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 and welcome back to the Thriving Stylist Podcast. I’m your host, Britt Seva. Oh my gosh, you’re going to peek inside my brain. You get to see how dorky I am right at the top of this episode.
You know what just crossed my mind as soon as I said, “I’m your host, Britt Seva.” Do you ever get a flash of a memory? My very first job straight out of high school was working as a main dining room host at the Ritz Carlton Hotel Company in Half Moon Bay, California. The property opened as I was graduating high school and I mean a ton of kids from my school got hired there. We were high school kids running a hotel. It was so bonkers looking back. But my first role there was as a main dining room host, and I got really close with so many people on the restaurant team, and I worked my way up to be head host and everybody called me hostess with the mostest. You love it.
So I’m going to go ahead and say I’m your hostess with the mostest, Britt Seva, and I’m really excited to be here with you this week, diving in deeper to our marketing funnel.
I started talking about the marketing funnel here on the podcast about two weeks ago. This is my trademarked marketing funnel that I’ve been coaching to since 2012. Over a decade now, when I realized that this was a repeatable system that I could use to coach stylists and salons to massive success, not even just a little bit of success, massive success, if they could really deeply understand all of these components. Not understand them at a surface level or “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I get it,” but deeply understand how to maximize each of the four levels of the marketing funnel in full.
We already covered Opportunity about two weeks ago. We covered Desire last week on the podcast, and now we’re talking about building interest in social media.
Now, the irony of this level of the marketing funnel—which is level three if you’re going from the bottom up—is that this is where we spend 80% of our marketing time. 80% of our marketing time is on social media and building interest in our brand. Y’all, no. It’s only 25% of the marketing funnel, so why would we spend 80% of our efforts on 25% of the puzzle? It doesn’t make any sense at all.
Usually why that happens is because your efforts are misaligned and you’re working too hard on social media, like the tools working against you, not for you. I’m hoping to overcome some of those challenges here today.
Now I’m recording this podcast episode not long after teaching an in-person workshop at a salon in San Diego, California, and one of the things we talked about with social media. It’s funny because as I talked about it, you could almost feel like a heaviness fill the air in the space. We talked about the words to describe social media and “exhausting” was that one of the big ones right on the tip of everybody’s tongue because I think that most of us have found social media to be exhausting at one point or another, or currently today.
I dug in deep and I said, “Why?” A lot of them said, “It feels almost like a job, like this obligation that we have to keep showing up and sharing more and keeping up. And platforms are always changing and be creative and your pictures aren’t good enough.” It just feels like this recurring message of not enough, not enough, not enough.
We have spent the last decade living in, for lack of a better word, influencer culture, where we’ve almost been conditioned to think that the way to become successful is to be more, bigger, be flashier, get more followers. If you have 10,000 followers, 50,000 followers, a hundred thousand followers, then everything’s going to come together.
Well now, in 2022, at the time of this recording, the influencer culture is crashing fast. I mean, you’ve seen influencers talk publicly about how they’re losing brand deals left and right, and how that’s no longer a way to make money. Because a lot of these brands realize that just because somebody has a lot of followers doesn’t mean that those followers are actually buyers.
When I coach to social media, I coach to actually getting more of your followers to become actual clients. I talk about instead of being popular, being profitable. You can have 300 followers and be making more money than somebody with 30,000 so long as you were showing up the right way on the platform and the channel. That’s what I coach to and where I want to focus.
This episode, I want to talk about where you need to be, why you need to be there, and how to best show up on social as it stands today.
The reason why I call this episode Building Interest & Social Media is I refer to this level of the marketing funnel as the Interest level. I believe that people show up on this level when they are interested in you. If somebody chooses to follow you on any social media platform, they’re not convinced you are their person by any means. They’re simply interested. There’s a curiosity there. It is your job to get them from interested to desiring services with you, and then from desiring services with you to taking the opportunity to come in and work with you. That’s your job.
So many of us are spending a lot of time spinning our wheels creating social media content, thinking that if we just make enough content, we’re going to win the game. That is not the recipe at all.
