Now that the holiday season and all the insanity that comes with it is behind us, it’s time to really think about your marketing plan if you haven’t already. With the tanning season revving up, here are some ways to make sure your marketing plan is rock solid this year.

Evaluate Your Business

 It’s hard to plan out your marketing if you don’t have a grasp on your company’s current position. A great place to start is a simple S.W.O.T. analysis. Get together with your management team and take a critical look at your business to figure out your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. You might even want to bring in some key employees to offer insight on this.

Strengths: What is your salon really good at? Is it product sales? Customer service? Cleanliness? What things set your salon apart from others in a good way?

Weaknesses: What is your salon lousy at? What parts of your business could use improving? This is sometimes not fun as an owner or a manager to hear, but your employees can offer a lot of valuable insight on this.

Opportunities: What are some opportunities for growth and improvement that maybe you’re overlooking? What are some things you maybe have been offering or selling, but haven’t put the proper resources behind?

Threats: What things threaten your business? A competitor? Traffic? Visibility? What’s going to pose a challenge to your salon this year?

Investigate Your Competition

There’s absolutely no reason you should not be keeping tabs on your competition. When you’re putting together your marketing plan, check out what your competition has been doing. Take a look at their website, their advertising, their social media presence, their emails. See what promotions they offered and how frequently they offered them. Figure out who is taking customers from you and how they’re doing it. Also look into the possibility of new competition that might be moving into your territory.

Know Your Customers

Do you really know who is tanning in your salon? Sure, you could assume the status quo, but is that really your customer base? Without knowing your current customers and potential customers, you can’t put together an effective marketing plan. Your customer demographics should be dictating how you advertise, where you advertise, how much you advertise, when you advertise and what promotions you offer. It’s hard to really nail that if you’re not sure who you’re talking to.

Choose Your Delivery

Today, there are endless ways to deliver messages to your customers. Be sure you are delivering that through media that are going to result in what actually matters for your business – sales. It’s important to take the proper time and evaluation to have a clear understanding of whether or not each channel is going to be beneficial to your business or just costly and burdensome.

Should you do social media? Texting? Mailing? Radio? Video? Yellow Pages? Adwords? Look at your demographic and your current customers and investigate the effectiveness of each channel. Evaluate the channels you used last year and determine which are worth keeping and witch are worth pitching.

A little planning can go a long way when it comes to marketing. Don’t just leave it to chance – take the time to formulate a plan of action and a reasonable budget. That could be the difference between a decent season and a record-breaking season.