Attracting new spa customers can take some effort and creativity on your part. There are a lot of wonderful spas out there. How do you make those new guests choose yours?
Obviously, creating the best guest experience that you possibly can is a key piece of the puzzle. Beautiful facilities and a well trained, competent, and friendly team are also important. But once you have all that, you still need to market yourself. If nobody knows about you, they won’t come, and all those wonderful staff members will just sit there with nothing to do.
Very few spas have dedicated marketing teams, and many don’t have any marketing staff at all. Fortunately, you can still get a lot of mileage out of creative marketing ideas for your spa or wellness business.
Here are seven creative marketing ideas for attracting new spa customers:
Incentivize referrals
Referrals are the first place you should be looking for new customer acquisition. Happy customers are your best ambassadors, and if they love you they will happy to tell their friends. Sometimes people need a little nudge towards giving a referral, so make sure everyone knows these are welcome and highly encouraged. Send customer satisfaction surveys after treatments to make sure your guests are happy, and when they are, ask for a referral and offer an incentive, like an additional service, service discount, product gift, or loyalty points if you have a loyalty program.
Elevate your social media
Even if your spa is a part of a hotel or resort, and the hotel does the bulk of your marketing, you can probably still have an Instagram account for the spa. Something with a separate identity from the hotel, where you can interact with customers and potential customers. Make sure to post regularly and engage with people. An unused social media account, where your last update was a year ago, is worse than no social media account at all. Be creative with these accounts! Showcase the best of what you have to offer, your fantastic products, your charming and wonderful team members, and your beautiful facilities.
Turn your guests into micro-influencers
Offer gifts in exchange for social media posts. This is how influencer marketing works: the brand gives a gift to the “influencer” in exchange for a post on social media, and the reality is that everyone is an influencer, not just those with tens of thousands of followers. We all rely on our friends and people in our networks for recommendations – and many of us trust these people far more than we would a stranger on Instagram. Offering a small gift, like a product sample, in exchange for a post and a tag can be a small investment towards reaching networks of people you might not otherwise.
Concentrate on SEO
Do some SEO work on your website, and blog if you have one. SEO means “Search Engine Optimization” and refers to the tweaks you can make to a website to get it to rank higher in search engines. When people do a Google search, you want your page to be among the first ones they see. SEO ranking factors include keywords, social metrics, and the number of links going out of and coming into your page. SEO can be self taught. Here is an introductory article to get you started with the basics.
Stay on top of online reviews
Online reviews play a big role in how people choose a good or service, particularly when it comes to travel, hospitality, and wellness. A 2018 survey by BrightLocal found that 86% of consumers read reviews for local businesses, 57% of consumers will only use a business if it has four or more stars, and that 91% of 18-34 year old consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. But great reviews don’t just happen. Monitor what people are saying, and respond to both positive and negative reviews. Thank positive commenters for the compliments, but also graciously thank negative commenters for feedback. Never get angry or argue with a reviewer. If you feel there is something you should address, or that you have been unfairly maligned, get an email address and continue the discussion offline. Don’t argue on the public stage.
Host events
Events are a fun and great way to attract new people. Host a customer appreciation party, an event to launch a new product, or a learning event related to a product or service. No matter what type of event you choose, encourage people to bring a friend. Offer swag bags of product samples, mini massages or facials, or a wellness or skin care workshop.
Make the news
Create an attention-grabbing treatment and send out a media release about it. Gold facials, caviar body scrubs — these make headlines because they are unusual, decadent and exciting. But you don’t need to offer these wildly luxurious options to create newsworthy spa menu items. Pick a theme – like wine, candy, chocolate, mushrooms, wildflowers – and spin it out into something truly unique and exciting by building a creative and unheard of spa experience around it, maybe pairing it with a holiday or occasion. Then alert the newswires and/or the local news and media outlets.
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