When creating a marketing calendar start with the following themes: seasonal, monthly holidays, community events, charities, manufacturer driven, new services and standard promotions. Let’s break each one down and in the order by which you should build your calendar.

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Standard promotions: You should have a referral promotion and a rebooking promotion in place on an ongoing basis. You can always add a contest a few times a year at specific times to support peak months and periods where you need to drive client traffic.

Monthly Holidays: Go through the calendar and look for holidays you can create marketing themes around. Christmas, Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, Easter, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Independence Day and so on.

Seasonal: As we move through spring, summer, fall and winter there are plenty of services and products designed to support your customers. The seasons provide a good period of time in your calendar where you can run promotions. For example, if you are a nail technician, during the winter you can focus on marketing winter nail art with a free paraffin hand or foot treatment. If you are a hairstylist you can drive your color business in the summer with a promotion that packages the service with color shampoo and conditioner. Make a list of what services and accompanying products you could put together for each season. Then position the promotion to start at the beginning of each season and have it run for 8 weeks which should cover a big chunk of that season.

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Seasons will also include the following: wedding season, graduation season, back to school, proms, etc. Based on the services you provide, you can take advantage of any or all of these seasons to drive your business. 

    1. Community events: Look at events or celebrations that happen local to your area that you may want to be a part of such as town fairs or parades.

    2. Manufacturer-driven: What do they offer from a promotional standpoint that you can take advantage of? Usually these programs are turnkey, easy to use and provide a boost. You can also look to any new product launches they announce and put a promotion in your calendar to coincide with it.

    3. Charities: Can you attach yourself to a walk-a-thon or launch a cut-a-thon? A popular charity every year is *** cancer awareness month in October. You can put a special together where a portion of sales proceeds go towards a charity. 

    4. New services: Any time you make a choice to add a new service to your repertoire you have an opportunity to put a promotion in place.

Now open your calendar and start at the top of the list and begin to fill in your promotions for the year. Remember these guidelines as you’re going back through.

• Run promotions in 6-8 week cycles. The longer they run the less impact they have. This is why you want to add some punch to your referral and rebooking promotions throughout the year.
• You can run more than one promotion at the same time as long as they differ. For example, if you are offering a retail driven promotion for St. Patrick Day it doesn’t make sense to offer another special that includes retail during the same time period.
• Meet with distributor and manufacturer representatives during your calendar building process to generate ideas.
• If you work in or rent a space in a salon or spa meet with the rest of the team. Share ideas, help each other, cross promote with different departments. Their involvement is up to them but unity can provide balance to a marketing promotion. Depending on the temperament of the salon owner or manager, they should appreciate the ideas and support.
• Do be attached! Your calendar is a starting point, if you need to move something around or come up with a more effective or exciting promotion don’t be afraid to change things up. Remember, business fluctuates and you need to be prepared to move with it, not against it.
• Keep your budget in mind. As a rule, spend 2-4% of total sales each month on marketing efforts. This knowledge can help make decisions on what you offer and when. For example, marketing a customer event in your salon during a slow volume time of year may not help you financially due to a lower income stream during those periods of the year. Use your budget percentage wisely and spread the monies out as you need.

Do yourself the favor and take the time to give yourself this peace of mind while giving your clients fun and creative incentives that keep them coming back for more.