Local Marketing: Instagram Outreach Paired With Social Media Ads

As a Franchise Concept, the salon company provides training to local managers on marketing tactics, but each location is ultimately responsible for their own marketing efforts. After examining Occupancy reports for our 400+ locations we selected 6 struggling markets that could benefit from additional marketing support from the home office and implemented a new local marketing technique.

In this campaign, we required the franchisees continue to produce direct mail and other marketing efforts while we aided in digital marketing efforts.

Marketing efforts included: 

• • 4-10 hours of targeted Instagram engagement, in which a team of interns identified potential leads on Instagram (based on location, occupation, age, content shared on social media etc.) and liked and commented on their social content.
  • Instagram story ads dropped in the same markets where we were performing Instagram engagement. 
  • Call to Action Facebook and Instagram Ads, which drove traffic to the regional or specific location pages:

• Awareness Facebook Ads, which lead users to blog posts that further explain the benefits of Salon Studio ownership compared to traditional salon models. 
• See the blog post: “What’s a Salon Studio Anyway?“

• See the blog post: “Way more Freedom: 8 Reason for Going Sola“

 

Results: 

After a four-month period, we noticed.

• A 30% increase in leads for our struggling markets.
• A 60% increase in website traffic to location pages.
• 4k new Instagram followers and a shift in “Top Locations” of our followers to reflect two of our target markets.

Why it was Effective:  

I narrowed in on a very specific location for these Instagram and Facebook ads to mirror what my team of interns was doing, drilling down to within an 8-10 mile radius of our struggling locations. I used interest-based targeting to reach beauty professionals who lived and worked in these areas. I wanted to ensure that the people with whom we were engaging on Instagram were also seeing targeted ads that describe “The Sola difference”. With an integrated marketing approach, I try to target the same individual with a similar branded message on multiple channels. When done well, this method often makes a customer believe that their purchasing decision was fate and not a well-thought-out marketing strategy.