Think about it this way. How many of you have more followers than clients? I mean, literally everybody should raise their hand. When I look at the Instagram—let’s just talk about Instagram specifically for a second, and then we’re going to go broader. When we’re looking at Instagram, I spend a lot of time looking at other people’s profiles, accounts, followers, followings, all the things. I’m analyzing the platform all the time, and I look at a lot of people’s followings, and it takes me about 2.5 seconds to see if somebody’s bought followers. If you haven’t figured out how to do that yet, it’s not that hard. Just go ahead and look at who’s following who, and it becomes very transparent, very easy to see who’s bought a following.
Anyway, when I find somebody who has not bought a following and has a few thousand followers, in our industry, almost always, they are predominantly followed by fellow stylists. That’s not a bad thing, but that should tell you it’s not a reflection of how much money they’re making as a stylist at all. It’s certainly a reflection of how much influence they have, how popular they are, but that doesn’t always translate to profitability, right?
Now for me at the time of this recording, I have something like 60,000 plus Instagram followers. I don’t have 60,000 plus Thriver Society members. We had 1% of that attend Thrivers Live this year. So when you look at how do I maximize what is happening on the Interest level of my marketing funnel, a.k.a., social media, it’s about how do I get more of the people who are following me to take action and choose to invest in my brand, in my business, and in my offerings. That becomes the question.
What exactly lives on this Interest level and where should you be spending your time? Anything social media related lives on the Interest level. That would be the obvious, Instagram, the second most obvious, TikTok. Then we have Facebook, we have Pinterest, we have Google Business, and Yelp.
Review sites are most definitely social media platforms. When you look at social media, by definition it is anywhere digital conversations are happening about a person, place, or business. Online review sites, without a doubt, fall into that category. It’s like Web 2.0. I had a podcast a couple weeks ago about Web 3.0. Web 1.0 is very traditional internet. Web 2.0 is defined as user-generated content. So Web 2.0 is essentially all social media and if somebody goes on Instagram, they can comment and say whatever they want on your posts. If they go on Yelp or Instagram or a Yelp or Google business, they can say whatever the heck they want about their experience working with your business. Same with your Facebook page, same with your TikTok. Anybody can do whatever they want on any of those platforms.
When you look at something like TikTok and we say, “Oh, well TikTok is not as risky as Yelp,” Yelp gets that reputation for being a super risky platform. We’ll talk about that in a moment. Somebody can create a slanderous video about you on TikTok and maybe have even more impact than a bad Yelp review would.
Literally any of these platforms would be considered Interest level. It’s anywhere an online conversation is happening about you as a small business owner. So the Nextdoor app, LinkedIn, Pinterest if I didn’t already say it, all of those things would be considered Interest level components.
There’s no shortage of places that you can be focusing your time, energy, and effort as a stylist or salon owner. But I want to talk about what I call the Core Four. So there’s four that I believe are so critical when it comes to building business today. Those Core Four are going to be Instagram, obviously, Facebook, Google Business, and Yelp.
Any surprises there as I list the Core Four? Notice that TikTok didn’t make it, YouTube didn’t make it, Pinterest didn’t make it, and I want to talk a bit about why.
So how did I choose the Core Four and why do I think they’re the most important? These are the Interest level platforms or the social media platforms where people tend to find the most service-based businesses. I’ve been sucked into buying stuff off Amazon and TikTok too. TikTok made me do it. Yeah, I’m totally like a victim of that process. 110%. I’ve bought stuff off YouTube, I’ve bought stuff off Pinterest. I’m not saying those sites aren’t generating sales. What I’m saying is none of them are optimized for local small business yet.
Now I know that I’ve seen some people blow up specifically on TikTok as stylists or salon owners, but I always ask myself if they put that effort into focusing their time, energy, and attention on a platform more focused on growing local small business, would they have gotten two times the result? That’s always the question we have to ask ourselves. Are you getting great results or are you getting phenomenal killer results?
