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Thriving Stylist Podcast
#436 - Paid Marketing Scams, Strategies and Budgets for Stylists and Salon Owners
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Being behind the chair is what you love. Worrying about money, that's exhausting. Imagine if 2026 was the year everything changed. It's not just some stylists in our coaching program that grow their income. Every single one does over half, even cut their hours while earning more. And all of them, they finally feel in control. No guesswork, no risk, just real results in 90 days or less. For our 17,000 members who are just like you, visit www.thrivingstylist.com and take the first step towards the business and the life you actually want.
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Do you feel like you were meant to have a kick ass career as a hairstylist? Like you got into this industry to make big things happen? Maybe you're struggling to build a solid base and want some stability. Maybe, you know social media is important, but it feels like a waste of time because you aren't seeing any results. Maybe you've already had some amazing success but are craving more. Maybe you're ready to truly enjoy the freedom and flexibility industry has to offer. Cutting and coloring skills will only get you so far. But to build a lifelong career as a wealthy stylist, it takes business skills and a serious marketing strategy. When you're ready to quit just working in your business and start working on it, join us here where we share real success stories from real stylists. I'm Britt Siva, social media and marketing strategist just for hairstylists and this is
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the Thriving Stylist Podcast. What is up? And welcome back to the Thriving Stylist Podcast. I'm your host, Britt Siva and this week we're talking about paid marketing scams, strategies and budgets for stylists and salon owners. Let's zoom out for just a moment and talk about paid marketing. I want to be very clear. Nobody listening to this has to pay for marketing. Not a single one of you. I know tens of thousands of stylists who have built beautiful clientele, never paying for marketing. So I don't want this to be a confusion that I'm saying everybody has to. I actually think it's the minority of people who are even ready to pay for marketing. But I want to talk about misunderstandings around paid marketing. Who should what it costs, what it looks like, is it viable? What are paid marketing scams? I want to talk about all of it. When we think about the majority of the industry who is simply not ready for paid marketing, instead of investing money, they must invest time. There is no other currency. When we look at what it takes to build a business of one or a full salon team, you have two resources to build that business with time or money. And the reason why some stylists and salons get to a point where they choose to pay for advertising is because they've essentially earned the privilege to not spend so much time on marketing. And that's the rub is that when I talk to stylists and salon owners, they say, I just don't have time for social media, I don't have time for marketing, I don't have time to do my website, I don't have time to work on the referral program. Time, time, time. It feels like the resource that there's not enough of. And when you look at stylists and salon owners who are paying for marketing, they are not spending much time on it at all because they've earned the right to instead cut the check and their chair gets filled with perfect target market clients. And that sounds like luxury. And so if when I say paid marketing, you think, yuck, I would never want to do that. I want you to imagine a world where all you do is pay $500 a month in your chair fills. For most of us it would be like, that would be a no brainer. But that's the promise of paid marketing. When done correctly, you wouldn't have to be posting on Instagram and the videos and all the things like it's in essence a shortcut, but you're paying for it. It's the investment of the money instead of the time. This being said, 90% of the industry needs to invest the time right now. It's not about the money. For the 10%, who's ready? I'm talking to you. For those of you who are already spending, you might find some areas where you might want to scale back. For those of you who have built really beautiful marketing funnels, this may be the gateway for you to spend a little less time in marketing and capture a new excess of clientele by turning some of these levers on. So let's just explore the topic. There are a ton of companies out there who advertise that they have marketing options for local small business. I mean, hundreds of them. I did some research before coming onto this. Many of these companies I've never heard of before. What you'll find a lot of with these paid online marketing companies is they're a flash in the pan, they'll sell something, it works maybe a little bit for a small period of time. The leads dry up because what they were offering was not very good and then that company goes away. And a new company emerges. There's a lot of turnover in these digital marketing companies that are happy to take your money with the promise of building and growing your business. So let's talk about the companies I'd stay away from first. And then we'll get into the small handful that I know for a fact are filling salon chairs incredibly quickly. We'll talk about how much they're spending, how they got there, all that kind of stuff. So the first type of company that makes me nervous is an all in one. And you'll know an all in one because you'll go to their website and it's like, what's amazing is, is you can just pay us and we'll do everything. We will do your website, we'll do your SEO, we'll run ads, we'll figure out the Google click ads, we'll do your