Do you know your industry specs, your audience demographics, and your local salon community? Do you keep track of your customer’s opinions about your services and the beauty world at large? Do you test new products and services’ potential market performance before distributing them in your salon? Branding and marketing are a big deal in big companies, and they often involve specialized teams performing full time work to generate that kind of information. As a salon, you might not have those resources, but that doesn’t mean you’re off the hook when it comes to thinking about your brand (and the myriad of things that go into it). So here are Babe’s expert tips for tailoring your brand to your every situation, without the marketing team and advertising budget.

Know the biz. Subscribe to credible beauty magazines and email lists (like this one) for insider scoop on developments within your industry. This will be your window into the professional landscape of your business, and it’ll likely give you a good idea of where your salon and services stand within that landscape. They might even clue you in on new trends and opportunities you can seize to make your business better. It’s good to get a variety of opinions and perspectives for a well-rounded and unbiased view, and you can even provide these materials to your clients for pre-appointment reading.

Chart out your space. Once you get an in-depth understanding of the context of your business (a.k.a. know your territory), you can accurately define what your business is, where it exists in the beauty space, and how it’s different from other establishments in that space. We’re talking about your mission statement--your reason for existing as a business. If you know that hair extensions are an up-and-coming yet not-fully-mainstream salon offering (an industry insight we identified in our last blog post), you can establish your salon as a trendy boutique, a rarefied specialty salon, or even a niche within the pop beauty scene, depending on your preferences.

Know your audience. If the beauty industry is your territory and your salon identity is your address, then your audience is the people living at that address. It’s good to know some general details about your audience--their gender, average age, income level, favorite service, etc.--because your salon identity and your audience are intimately linked. When one changes, the other will change, too, so you’ll want to be able to predict and control these outcomes as much as possible.

Utilize surveys. Once you can identify the members of your audience, get acquainted with their opinions. Do they like the quality of your service? Do they think hair extensions are new and happening, or do they see them as old news? You’ll want to tailor the brand space you defined from beauty industry perspectives to the tastes of your audience--to make it palatable, if you will. Consider it a fine-tuning process, where you keep the fundamental details the same, but modify your delivery. Or, to put it a different way, keeping up with industry insights helps you moderate your brand identity, whereas keeping up with your audience’s opinions helps you determine the best way to express that identity.

Take advantage of existing resources. If you’re using Babe hair extensions in your salon, rest assured knowing that we’ve done most of the branding work for you. We provide our stylists with various marketing tools, display sets, and professional resources to keep your thumb on the pulse of Babe’s brand at all times. We also send out regular emails about Babe products and resources, so if you haven’t signed up for Babe correspondence and blog updates, please do so! Our brand is your brand, and we’re here to help you master it.

Have more branding questions? Leave them in the comments below. Also, try signing up for our Free DvD, which comes with three special reports about developing your Babe brand and business.