Four Essential Steps to Better Understand Your Hair Salon Clients

Hair stylists and hair salon owners wear multiple hats for their clients ranging from beauty consultant, career and family advisor, confidant and most important-hair expert/guru, just to name a few. However, the ultimate goal is to know your clients so well that you can anticipate their hair styling, hair maintenance requirements and beauty needs while exceeding their expectations.

Here are four ways to know your customers better and grow your business.

1. Who Are Your Best Clients
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People who utilize hair stylists, are hair involved and who frequent hair salons have hundreds of resources and tools that are immediately accessible for their hair styling needs. As a result, your clients can be less loyal and do-it-yourselfers. Social media has given your clients the power to rethink their purchase decisions and now they have many hair resources that are easily accessible that were once only available for licensed professional hair stylists. Hair clients have also become more diverse, have more expertise about hair styling options, and are product experts because digital marketing has begun to amplify niche hair communities. So, successful hair stylists who seek to remain relevant and grow their clientele and make more money must understand what clients require to keep them engaged and loyal.

Understanding your clients hair styling, hair care and beauty needs, what motivates them, who influences them and other relevant data that impacts their lifestyle is key. For example, when determining what types of services or products to offer, ask yourself as many relevant questions about your clients as possible. Do your clients like to try products? How often do your clients want a new hair cut or hairstyle? Do they have children? Are they familiar with the latest hair styling trends? What type of careers do they have? Do they own a home? Define them in multiple ways to understand their problems and address their issues.
Here are a few examples:
• A single woman from New York in her early twenties who grew up getting her hair cut and colored every six weeks now wants a style that can be maintained once every three months.
• A single mother in her mid thirties with three children, living in Chicago, who visited the salon once a week is now unemployed. The weekly salon visit was her only treat to herself and hair is the most important aspect of her style.
• A married mother of three in Richmond that is a stay-at-home parent recently got her first professional hair cut and her family income is $60,000 per year. The mother wants to keep her fresh, modern day look.

2. What Do Your Clients Care About
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Understanding your hair salon clients’ most pressing issues, problems and desires is essential to your business success. Each person in your client base has a specific want or need and are naturally receptive to consuming information that helps meet their challenges.
Clients look for hairstyles as a way to define their style, to highlight their uniqueness and compliment their beauty.
By understanding what your clients care about, you can start creating services, products and content to meet their needs. As clients begin to engage your expertise, you can develop a deeper understanding of their hair challenges and opportunities that impact their lives. With this inquiry and engagement, you also can recognize the interactions and motivations of your best clients.
Once you have this information, you can begin creating more services, content and products that attracts your ideal customer.

3. How Do Clients Perceive Your Business
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Understanding client perception is as important as knowing who your clients are. One way to measure perception is to conduct a survey to gain valuable insight and feedback. This is particularly important as it allows your business to adjust to the feedback and compensate for where it falls short.
Building and leveraging your presence online is a great way to gain valuable real-time insight of customer sentiment. If you want to see how your clients are responding to your services, products, recommendations, feedback and noise measurement can give you a warning before your sales and profits are negatively impacted. Without knowing how your clients perceive your business, you will miss complaints and wonder why customers are taking their business to your competitors or seeking other options for their hair styling and beauty needs. Unless you continuously attempt to get valuable feedback, you may never discover where you are going wrong.
Learn to you use online and offline activities to effectively communicate your story that resonates with your client base and increases your influence in your community and beyond.

4. What is the clients’ hair journey?
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How do your clients feel about their hair? Because this is not a one-size-fits all answer, you must know each client’s unique needs and desires.

Where do you fit in your clients’ hair journey? Are you an expert? A partner? A consultant? Service provider? Evaluate and assess how your clients interact with your business. How do your clients contact you? How frequently do you interact? Have you discussed goals regarding your clients’ hair, styling or beauty needs?

Are client transactions with your business seamless? Is your clients’ experience amazing every time they are in contact with your business? Will your clients refer you to friends and family? Will they write a positive review for you without you requesting it?

It is important to review your clients’ journeys at least once a year. Consider new ways and platforms to improve your client’s hair journey and decrease the resources needed to maintain your sales and marketing functions.

In closing, the lack of client understanding makes it difficult for your hair salon and hair styling business to effectively meet the needs of current and future clients. Clients are less loyal and far less trusting than they used to be and social media has given them the power to rethink their purchase decisions. So, if you don’t understand your clients how can you possibly deliver the types of experiences they desire?