The JCTA Marketing committee has been hard at work preparing for the Please Tan Responsibly campaign for the 2019/2020 season. The JCTA Marketing committee did a full review of the analytics of last year’s campaign, and Google Responsive Ads outperformed Facebook. Website traffic increased from Facebook by 34% and Google by 620%. The committee decided that the spend on Facebook will be reduced and Google will be increased. You won’t see all the creative ads we’ve done in the past, but this will increase traffic flow to the JCTA Consumer website.

This year’s campaign will start a month later – in November – due to funding restraints. I’ll explain this later in the article. We had a great success with our Outdoor to Indoor campaign, which gave us millions of impressions in October and November last year. Over 600 Canadians per day clicked in to TanResponibly.ca website and found the closest 3 salons to them.

Monthly spend will be higher in November, December and January this year, but will be reduced in February to June. This should educate Canadians, so they understand if you’re going to pre-tan before going on holidays you need to start early. Over the last 10 years, vacationers have been coming in just weeks before their holiday. This, as we all know, does not get them a complete base tan. As an industry, we need to make sure that each client understands that creating a base tan take 10 sessions at the least and should be started a month a head of time. It’s similar to how we teach clients proper use of sunscreen when they’re outside for prolonged periods of exposure. You may or may not know, if you apply a sunscreen incorrectly, meaning if you don’t apply the proper amount – 35ml for exposure body – you don’t get anywhere near the protection you think you have. Example: Ff you apply a SPF 16 at half the amount required, the SPF rating become a SPF4 (according to research). Let your clients know; it’s an easy calculation. It’s the square roots of the rating on the bottle. According to research, the average person applies 1/3 to 1/2 the amount recommended. By having a complete base tan and knowing how to apply sunscreen properly, they’ll have dual protection and greatly reduced risk of overexposure and sunburning. According to the Canadian Tanner Survey we did in January, pre-tanners had a much better holiday since they didn’t sunburn.

December will be the start of the PreTan Campaign, and it will run into the middle of February. With Facebook and Google now changing up the way the serve up ads to consumers, we will be creating 2 to 3 ads, and Facebook seems to decide on one ad for the consumer. We’ll then drop the other 1 or 2 ads so that the spend on the best ad will have a higher amount. This should hopefully increase our impressions and bring our cost per click down, therefore, getting more clicks to the website per dollar spent. Google seems to be doing the same thing, and we’ll be focusing more on Responsive Ads. Google is also changing up how keywords work; they now are saying if we use the keyword “tan,” if someone types in a search for tanning, tanning salon or spray tan, they’ll see our ad. The downside is if someone types in “tanning cow hides” that person would see our ad. We’ll be using negative keyword to stop that from happening. Hopefully once the ads start running, we can track the analytics and add in our negative keywords to make sure we have the right Canadians seeing our ad.

The Lifestyle part of the campaign will begin in mid-February and overlap with Sunburn Prevention in March. Hopefully every salon is teaching sunburn prevention. As an industry, we need to be concerned about our clients not only indoors, but outdoors too. You may want to set up a sign in your salon to show what the noon day UV Index will be for that day. This will help clients understand how the UV index vary and show how naturally the UV index increases from Spring to Summer and starts to reduce in Fall. This will also help your clients understand the importance of base tans and why outdoor workers have a lower risk of melanoma. Outdoor workers acclimatize their skin in the Spring, and they reduce their risk of sunburning in the summer. This is why having a base tan for a sunny vacation works. Clients need to understand they need to acclimatize their skin to a high UV Index when, for example, going to Mexico or Hawaii.

The Sunless Tanning part of the Please Tan Responsibly campaign will gear up again in May and end in June for the proms and wedding season. The Lifestyle campaign will include sunless tanning along with UV tanning – GTLG – Gym, Tan, Look Good.

I said above that we have had to reduce our spending this year for marketing and the reason why is a rainy-day fund. Over the last year to 18 months, there have been a lot of negative Canadian research papers released. Luckily, the media doesn’t seem to be that interested since age restrictions came in. This year, the Canadian Health Survey included indoor tanning questions. Health Canada does a review every five years of the indoor tanning industry. The last one was in 2014, and a research article came out 18 months later. The report was actually beneficial for us. We are expecting, so long as salons have upped their professionalism and following regulations, the report should have even better results. This survey is also the first one after all provincial regulations started to be enforced as well. Remember provincial inspectors are out doing inspections, especially in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Ontario.

Time to gear up for the next season. Hopefully this will be the year you decide to become a JCTA Member and support the Canadian Indoor Tanning Community. JCTA Members are making sure everyone knows our side of the story.