But what do you do this year?
Kate Woods of Salondipity.co.uk believes it’s more important to have some festive fun to make your clients feel valued and rewarded. Here are her top ideas for making your Christmas ‘do work in a Zoom era.
1. Decide whether your event will be paid for or free of charge
If you want to make it a paid-for event, you need to make sure that they get the value back in the goodie bag, (which I recommend you pre-deliver on the day) and also the experience. No one wants to pay to be sold to for an evening.
Some great ideas to include in your goodie bag are: a mini bottle of fizz, a face-mask they can wear during the event, product samples, a refer a friend card and a 2021 gift card. Tickets could also include entry to a prize draw at the end of your event.
If you decide to charge for your Christmas event, Eventbrite – https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/ – is a great free tool for your ticketing.
2. Come up with a plan for what type of event you’re going to host
These are four of my festive favourites:
Christmas Shopping Event/Showcase
This is the online spin on your seasonal showcase. To make it a bigger draw for your clients, it’s more appealing to showcase a skill that they can actually learn from, so that means a make-up tutorial or a styling skill. You can still focus on something super glam for party season, but in keeping with the year it might be fun to include some low-key and relaxed, but on point Zoom-friendly looks too. How about getting team members to teach one skill each that showcases their talents. Don’t forget to set aside time to talk about your Christmas gift sets too.
A Product Panel Party
Pick your top VIP clients (these might be your big spenders, but they could be people who’d look great on camera or who are just super positive about everything) and ask them if they’d like to be panellists. Then send them out a selection of products to try. On the evening of the event you’ll play the host while the panel give their honest feedback about what they’ve used.
This is a brilliant strategy because it makes your panellists feel valued and special, attendees are more likely to buy the products because they’re seeing objective reviews from people like them and you can reach a wider audience because your panellists friends and families will tune in too.
A virtual Christmas market
Rather like the Christmas showcase, but team up with some other local businesses too, so you can each showcase one thing, that could be hair and beauty, table laying, wreath-making, gift-wrapping.
This is a great way of tapping into the #shoplocal sentiment and building a supportive network with like-minded local businesses. It’s got the added bonus that you can increase awareness by marketing to all the businesses’ clients.
Your Salon’s Got Talent!
If we ever needed some festive fun, it’s right now. So, a talent show really fits the bill, especially if you’ve got some big personalities (and better still big voices) in your team. For bigger teams, you could step this up a notch and have a ‘judging panel’ giving their Cowell-esque critiques.
3.Be sure to shout about your event
The success of your event is all down to how well you market it. Put it on your website, send an email out to your mailing list, use your social media channels to raise awareness and tap into any other organisations that can help you (I think school PTA’s are an under-used resource). Chat to other local businesses – could they include something in your goody bags, in exchange for promoting it to their client-base?
4.Be prepared
Hosting a Zoom event is a little different to hosting a face-to-face event, but don’t let that put you off. Make sure you pay for a monthly subscription, that’ll let you speak for longer than the free 40 minutes – https://zoom.us/buy?plan=pro&period=annual&from=pro (don’t forget to cancel it afterwards!). I’d also recommend you do a small practice with friends or members of the team, just to make sure it looks good and people can hear you.
5.Have fun!
A Christmas event should be about getting people together for a giggle, so be sure to host something that’s a bit of a fun festive escape from 2020.
You can find out more about Kate and her free resources for salon marketing here: https://salondipity.co.uk/salon-marketing-resources/
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