images, we can do it all. Just continue paying us the money and we'll get you taken care of. I have seen more loss, more stylists and salons taken advantage of by all in one companies than anything we. Gosh, when was it? Probably about six years ago. We invested in what ended up being an all in one company. I will say as a business, like my salon coaching business. Me, the person you know as me right now, our business did this many years ago. We didn't know we were doing it at the time. We invested in this company to do one thing for us. It had nothing to do with marketing. And they did that one thing very, very well. And they were like, hey, I don't know if you know this, but we also do websites and we can also do your Instagram and Facebook ads and can do this and we can do that. And we thought, amazing. Wow. I mean, if they were able to do this thing over here for us and it went so well, why not go for it? We lost tens of thousands of dollars with that company. It was a horrible investment. And what I have seen time and time and time again is results similar to ours. I'm not saying that happened to us once, so don't do it. I'm saying I've watched what happened to me happen to dozens of salons. The reason being a lot of companies can do one thing very well and then they do another thing, mediocre, another thing, not really good at all. But a lot of these businesses are just trying to grow. They're just trying to get a paycheck. They sincerely want to help you. They simply do not have the skill and talent. What I find with a Lot of these all in one companies is that they're not scammers and they're not trying to rip people off. They're just not very good. They're not good at their job. But it takes a lot of time and a lot of energy and a lot of effort. So they have to put this huge price tag on it. They do their best. Their best is not good. So it doesn't fill your chair with clients. And 5000, 6000, 8000, $10,000 later, you're no better off for it. And now you're frustrated and you don't even want to start over because you don't have any money, you don't have any time. That's the cycle I've seen tons and tons of times. So if you see a company who appears as if they can do it all, we can build your website, we can market for you, and we can do your social media run the other direction. That's the worst. Next is those who say, if you pay us, we'll boost your SEO. If you pay us, we will put you on the front page of Google. There was a time, the time is a long time ago, probably 15 years ago, that companies like that actually worked really well. Now I find it to be a pretty big scam. It's not cheap, it's not effective, and it's tricky because what you'll do is you'll pay the money, which is hundreds of dollars, sometimes thousands, depending on the company that you work with. And they do is they basically force traffic to your website, which does push you up higher in the Google rankings. But it's like a trap because it's not actual legitimized, sustainable SEO. So it only works for so long as you're paying them, and as soon as you stop, it's gone forever. It's a trap. It's like golden handcuffs. Instead, I prefer how to teach stylists and salons just to get their website up there and keep it there without having to pay. And there's easy ways to do that that are not expensive at all. Most cost nothing. Do take some time, but not a huge amount of time. And you can see really great success. SEO now is not driven by keywords. There's not a really big hack to it. It's about how many people are naturally looking at your business, and that comes from your funnel. And those are all things that we can control quite easily as stylists and salon owners. Even if you're not techie, what do I mean when I keep saying SEO? It's search engine optimization. And search engine optimization is how easy it is for the Internet to show your business to somebody who is doing a local search for best hairstylist in San Antonio, Texas, best hair salon in Dawson County. If you want to come up in searches like that, it's search engine optimization that makes that possible for you. And the game that we like to play is to get you to rank as high as we possibly can based on search terms. So search engine optimization is a wonderful thing. We want to have that in your business. Paying a company to get you on that front page of the Google search, get you to show up higher, generally is a failing strategy. The other thing is the way that Google ranks local search is changing all the time. And right now, what's getting businesses ranked high is Google reviews. And there's nothing that can be done really with any kind of paid SEO booster that can outpace Google reviews because Google owns the page and that's what they're prioritizing. The other thing that's making businesses rank really high right now is Yelp reviews. We're going to talk about Yelp in a minute. So having your. Your website optimized is great. And there's, like I said, there's things we can do to get you to show up higher in local search result SEO paid boost. I have not in recent years seen great results where the money being spent is justified by the amount of traffic being driven by that specific result. I've coached a lot of salons one to one and looked at the back end of their finances and their traffic, and we've not seen a correlation in many years that I've been able to track in the businesses that I'm looking at next. There is something new popping up, and I'm actually not going to name the name of the company that a salon I was working with was using. And I was coaching a salon one to one, and we were analyzing their marketing and I was saying, where are you cutting checks for marketing? And one of the larger checks, it was hundreds of dollars a month, was to this company. And they were like, what do you think? And I was like, I've never heard this before, so that's not usually a great sign, but