If there’s only your salon in your local area then you’re
rather lucky, but I’m guessing for most of you there’s a few other salons
nearby? You may not always think of doing competitor research for any nearby
salon, however it is something that you could really find beneficial to your
business. By competitor research I don’t mean walking past all of the salons
nearby and trying not to stare too hard but getting a close enough look to pick
up some details. Well I mean, you could do that as a starting point, but
there’s a lot of better ways that you can gather your research…
Who are they?
The first port-of-call would be to find out exactly who your
competition is. The easiest way to do this would be to just do a search on
google for salons in your local area. Once you’ve got a list of all of your competitors,
you can begin collating information about them, and really start defining who
will be your direct competition and who is sort of your secondary competition.
Social Media
Nowadays most salons will use social media, especially
Facebook, and this is the perfect place to find out all of the latest news
about any of your competitors. This could be their latest deals, any new
services, reviews, photos, events, pretty much anything you need to know can be
found on there. You could draw inspiration from their posts or their services,
they might offer something you’ve never heard of so it might be a good idea to
start offering it if its something that you could provide. Perhaps you see that
they’re doing a deal on something that you also offer, you should try to match
it or even beat it to try get more customers in. The main con of social media
is that this also means that if you use social media for your salon, then I
would guess that your competitors are also looking at your page, so if you
decide to promote an offer on your social media pages then there’s a good
chance that they will see it and want to offer something similar, if not
better.
Website
Take a look at your competitors’ websites, you should be
able to find out a lot of information on here as you would be expecting them to
want to showcase their business. Not everyone will have a website, as social
media seems to be taking over, but its always good to try and find them. Look
at what they’re doing well and if there’s anything that you could take from
them to replicate on your own website or just on your social media.
Strengths &
Weaknesses
Once you’ve done your research on the website, social media
and just through google, make a list of all of the strengths and weaknesses that
your competition offer. From this you will be able to see what you could be
doing better or what you should try stay away from doing in your salon. Also think
about how you can beat their strengths to make sure you stay ahead of your competition.
The last thing you want is for one your customers or
potential customers to go to one of your competitors down the street instead of
visiting your salon! I hope you can use these tips to help collect some information
about your competitors and begin to create some sort of strategy in order to
make sure you stay ahead of the competition.
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