Building up your brand can be a thrilling, exciting, terrifying, and sometimes downright overwhelming experience. It’s when you decide not only what your business cards and website will look like, what kind of clients you want, but who you are as a stylist.
But here’s the problem: many stylists feel like if they create a logo or pick out a few pretty colors, that’s enough. That’s a brand.
Sorry, love, but that’s not it at all.
And it’s not you, as a person. So many stylists think that they as a person are their brand.
Not quite.
Your brand is how you showcase your business and how you appeal to your target market. So if you personally love to party on the weekends, but your bread-and-butter clients are 45-year-old soccer moms, you’re totally turning off your ideal clients when you post photos of your weekend adventures.
You can have a fun, party lifestyle but have a different brand behind the chair as a stylist.
At the end of the day, a brand is the emotional connection we build with our clients. It’s the way they feel about us before they step foot in the salon. Meaning, it’s difficult to build your business out successfully until you’ve decided who you are as a stylist and what your brand is.
Today, we’re diving into three quick tips to start a cohesive and unique brand for you.
Tip #1: Build a brand you can evolve in
Chances are, your business will change during your time in the industry. And the moment you think, “Man, I’ve got a good thing going,” it’s the kiss of death.
Think about how big consumer brands like Toys’R’Us and Sears have collapsed in the last year or ones like Barnes and Noble are projected to close in the next. There’s one simple reason these brands are in trouble: they didn’t evolve.
They found success, got comfortable, and decided to cruise. The problem with that is there is always going to be someone coming up behind you; someone younger, better, smarter, so you need to constantly evolve too.
If you stop evolving as a stylist, your clients will go to someone who hasn’t. They want to see someone who’s staying up with the times, who knows the latest trends like the back of their hand. So you need to build a brand that you can grow into.
Consider your specialty and really dig deep into it. Always be on lookout for ways to grow, whether it’s through classes, training, master classes, opportunities to shadow a senior stylist, whatever.
If you are not driving your evolution, it will drive right by you.
Tip #2: Be cohesive
If you’re using multiple filters on social media, colors on your website, even mismatching your business card to your services menus, you are driving clients away.
I totally understand it. It’s so easy to see a beautiful color and add it onto your website for a bit of pop, or order a new business card style you love, even if it doesn’t match your logo.
But using so many different branding elements – differing logos, colors, fonts, whatever – looks unprofessional and can confuse potential clients. They aren’t sure if they landed on your Instagram page or someone who just happens to have the same name as you. They aren’t sure if they want to trust you with their highlights if you have so many different colors bombarding them on your site.
Pick one or two main colors and two to three accent colors as your base color palette. Decide on which social media filters best complement those colors and use them consistently on your social media. Make your business cards, website, printed materials in those colors to look like the ultimate professional stylist you are.
Tip #3: Separate your social accounts
There are so many questions about whether stylists should have business social media accounts or not, so let’s get right to it: since you are not your brand, you should absolutely have a business social media account just for your business.
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t share anything about yourself. Definitely, allow your followers to get to know you as a stylist, but the weekend party pictures and the video of your cat chasing its tail belong on your personal profiles.
Instead, think of your business accounts as an introduction to you as a stylist. Focus on photos and captions that will attract and retain your target market.
Just showing up and doing pretty hair isn’t going to do it. 90% of the industry is already doing that, so if you plan to have a long-term sustainable career, you have to have a wow factor. Somebody has to stumble across your Instagram, Facebook or website and want to dig deeper because you’re doing things differently. Great hair is really easy to come by these days. An exceptional stylist who presents themselves and their brand differently is the X-factor.
Want to dig more into how your brand helps get client into your chair? Click here to listen into how brand works hand-in-hand with the hair stylist marketing funnel!