let's look it up. And I looked up the company and my heart sank. And I was like, oh, I can just. The writing's on the wall. But I was like, let me, let me ask the questions and figure out what's going on here. And this company had approached this salon. It's a huge Salon. I mean, the company just could. It's like they were cashing the check before they even had the sales meeting. And they went into the salon and they were like, what we're going to do is you're going to give us this money and we're going to send you guaranteed leads every single month. And it's, it was a certain amount of like calls, booking, inquiries, and then it's to your front des desk team to respond to all these leads that we're going to send you and book the appointments. So it's a certain amount of leads, not necessarily bookings. And it was a big number. It was like for. I don't, I don't. I'm going to make up these numbers for 700amonth. We're going to send you a hundred leads a month. Most salons are like, wow, I can get a hundred new clients a month for 700. I'm in. The problem is it's not even close to a hundred clients, it's a hundred leads. So what is happening is, so I'm watching, I'm like, show me how this happens. The salon owner opens this app on a phone and on any given day there's three leads or seven leads or whatever. And so it appears as if it's high demand. It's so fake. And I was like, okay, let's click on a couple of these. And she was like, well see, these are international numbers, which somebody, she's like, we can call them. And it could be argued like, maybe they're traveling in here for business. They weren't, they were like, not leads that were going anywhere. And then some people, we would respond and they'd be like, wait, what is this for? And the owner would say, oh, it looked like you, you submitted an inquiry for a hairc. And the client would be like, oh yeah, I was just looking around, never mind. So many dead leads. And I was like, okay, how many of these actually turn into bookings? And we looked at the previous month and it was less than 10, mostly blowouts, a couple of haircuts. And I was like, so in actuality, you're paying hundreds of dollars a month for a small handful of leads for your lowest cost services. And it was like a blind spot to this owner because it emotionally felt like interest. And it felt predatory to me that this business taking advantage of making the salon owner basically feel like there was interest when there wasn't. And when we looked at how much business was legitimizing, it was like nothing. So be really wary of Scams and offers like that. Just because any company is sending you interest, if it's not turning into actual business for you, it's not working. Be very, very careful. So those are the things I want you to stay away from completely. Next, I want to shift gears into the three paid marketing platforms that I know firsthand are working very, very well for stylists and salon owners. Some of them might surprise you, which good we'll learn today. The first is going to be Instagram and Facebook ads. It's very interesting when I talk to our most successful members, Facebook is winning over Instagram. It's such an interesting time. And when I talk to stylists and owners, they're like, it's not so much the Facebook page, and they're doing their best to keep their page, you know, updated and relevant. But interacting in the Facebook communities has been huge, huge, huge. Summer running Facebook ads with success. Instagram boosts and ads with success. The nice thing about using either of those platforms is it's relatively inexpensive. We're looking at spends of like five to $10 a day getting, you know, two, three, four, five, six, seven new guest requests from these platforms on a five to $10 per day spend. But as I say five to $10 per day, some of you are running the math and you're like, that's 150 to $300 that I don't have. I get it. But like I said, a lot of people aren't ready to run ads. We're talking about how you know when you're ready in a minute. But I want to do a platform overview. Okay, so we are still seeing success with stylists and salon owners. In spring of 2026, I'm recording this episode we are seeing. I have seen the legitimate results of stylists and salons running Instagram and Facebook ads. Budgets around that price point, proven traffic from those sources. I'm seeing that next. Probably the most controversial, but I. I have to say it. Yelp ads. And I know that people don't like it when I. Too bad. It's working. It's working. Some of my most successful students, like solo stylists doing hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in services by themselves, not with a team, half without an assistant, are running Yelp ads. And the reason why it works is because they have built up enough reviews that the Yelp ad is driving the traffic and it's giving them 8, 10, 12 new guest requests a month. And they're kind of like, love the platform or hate it. It's filling my chair. I'm not posting on social media anywhere else and I have endless business coming in, which is how paid ads work. Okay, so there's Yelp ads and then we have Google Ads. So when I look at my large scale salon teams in particular who are filling chairs Fast, we're talking 200 plus new clients a month and upwards it's going to be Google Ads and it's the most expensive, it's the most effective. So let's look at all three. Talk about budget. So Instagram and Facebook ads. Actually, let me zoom out for a second. For any of these ad platforms, I don't want anybody listening to this episode to consider spending money on these platforms or anywhere else until you have a proven marketing funnel. How do I know I have a proven marketing funnel? When you are getting 8 to 10 new guest requests every single month consistently for at least six consecutive months months from your non paid marketing efforts, you have a proven