Today, on Sunday 13 September, until 4 p.m. we are sitting in the main hall of the Warsaw EXPO XXI Centre and reviewing beauty salon marketing free of charge. The organiser of the Beauty Forum & Hair trade fair invited Vreego to the Free Consultation Zone as a marketing expert. If you are at the fair today, come over - no appointment needed.
What the consultation zone is
The Free Consultation Zone is the part of the fair where a salon owner walks up to a specialist with one specific question and leaves with an answer. There is no appointment and no fee. The conversation does not end with a sales pitch either - if someone wants to work with us, they get in touch after the fair.
Every expert in the zone covers a different field - law in cosmetology, permanent make-up, salon management. Vreego covers marketing for the beauty industry: Google and Meta ads, websites, online booking and reviews on the Google Business Profile. The consultations are run by Emil Wagner, owner of Vreego, who has spent ten years running Google and Meta campaigns and building websites and online shops for service businesses.
The fair itself fills four halls and over 750 companies exhibit there. Over two days, salon owners from all over Poland walk through.
How we prepared for these conversations
The invitation came in July. We could have sat down with nothing but our experience from client work, but experience has one weakness: it rests on the dozen or so companies you happen to know, and it is easy to mistake them for the whole market.
So a week before the fair we ran our own study. We reviewed the marketing of 100 beauty salons from Warsaw and from smaller towns, each one against the same 0-100 scoring rubric. The rubric covers six things: the Google Business Profile and its reviews, the website and its price list, the option to book online, the offer aimed at someone visiting the salon for the first time, what happens after the appointment, and advertising. On top of that we went through more than 300 salon ads in the public Meta Ad Library, to see how this industry actually advertises in Poland rather than how it looks in marketing guides.
The average score came out at 58.5 out of 100.
How to advertise a beauty salon - where our audit starts
A conversation about salon advertising almost always starts with the question of whether Facebook or Google works better. We start with three things you need to have in place first. Without them, advertising sends women to a place where they have no way to book.
The first one is your Google Business Profile. Before choosing a local business, 68% of Poles read the reviews. If your profile has a dozen or so reviews and the salon next door has two hundred, some women will pick that salon before they ever open your website. Left to themselves, one client in fourteen writes a review. Asked directly at the till - the large majority do. That means the number of reviews grows if someone in the salon simply asks for one after every appointment. It costs nothing, and it concerns people who have already been to you.
The second one is the option to book online. In our study, 5 salons out of 100 had their own booking calendar on the website. Meanwhile, one booking in four is made while the salon is closed - in the evening or on a Sunday. If the only way to book is to phone during opening hours, those appointments simply never happen: at the moment the client was ready to book, she had no way to do it.
The third one is an offer for someone visiting you for the first time. Thirty salons out of 100 have one. It means one specific thing addressed to a new client - a free consultation, a skin analysis included with the treatment, one selected treatment at a lower price to start with. In the remaining salons, a new visitor lands straight on a price list with dozens of entries, does not know where to start, and leaves the website.
Only once these three things are in place is it worth paying for ads. Then the person who clicks your ad lands on a page with an offer meant for her and can book an appointment right away. Before that, you are paying for clicks from people who have no way to book anyway.
What a single consultation looks like
One consultation takes fifteen minutes. We start with four questions: how many reviews your Google Business Profile has and when the last one came in, whether a client can book herself outside your opening hours, how many new clients come back for a second appointment, and what they receive after leaving the salon.
Based on the answers and a quick look at the website and the profile, we arrive at a score on the same 0-100 scale we used for the hundred salons. Each person leaves with a card listing three things to do over the next month, set in order - starting with the one that gives the most for the least effort.
More often than not, that first thing is something the owner does herself within a week - she starts asking clients for reviews, or adds a single offer for new clients to the website. It costs nothing and it does not require an agency.
Not at the fair today?
We run the same free audit outside the fair as well. We check the Google Business Profile, the website, the way clients book and what happens after an appointment, and you end up with a score on a 0-100 scale and three things to do, in order.
Book a free consultation: vreego.com/en/beauty
Emil Wagner, owner of Vreego
phone +48 577 922 575, emil@vreego.com
