The 5 Pillars of a Solid Internet Marketing System for Tanning Salons

A robust Internet marketing system can serve as a fruitful investment for any local business. As potential customers search for salons in your area, showing up at the top of the list and backing it up with a well-designed, informative website is essential. An active web marketing system can include:

• Online Review Addition
• Mobile Website
• Email Marketing
• Pay Per Click Marketing
• Facebook Ads

Starting with a solid foundation will amplify the effects of everything else you do. These five steps give you the biggest return on investment compared with anything else you can do regarding marketing.

Pillar #1 – National Data Aggregators

These three companies try to keep data about businesses (Name, Address, Category and any other pieces of information they can get) in order to sell to other businesses for purposes such as prospecting and mass mailings. They also sell this information to other websites and online directories.

Claiming your listing, confirming accurate data and completing all available fields elevates the chances that data is propagated throughout the web in a correct consistent manner. Search engines like Google consider consistent data about business in a variety of places signals a quality business.

• Localeaze
• Axciom
• InfoUSA

Pillar #2 – Google+ Page

A company’s Google+ page is essentially its listing on Google’s business directory. As far as Google ranking goes, a company’s Google+ page could be more important than its website. Oftentimes an unclaimed Google+ page ranks higher than the same company’s website. Therefore, the Google+ page will get more visits than the website. Google seems to constantly change the degree to which the Plus page effects the overall ranking of a company and how the results are displayed together (the Plus page can be blended with the website in the same listing). But its high importance remains constant.
Go here, log in or create an account, and then go through the steps to claim your page. The develop it as fully as possible, adding:

• Name – Your official name
• Phone number
• Address
• Business Category – Extremely important to use the one that most closely defines your business. Include up to 5 categories if you have spray tanning, teeth whitening, etc.
• Website – make sure you link it to your website
• Images

Pillar #3 – Home Page Title Tag

Every page of a website has a “Title Tag” in the code of the site that is not visible on the actual page. It performs two major functions, it tells search engines what the page is about and serves as the text seen in the search results page after someone types in keywords. The home page title tag in particular is the most important one because it usually has the most power compared to any other page on a site so the words on that page signal what the whole site is about.
The image to the right shows the home page title tag of this website, www.prosun.com. As you can see, we tried to summarize what ProSun sells using as many appropriate keywords as possible so we can rank highly for them. And since the title tag also shows up in the search results so it also serves as our ad that needs to be compelling and make sense to invite a click.

The home page title tag is usually very easy for someone to change if access is available to the back end of your site. Keep things in mind when creating it:

• Include keywords for your main services.
• Include the city or cities you service.
• Limit to 60 characters.
• Enter one for all pages of your website if possible

Pillar #4 – Facebook

Claim, develop and monitor your facebook page. Even if you don’t use or like facebook, your page probably exists and visitors are using it to communicate with or about you. You need to at least control as much as possible and represent your company as well as possible. Claim it from your personal facebook profile and confirm all the information is accurate. Upload your logo and a cover photo.

Pillar #5 – Create a Plan for Online Reputation Management

Positive comments about your business will hopefully pervade throughout the web on many sites. Customers can leave reviews about you on Yelp or Foursquare or they could talk about you with their friends on facebook or Twitter. Your reputation as a result of this can affect both your rankings on search engines and your success in converting prospect to customers. Influence your online reputation by:

• Proactively obtain reviews. Ask your customers to leave reviews for you. Enable them by giving them links to the review sites in an email or using a QR code poster in your store.
• Check the web for reviews on a periodic basis. If you have your profile claimed and developed, many of the more robust (and therefore important) review sites will let you respond. Keep your responses positive.

ProSun Starter Kit

ProSun offers extensive consultation service for new salons and current customers and potential customers (which is everyone). We give a FREE internet marketing analysis to any salon owner regarding how well your salon follows these core recommendations and guide you through the process. Call 800-874-2776.