids want to see her. And then who else does she attract? Their families. So there’s a lot of people who go to the high school and now their parents also see her too, so she’s built a really nice clientele because of that.
When I was building my clientele, my story was very similar. If you’ve heard me tell it before I thought my target market was 21 to 25 year-old young women. It wasn’t; it was their mothers at the end of the day. But by getting my foot in the door with that younger market, I attracted the dream client clientele that I was really looking for.
It looks like this stylist has done something very, very similar. She doubled down on one specific niche and then continued to grow and get referrals from there. She was able to pull that off because of the way she networks.
So when we look at local network marketing, I want to share some of the ideas and you guys are going to want to laugh at them. But what you have to understand is that networking in a small community is very different then networking in a major city.
Out here, we have one major local event a year, and then a couple of much smaller ones as well. If it were me and I had a salon, I would pay top dollar to rent a booth at that event and I would be doing something cool. I don’t know what it is off the top of my head. We could talk about that in another episode. (Something I’ve talked about in Thrivers Society is different things you can do at live events that aren’t cheesy as a hair stylist). You can do something like that. I would want my name and face everywhere. If you go anywhere in town, I want you to think of me in my salon. Like I’m going to drown the town in the fact that my salon is the place to be. Local events are a really huge place to do that.
We have in our tiny community parades and we love parades around here. We do a few parades a year for all kinds of things, and I watch some businesses — it’s wild to see. There was a company of realtors. You should’ve seen them walking down the street in the parade. You would’ve thought it was Mickey and Minnie Mouse. I mean, people were losing their mind and it was because this group of realtors has done such a great job of networking within the community that they’ve almost become pseudo celebrities, right?
If you’re in a small community, you know what I’m talking about. The idea of –I don’t even want to use the word famous, but, but gaining recognition in a small community. You can be a huge hero realtor and you can be a hero hairstylist or a hero hair salon.
Participating in things like this and just getting your name and face out there and creating memorable touch points and memorable conversations is huge.
Imagine if your town did a Halloween parade and everybody in your salon dressed up characters from the movie Grease, and somebody was carrying a boom box and the music was playing and you guys were all doing a funny dance. The local paper got a picture of it and the whole next week people were like, “Oh my gosh, did you see Britt Seva salon? How cute it was when they were doing blah-blah-blah?” The viral marketing in that is unbelievable.
Then someone’s like, “Oh my gosh, Britt Seva salon,” and then they Google you, and the beautiful website I told you to build is flawless and people like, “Why am I driving an hour to see somebody out of town when Britt Seva salon is right here?” Can you see the power of doing that silly grease lightening parade spot and what it can do to boost your business?
If you’re in a small community, getting out there in front of the people is crucial. Networking with the local schools, teachers, students, whatever you need to do, networking within those micro-communities is very powerful. And then giving back to all the shops in the community.
If you’re in Thrivers society, you know I have two really powerful local network marketing strategies for getting involved with other local businesses without saying, you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.
I’m not suggesting that, but really building effective relationships within the community so when someone says hair stylist, you’re the first thing that comes to mind.
Market domination is huge in local communities and the cool thing is there’s a lot of ways to do it without upsetting the other stylists or salon owners. There’s ways to do it and stay inclusive.
But if there’s one thing you take away from this episode, don’t minimize the business you’re building. Give it the respect it deserves. Build it as if you were competing with the big dogs in the most complex, crowded city in the country and it’s going to really change the way you look at building and growing your business.
For you fellow small town livers, I hope this has been a really inspirational episode for you. I look forward to bringing you more goodness in the weeks to come. You guys so much love, happy, happy business building, and I’ll see you on the next one.