That’s the trade off. Maybe we’ll never know the answer, but going viral on TikTok is not even close to the same as getting 300 Google business reviews in an industry like ours. When I think about biggest bang for the buck, the Core Four are still going to win.
Now there’s caveats to that. If you’re in something like the destination wedding business, I could for sure make an argument that Pinterest might be great for you. I could make an argument that like Wedding Wire or whatever the popular wedding promotion sites are right now might be a better fit. But even so, if somebody finds you on Pinterest for their incredible destination Maui wedding, they’re still going to want to look at your social media, your Instagram, they’re going to want to see reviews somewhere. Having them on your website is good, but it’s too low in the funnel to gain the interest that we need. That’s why we want to have those reviews a bit higher in the funnel than having them on your booking site or having them on your website.
For those of you who have a booking page, like an online booking page that your clients can book appointments with, one of the features that online booking page touts is we collect reviews for you. That’s great. Having reviews on your online booking page means they’re located in the completely wrong place of your funnel. Completely wrong.
What I would do is I would turn those reviews into Interest level content. I’d be sharing them on Facebook, I’d be sharing them on Instagram, I’d be turning them into graphics because that’s where they need to be to be impactful, and that’s why this funnel matters.
Just having all the right pieces isn’t going to work. The pieces have to fit together properly. When you buy a 500 piece jigsaw puzzle at Target, the puzzle is worthless until you put it together properly. It’s just a jumbled mess that you paid 20 bucks for. You have to put the puzzle together perfectly to see the full picture and the marketing funnel’s the same.
Let’s talk about how to use the Core Four and why they matter. Let’s start with Instagram ’cause I think that’s the one that everybody’s most excited about. Why do we love Instagram? Oh, I shouldn’t even say it that way ’cause some of you are like, “I don’t love Instagram at all.” Why in our industry is Instagram so highly prioritized? Any guesses? It’s because it’s our networking channel, if I’m being candid. It’s where hair stylists hang out. If you want to find out who’s a trending educator, if you want to see what the hair color brand you love is up to, Instagram is the place where hair stylists are hanging out.
Hanging out with our peers and those we admire is something that industry professionals do across all trades. Our industry just happens to be there. Not all trades are. A lot of trades are on LinkedIn instead, some are predominantly on YouTube. Ours just happens to be on Instagram. In our mind, we’re like, “I’ve got to be all over Instagram. This is where the people are.” No, no, it’s where your industry is.
Instagram as a platform is actually losing traction. It’s starting to stabilize and may at some point shrink. We’ll have to see. There’s still a growing amount of users on the platform, but how often they’re accessing the platform is declining and burnout is fairly normal. You’ve probably experienced it yourself.
Your clients might be there, your target market clientele might be on Instagram, but I wouldn’t put all my eggs in that basket. It’s going through a bit of an identity crisis. There’s a lot of changes coming to the platform.
For example there’s a lot of rumors that hashtags won’t stick around for very long. I have actually been a little bit of the anti-hashtag lady for the last four years, so losing hashtags to me is six and one half dozen of the other. They kind of lost their search power probably in 2018, 2019 we really started to see it wane. What used to be a really cool search engine optimization tool is really floundered and they’re adding in things like tags that you can use for reels and things like that. But it’s too soon to say if that’s actually going to pay off.
So when you’re showing up on Instagram, content that’s working today is varied content. I always say that content on Instagram should educate, inspire, or entertain, never inform. If I’m to look at your Instagram and it just looks like I do good hair, I do good hair, I do good hair, we’re missing the mark. The perceived value on that is very low. It’s hard for me to understand who you are, why I should continue being interested, why you’re any better or any different than anybody else.
Let me ask you this. How many of you do good hair? As I ask that question, probably 85% of hands went up and for the 15% of you who did not raise their hand, come on, you need to keep hanging out with me ’cause let’s build the confidence. But most of you do exceptionally great hair.
