It's no secret that the permanent makeup industry will continue to thrive right into 2024! The permanent makeup industry is expected to reach a market worth over $4.1 billion by 2028 according to a Gitnux Market data report.
An article written by Capital Counselor recorded that the stats for the beauty and personal care industry are expected to be an astounding 716.6 billion in market size by 2025.
As an artist and entrepreneur, you’ll have to stay keen on how to ensure you receive your relative piece of the pie and keep growing your business. Make sure you're not taking an arbitrary approach to the growth of your business and be sure you have a well thought out plan to how you'll reach your financial goals.
We’ve put together a few pointers that might be a good idea to add to your 2024 project plan if you haven’t already thought to do so.
Keep Building Your Social Media Capital
Social media capital? Yes, social media capital. We define this as the potential monetary and influential value you have developed through your social connections and digital assets. So, what do we mean by building your social media capital? Is it merely continuing to follow, friend and connect with people online and sharing content? Well yes, but a little more than that. As you’re posting and connecting, think about how your content is working for you. How many people are engaging with your post? Are they commenting, resharing, tagging others or saving your content? Those are good indicators that your content provides value and can potentially translate into future sales and opportunity for you. Be sure to consistently track all those metrics by analyzing your social media dashboard. Remember it’s not just about the initial vanity metrics measured in likes and views.
Develop and Refine Your Customer Experience
As part of our new artist onboarding program, we have new team members think about a time when they received the best customer experience and explain what it was like for them. Not to sound cliché, but the old phrase treat others as you want to be treated is totally applicable when we think about designing our customer experiences. An intentional design must be thoroughly thought through because we must be intentional about what and how we want our customers to experience our environment while patronizing us.
From the moment they book an initial appointment until the time they receive their touch up service we must be thoughtful about how we facilitate the most seamless and pleasant journey for them. Don’t leave a good customer experience to chance. As you take time to develop, execute and refine this process I can guarantee you’ll see an increase in client services resulting from referrals and social recommendations.
Reward Your Word-of-Mouth Referrals
As you reap the benefits from designing a highly effective customer experience journey for your client’s you’ll need to think about how you want to reward them for taking the time to refer clients to you.
Word of mouth referrals are very powerful! If you find a way to consistently impact your clients by giving them the brows of their dreams in addition to facilitating a fantastic customer experience, then there will be no need to spend money on social media ads. Your client’s will take care of that for you and be your very own marketing and advertising firm.
Have you ever noticed the local restaurant or coffee shop that consistently has the line out the door of people waiting to get in? When did they ever advertise or promote their services? They in most cases probably didn’t have to. That’s because their service along with their exceptional food caused their customers to do their advertising for them. Now although your satisfied clients will happily be the walking billboard and online publisher, it’s still a good idea to reward them for their efforts at your own discretion.
Rewarding a few of your top referring customers with a discount or a gift card that credits them for future services can go a long way to make them feel appreciated. In some cases, some companies go as far as developing affiliate programs that provide cash incentives to their customers and brand advocates who consistently bring them business. Just food for thought!
Set Expectation with Your Clients
This point blends into our earlier point about designing customer experiences. Setting client expectations is crucial to the success of your service business. Your clients must be aware and understand upfront all your service policies. The more you can eliminate any confusion and uncertainty the better.
Having a clear website with a list of your services, pricing and policies is key to establishing parameters and expectations as well as a client consent form. And though we are in the age of automation and digitization never underestimate nor cast away the method of a good ole old school phone conversations to ensure they are ready and prepared for service. Lastly, following frameworks like the MARSS example can be good practice while interacting and planning for your client services.
See the definition of the MARSS acronym below.
Meet the client where they are by actively seeking to understand what it is they are needing or wanting from you.
Assess if what they are requesting of you is something you can provide them.
Respond back to the client with empathy
Set the Expectations by letting the client know what you can or cannot provide to them.
Seal the deal with a summary document or some form of evidence that shows mutual consent or understanding.
Hopefully these tips for how you can grow your permanent makeup business have sparked some ideas for you to try. In summary, if you’re really looking to grow this year you must continue to build your social media capital by analyzing your best performing content and creating more of it, while building connections.
You must develop and refine your customer journey to ensure they have the best experiences. As you create great experiences find ways to reward your most loyal customers so that you generate more buzz through client referrals. And lastly you must set the right expectations with your clients so that your services are seamless as possible which can translate into great experiences.
For more education on how to build and grow your PMU business check out our MBL Brow Bosses coaching and mentoring membership group.