effective marketing funnel. So when you're getting those eight to ten new guest requests every single month without having to pay for them, if you would like to dabble in this, I'm here for you. I support you. If you are not getting that level of demand without paying, paying is likely not going to get you there. Why? Because all that paying does is bring more eyeballs to a funnel that has cracks in it. It what is the marketing funnel? I have several podcasts on it. So do a search for thriving styles. Podcast marketing funnel if you're not familiar, it's a multi level proven framework for filling a stylist or salon's chair. At the very bottom of that we have what we call opportunity, which is your brand and target market. It boils down to your messaging and whether or not clients look at your online presence and can see themselves in your business. If that's off, nothing else matters. If you don't get that right, there's nothing we can do. Marketing wise to fill your chair fast. Absolutely nothing. Which is why that's the first level. It's foundational and everything else builds upon it. Above that we have trust. So trust is everything that happens between when a guest finds you after they've booked their appointment before they actually show up into your business. It's a critical piece of the marketing funnel that did not exist pre2020. Trust used to happen after the opportunity level. We had to move it up the marketing funnel because of the shift in consumer behavior. So then there's this trust level. Above that we have what we call the desire level. The Only thing that lives on your desire level is your website, not your booking page. Your booking page is down on trust. Your desire level is just your website. If you have no website, you have no desire level. If your website's not built properly, you're creating poor desire. So the website then above that we have the interest level. The interest level is your social media. So that's going to be Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, nextdoor app, Yelp lives there, Google Reviews live there. Any social platform like that is going to live on that interest level. It's where people hang out when they're curious about you, where people do their market research. Right above that is awareness. Awareness is where you are driving traffic, you're creating buzz about your business. All these paid ad strategies we're talking about live at the very top awareness. So even though we're talking about Instagram and Facebook, which live on the interest level, paying for more people to find you on any of these platforms is what we call awareness marketing. If what I'm saying sounds confusing and you're like, what is she talking about with all these level look up thriving stylist marketing funnel. Ton of resources out there for it, it'll explain it more. But this is the framework that we've watched build business for 17,000 stylists. It works a hundred percent of the time every time. It's following the same pattern. When your marketing funnel is not well built or is not built in full, paid ads don't work. I've seen them fail more times than I can count. And when they fail, it's based on broken funnel every single time. If your funnel is built and it's already working, putting money into it will only increase the result. If your funnel is halfway done, missing parts and pieces, you think it's good, but it's no good. And you're not getting traffic at the rate of 8 to 10 new guest requests every single month per stylist without paying. Putting money on it will not help you when you are at that level and you want to feel faster, easier without having to lean heavily into posting all the time and creating all this content and doing all this stuff. Paid ads can be massive. Okay, so assuming you have your funnel built, like I mentioned, Instagram and Facebook ads, we're seeing good traction around the 150, 300amonth spend. I would say Yelp runs around the same, probably more higher end. 250, 300, 400 for those monthly Yelp ads. It does seem to vary by region, probably based on the impact they think they can get for you. Again, do not run Yelp ads if you are not putting fresh content on that platform every single month like you would any other social media platform. You want to have at least 15 or 20amazing reviews on there before you run ads on it. Otherwise people are going to look at your page and be like, wow, nobody's come here yet. I'm not going to come either. So you build the profile first, then you put the money in. Google Ads is a different beast. It's more complicated. Without a shadow of a doubt, it's more expensive. We coach salons who are paying anywhere from 500 to $1,000 a month plus, but it is filling their chair at a really rapid pace. Hundreds of new clients a month, qualified clients. The reason being Google is the largest search engine in the world. So when you're running effective ads with an effective marketing funnel on a platform like that, it does work. These are clients that are being retained, that are paying money, that are doing all the things right. And so for a lot of you who may have listened to this being skeptical, if I was to say, well, if you paid $6,000 a year, your salon would be filled with 2,000 new clients, you might consider doing it. And that's where a lot of these salons are winning when it comes to demand and filling their stylist chairs fast as they have really spent the time hiring incredible team building, an incredible marketing funnel, and now they're able to enjoy
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the fruits of the labor.
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I hope this has got your wheels turning. If you have additional questions, leave them in the rating or reviews on itunes. We're always happy to help@thrivingstylist.com any way we can. So much love happy business building and I'll see you on the next one.