When a client is looking for a stylist, it’s easy to find good hair. They’re looking for something deeper on Instagram, so you need to show more and good hair, good hair, good hair, good hair, good hair, photo of yourself, good hair, good, good, good, good, photo of your salon is just not going to do it.
When we’re using Instagram, we need to think of it as a deeper tool that we can educate, entertain, and inspire with. It should be creating a feeling. When somebody’s following you on Instagram, they’re simply interested. They’re not sold on you.
Now let’s talk about the difference between posts and stories. Stories are for your existing clientele. Posts are for new clients considering your business. I’ll say it again. Stories are for your existing clientele. Posts are for those considering your business.
I want you to think about the content you share in that context. If you want to show a great picture of you and your family, that might be a really good thing for stories because your existing clients want to see that. They’re curious about, they’re interested about, they love your dog, Fido. They think he’s adorable. They’d love to see him more.
As a new client considering having services with you for the first time, I don’t know Fido. I’m sure he’s lovely. I don’t care to see him on your grid. I want to get an energy about who you are, what you do, how you can help me, how can you solve my problems? What makes you exceptional? Why should I choose you over somebody else? That’s what I’m looking for on Instagram.
Don’t believe me? Go back a few podcast episodes and listen to my episode about why two clients left a stylist and/or chose not to see one. It’s all the things I’m sharing with you right here. So I’m not making this up. This is truly what clients are thinking, so we want to be showing up on stories and our feed differently.
Okay, so Instagram matters. Yes you’re mostly going to hit clients between the ages of about 25, 26 to probably up to 40. The platforms actually sway older and it’s interesting the younger generations are not hopping on as quickly as they would like.
Depending on who you’re serving, your market might slowly be shifting, so it’s something to think about. Definitely a platform I still want you to be on, but it’s not the end all be all.
Let’s talk about Facebook. I know Facebook feels like the grandfather of social media. It’s interesting, a lot of marketing coaches are saying Facebook is having a revival because so many businesses pump the breaks on their Facebook efforts, yet Facebook is still growing and people spend more time on Facebook daily than on Instagram when you look at the span of all the generations.
The other thing is too, is think about how you use Instagram. Usually we go on Instagram to waste time and usually it’s to be entertained or inspired, which is why I say to post content that’s entertaining and inspiring or educational. I learn a lot on Instagram just like I do with TikTok. With Facebook, it’s different. Facebook, we’re looking to connect with friends and family.
If somebody gives you a shout out on Facebook saying that you’re an incredible small business that somebody should visit, the traction there is huge. Facebook groups are still powerful and always wherever we’re doing business in marketing, we want to find the gap. Instagram is a really crowded marketplace. Facebook is still fairly wide open and people are looking and listening and sharing small business recommendations. You want to be a part of the conversation.
It’s also a really easy platform in comparison to Instagram, so I would still be there.
Now let’s talk about Yelp and Google Business. First of all, an active profile on Yelp and Google Business helps with your SEO, so if you want to show up in local search results, for example, if I’m searching for best salon in Memphis, Tennessee, having more Google and Yelp reviews will help with that SEO that pushes your website up higher. SEO used to be based on things like keyword stuffing and metatags.
Search engine optimization and searchability now ranks very deeply on reviews. Why? Because Google knows that reviews don’t lie. You can say that Yelp reviewers are liars. I’ll get to that in a second, but it is what the public says about you and so they feel like allowing online reviews to actually be the dictator of what small businesses are recommended is more appropriate.
If you are not leaning deeply into Yelp and Google Business, you are letting this world pass you by. What’s funny is I talk about this quite a bit. I have a daughter, she’s 19, she’s entering the industry, but I follow really deeply her patterns and habits because they’re going to be the patterns and habits of the generation coming up behind us. She’s never on Instagram, she doesn’t watch television, she does spend a lot of time on TikTok, but if she is looking for a local small business, do you know what she uses? She loves the Yelp app. We are in the San Francisco Bay Area, so definitely it’s prominent here. There’s no doubt. And she loves the Google review.
