Mike and Debbie Burns, Island Sun Tanning

Mike and Debbie Burns are more than business partners – they’re husband and wife! After teaming up to create their vision of a perfect tanning salon and career, Island Sun Tanning has become a great example of reaching higher levels of success through active leadership.

In web-exclusive excerpt from their interview, Debbie shares her views on marketing:

There is no one way to market that’s best for everyone. When we first opened, our best form of advertising was direct mail. Seventeen years later, social media has probably had the greatest impact on word of mouth referrals.

We get customers excited for new arrivals by posting photos of our staff in some of the new clothing. We will put one of the girls in a blue dress and a red dress, then ask which our fans like best. We post pre-launch photos of new merchandise on Facebook, and these items sell out over the same weekend. The clients interact with us on Facebook when we post pictures of our staff doing various fitness routines.

We also see a lot of people redeeming coupons from text messaging campaigns.

When Groupon first became popular, we used it as a great way to advertise and basically pay them to bring in new customers. But with time there were a lot more deal hoppers, so we decide to change the program. Now we use Groupon Rewards. Customers get rewarded for spending money with us regularly, but they still get the deal they’re looking for. We don’t want to train our customers to wait for a deal all the time.

For more information about this salon, visit www.islandsun.org.