During the off-season, when most salons see a decrease in traffic, it’s easy to diminish (or eliminate) marketing efforts. But marketing shouldn’t be constrained to just the seasonal months. Salons need to be thinking long-term and use the off-season to set themselves up for a hugely successful peak season. Here are a few ways to wisely utilize the off-season time.

Keep making and posting content. Just because your customers might not be visiting your salon during the summer months doesn’t mean you should stop feeding them entertaining and educational content. Use this time to educate them about smart sun exposure, how to get an even tan, what products to use, etc. By providing your customers this valuable content, you’re helping to build solid relationship that will withstand the off-season and bring them to your salon when those summer months fade away. You might even gain some new customers if your content is extremely valuable.

Continue being social. When you aren’t seeing your customers on a regular basis, it’s even more important to maintain those social media relationships through Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram — wherever your customer are following you. Use these venues as a way to keep yourself in the minds of your customers so you’re the first they think of when the season returns. You can also use social media to offer some specials to drive some off-season traffic into your salon. And social media is a great place to post some confidence-building and educational content.

Click here to read the entire article in Smart Tan Magazine online.