You got to know that there’s going to be Gen Z coming down the pike, and that’s how they’re finding local business. Even if you’re not looking to attract Gen Z, I think about Gen X, a lot of Gen X is not even on social media anymore, so Google Business, Yelp, Google search. I’m a millennial. I’m getting a little bit of social media fatigue. I’m using Google and Yelp more often. So really thinking about if someone is looking for a local small business, what are they looking for? The opinions of strangers weigh very deeply in our minds right now. Yours, mine, and everybody’s. The more online reviews you have, the better.
So why do we hate Yelp? We could talk about company values. There’s some questionable ones and I don’t deny that. However, what you have to understand is avoiding the platform doesn’t actually avoid the platform. Do you know that somebody can create a profile about you and write a review about you even if you’ve not created a profile for yourself? The consumers are in the driver’s seat on that.
Unfortunately, Yelp is not a dying platform. It’s actually growing. 76.75 million hits a month, and that’s 76 million people looking for small businesses. Instagram can’t say that. There’s not 76 million people turning to Instagram looking for small service-based businesses. There’s just not, and so the power there is massive.
The other reason we don’t like Yelp is they filter reviews, right, and it annoys us. Or people can write fictitious reviews and it annoys us. Y’all, every single platform is like that. Have you ever had a nasty comment on Instagram that’s just not true? Sure. If you haven’t yet, it’s just because you’re not making a big enough impact. But one day, you will if you’re lucky.
How about have you ever been frustrated with Instagram because you post and you post and you post and you post and you never break into the algorithm? It’s the same. Yelp and Google Business use an algorithm just like Instagram does, just like Facebook does, just like TikTok does. Everything on the Interest level has an algorithm. Every single thing. Likely the reason why your reviews are getting filtered is you’re not embracing the platform.
Let me ask you this. Are you getting 10 or more reviews a month? Are you commenting back on every review that gets left about you? Are you uploading photos to the platforms? If not, then of course none of your reviews are going to stick. It’s like saying, “I haven’t posted on Instagram in six months, but I posted today and it’s doing really terrible in the algorithm and I hate Instagram.” You would never say that. In your mind, you would say like, “Well, I got to build my consistency back up and then I’ll start playing better.” We give Instagram all this grace that we don’t give any other platform. You need to change your mindset on that. Those platforms are way too important to let them fall to the wayside.
Let’s talk about TikTok for just a second. It’s not one of the Core Four, but I think it needs a nod because it’s important. TikTok is actually a platform that’s also tapered off in recent months. I don’t think it’s a dying platform by any means, but it’s plateaued. We’ll see what happens from there. We had Gary Vaynerchuck come in and speak at Thrivers Live in 2021, and one of the things he actually said is what I’ve said too: it’s not optimized for local small business. He thinks that we’ll get there. He thinks it’s necessary actually for the platform to grow and continue. We’ll see if in the next six months to a year it does. I’d like to see that happen.
For now, you can use it to create educational content. You’ll likely get more stylists following you than clients. That’s okay. If clients are following you, the vast majority will likely not be local to you. It’s also okay. It still builds your clout, it still builds your credibility. The thing with TikTok that can be a downer for people is it can feel really time consuming. Any platform is time consuming when you don’t know how to use it. As you use anything more often, it starts to become easier.
The reason I call the Core Four the Core Four, it’s because I think that they are the lightest, easiest, and the ones to get the biggest bang for your buck once you know how to use them. So if you want to make the Interest level of your marketing funnel easy peasy lemon squeezy, definitely check out thrivingstylist.com. The Thriving Stylist membership is probably perfect for you. I break down all of the Core Four modules and more, and we make it effortless and easy, and we give you the formula to see massive success there without spending hours and hours on your phone every week. It just should not be that hard.
As always, if you love this episode, have any questions, leave me a rating or review on iTunes and in the comments in your rating or review, ask me a question and I’ll do my best to hit it on the podcast.
As always, so much love, happy business building, and I’ll see you on the next one.
