The beauty industry is a lucrative sector to become involved in from an entrepreneur’s perspective. Women in the UK spend approximately £70,000 on their appearance in their lifetime, according to a report by Groupon, and that’s a lot of cash that could be yours if you implement an effective marketing strategy to capture this custom.
But how do you get ahead of the competition and show your target consumer why they should invest in your products and services? With print marketing, you have plenty of options to boost brand awareness and advertise your company — but here, we’re going to explore the advantages of leaflets. Cost-effective and simple to design, there are lots of ways this form of print marketing could boost clientele numbers and overall profits for your beauty business…
Keep your brand firmly in your target consumer’s mind
Recall is essential in business — if your customer doesn’t think of your brand when they need a service or product that you offer, you’re in trouble. So, whether they’re a regular client or someone who treats themselves every few months, you need marketing material that sticks in their mind.
Unlike digital ads, which many of us click away from as soon as they pop up on screen, you can create an attractive, lightweight leaflet that your potential customer will be inclined to pin on a wall or on their fridge. Since 45% of people keep leaflets on a board or in a drawer, according to the Direct Marketing Association, it makes sense to invest your marketing budget here for maximum ROI.
Creating the ideal first impression that will last
There’s no time for wrong first impressions in marketing — your beauty brand needs to make the right impact straight away if you want your marketing campaign to succeed. According to studies, you have just 50 microseconds to make a good first impression, so your promotional material must create an instant impact, signal your USPs, and be positively and attractively presented. A leaflet, unlike a brochure or pamphlet that can feature several pages, allows you to condense the very best of your services and products into one, easy-to-read page for maximum effect.
Your audience cares about how they look — although, this may not be news to you. Approximately 70% of consumers think that cosmetic and personal care are ‘important or very important in their daily lives’, according to a Consumer Insights 2017 report by Cosmetics Europe. Does this mean that, out of all industries, offering your beauty customers an attractive leaflet is more important to its success? Pleasant colours and high-quality images of real people enjoying a treatment help make your leaflet nice to look at and engage with. Interestingly, according to 3M (a science-based tech company), humans process images 60,000 times faster than text. Therefore, incorporating two descriptive photos in your leaflet is likely to improve how much about your beauty business the reader takes in — which should mean they’re more likely to consider you.
Targeting your leaflets in the right place
Whether its A5 booklet printing or sending out catalogues, no print marketing campaign will reap rewards if it doesn’t reach the right person. If you own a beauty company, women between the ages of 18 and 34 are your largest audience, as they make up the greatest part of the cosmetics market. But, how do you contact these women specifically? Make your leaflet marketing strategy a direct mail campaign! That way, you can send your leaflets directly to potential customers within a particular age bracket in key locations around your business.
Direct mail has several advantages and many sectors use it to communicate with consumers and potential consumers. Direct mail is simply a kind of advertising that helps companies send promotional material to a targeted group of people. Therefore, you can reduce waste, save on over-ordering at the printer, and increase the chance that your leaflet will reach the right person. To do this, either conduct your own target audience research — for example, by using social media or surveys — or purchase key data, like ages and addresses, from third-party sites.
Boost your return-on-investment rate
When compared to other forms of print marketing, leaflets offer tempting ROI. Plus, a one-off bulk purchase of leaflets may work out less in the long run than the cost it takes to maintain and run a digital marketing campaign. Despite common misconceptions that claim digital to be a free-of-charge platform for effective marketing techniques, your print material may actually be more effective than anything you could create digitally. A study by research firm GfK, that looked at the efficiency of print media compared to digital platforms including online banners, showed that print ads provided the highest ROI: 120%. Perhaps digital is not as useful as once thought.
Get the most out of your discount offers
If you’ve been in business a while, you’ll know the opportunities available to you when you launch a special offer or discount. Typically, you’ll draw in people how might never have thought about your brand — so why not merge your leaflet marketing campaign with a discount offer? Reportedly, 80% of consumers claim to use coupons regularly and 57% of shoppers are encouraged to buy for the first time when they are given the chance to redeem a coupon, according to VoucherCloud. If you’re looking to advertise new cosmetics or attract new customers for a flagging treatment, a leaflet that acts as a voucher can clearly help.
There are also a few tricks you could employ. For example, give a time limit and highlight this with a bold, coloured font to give your audience an effective reminder to act fast!
Capture an offline audience
As we mentioned earlier, there’s a lot of money to be made with beauty products and services. According to recent data, the global skincare, beauty and cosmetics industry is anticipated to reach a worth of $675 billion by 2020. With a value of around £17 billion in the UK and employing more than one million people, these figures show that beauty is a lucrative and attractive line of business. So, how do you stand out?
Competing in business is tough, so don’t make it more difficult by doing what everyone else does and thus blend into the background — go against the grain and invest in print at a time when everyone is online! You probably already have a Facebook page and Instagram account to keep in touch with your clients, as well as an email database to send out deals as you wish. Therefore, opting for print marketing campaign will allow you to widen your net and reach an offline audience.
It’s no good having a marketing campaign that your audience instantly forgets — this is a sure way to lower your ROI. But did you know that direct mail requires approximately 20% less brain effort to process than digital media? This is according to research by a neuromarketing firm, which suggests that it is simpler to understand and store in our memories. In a recall test, 75% of those taking part were able to recall the business name after viewing it on a direct mail ad, compared to only 44% who were able to after seeing it on a digital ad. Could it be that beauty brands that put all their ads and offers online are missing a trick?
Leaflet marketing harbours many benefits for those in the beauty industry. So, research print companies and start designing your own leaflets today to boost your profit margin in 2018.
Sources: https://www.digitalprinting.co.uk/blog/7-reasons-leaflets-place-beauty-industry/ https://www.directlineforbusiness.co.uk/small-business-insurance/knowledge-centre/getting-started/opening-a-beauty-salon http://web.archive.org/web/20001014041642/http://www.3m.com:80/meetingnetwork/files/meetingguide_pres.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/publication/220208334_Attention_web_designers_You_have_50_milliseconds_to_make_a_good_first_impression_Behaviour_and_Information_Technology_252_115-126Beauty, Skincare and Cosmetics Retail Trends and Statisticshttps://www.cosmeticseurope.eu/files/6114/9738/2777/CE_Consumer_Insights_2017.pdf https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerdooley/2015/09/16/paper-vs-digital/#10a288fd33c3 https://www.inma.org/blogs/main/post.cfm/cross-media-study-shows-print-advertising-has-highest-roi https://dma.org.uk/article/what-is-the-response-rate-from-leaflet-distribution https://www.huffingtonpost.com/danny-wong/what-science-says-about-discounts_b_8511224.html http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/fashion/news/the-staggering-average-lifetime-spend-on-cosmetics-and-grooming-revealed-9709654.html https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/fashion/average-british-woman-spend-70000-appearance-lifetime-cosmetics-beauty-products-groupon-uk-a7623201.html
