Do not start selling hair without your buyer persona

Your hair business starts and ends with your client. That makes her your ideal client or buyer persona. She, or he, is part the market that you want to mine. A market full of people that will buy from you, at your store price and your conditions!

The more you succeed to step into the shoes of your ideal client, the better your sales will be. All you must do discover is what she needs. Find a wholesale hair vendor that can provide her kind of hair. Select the Ecommerce platform where she can find the hair. She tells you what she needs to will help you to start your business. When you succeed to provide the hair she needs, she will buy as the last step of the sales cycle. Client happy, you happy!

Understand your buyer persona better

But where will your buyer persona share all her personal details with you? How will you get to know her better? Read further to understand her better.

Talk hair with everybody you meet

The easiest way of learning more about what your ideal client wants is to talk hair with everybody. Everybody that will fit in the market you aim at. Hair and beauty are topics everybody loves to talk about. It makes people often very happy to talk hair and it helps them to forget the daily struggle. Hair is a medicine against a bad mood, and it is a perfect excuse to start a conversation. When you talk, keep some of the key questions in mind. Try with every conversation to fill in the missing parts. Or finetune your insight in some previous responses you got and where you want to know more about.

With every talk you will understand the needs and likes of your hair market better. This will help you to become an expert in hair needs, or an influencer. You could even start a blog, or social media channel. A great way to start any career in the hair and beauty business! Whatever happens, do not stop talking hair!

Listen to your clients

When you are in business, or when you have enough people who follow you, analyse the feedback. Or the mails, the comments. Try to group the reactions into topics with similar characteristics. Not everybody uses identical words for the similar events or product. Use the context, like the posting, the images to group the various comments. Later, this will help you to discover a trend. To find out what your market and not all these individuals apart, are looking for and how.

Focus on the things you can change

You will hear and read a lot of different things when you talk hair or read the social media comments. To find what is important for you and your hair business, focus only on things that relate to:

1. Product
2. Price
3. Promotion
4. Place

You can find another product when your clients are looking for a specific texture or style. You can look for another vendor, when the price does not fit the budget of your client. You can change the branch or tone of voice to improve your Promotion effort. You can start selling your hair products in salons when your clients prefer. All this you can change, listen to what your clients have to say about this. Later you can also use this to compare the effort of the competition.

A product description your buyer persona likes

Now you know where to focus on, it is time to write the product description. You know what is relevant for your market. You know what they are looking for. Make sure to include this in the description and the images on your product pages. Use the definitions your clients use. Show the images they find the confirmation what you offer is what they want. List the benefits your product offers, that will solve the challenges they are facing.

You must talk again to your client, but this time she will listen (or read), and you will write or tell (video) about the hair.

Use the keywords you found before. This will help search engines, like Google or Bing, to determine if what is on your webpages is what your clients are looking for when they Google for hair.

Click Through Rate shows your level of success

The art is to close the gap between what your market, your ideal client, is looking for and what Google shows them in the search results. You can see in Google Search Console exactly what users have been searching for and to which webpage Google has guided them. For example, the query “Raw Vietnamese hair” can result Google will show your http://mystore/Vietnamese_Raw_Hair.html Product on the google search page. You can see the number of times Google saw the relevancy between your webpage and the query (Impressions). But you can also see, how successful your page tile and meta description was to convince the user to click and to visit your product page. The Click trough rate, that is also shown by Google Search Console, will tell you how successful you and Google have been to convince somebody on the internet the information on the webpage http://mystore/Vietnamese_Raw_Hair.html is what they are looking for. In other words, it shows you have been able to give the answer on the clients need. We are back at the client again.

Step by step increase your sales

It is possible the click through rate is too low. In that case you will not get enough visitors to the webpage. Now you must analyse using Google Search Console and your ideal client profile and all the other things you know about your client what is missing. Or what should be emphasized more. It will be a game of trial and error. Make sure you go step by step and you record every change and any change in Impressions, Ranking and Clicks. Step by step you will be able to tell the client better what they are looking for, and the number of visits will increase and with this the number of orders.

Social media is key

Social media is a great way to test what your clients like. Big names in the hair business often use their social media channels, not only to inform about the arrival of new stock. But more to engage with their audience and to learn about their needs. Social media is a great, and free tool to use with a high return on investment. You will learn a lot for little money.

Define your ideal client – social media

The social media your client prefers is part of the Ideal Client profile. There are so many different platforms and over time the preference of your market for a specific platform can change. Facebook is still the largest social platform, but there is a clear movement the younger generation is more into Instagram and TikTok. Because your time and resources are limited, and you can not allocate all your time to post pictures, and to engage with your followers you need to focus when using social media. When you define your ideal client, this is the buying persona that will always buy your hair, you need to limit the social media platforms you actively use. When you prepare your ideal client profile, talk with potential clients not only about the social media channel they use today, also about what they like and do not like. This helps to anticipate a shift in social media channel used.

You can make a list of characteristics, preferences, backgrounds, and pain points or use the ready-made template we offer in our all-in-one business package. Leave a comment if you would like to receive a free copy of the Ideal Client template.

What hair does your ideal client like?

Now you know the social media channel of preference, you can use this channel, or channels, to engage with your market.

1. Collect images of hair and re-share.
2. Ask the vendor if you can use their images to publish and market their hair.

Share posts of hair stylists on your social media and invite your followers to respond.

We all love to talk hair, and sometimes this is limited to a simple like, but you can also trigger a comment. It will not always be easy because your followers might need time to feel free to interact, but when you post the right images you will get the reactions that will tell you what people like and do not like.

Think about a competition to make it ore attractive to share a comment. Avoid to simply post images of hair and wait until people react. Social media is like the real world. People are more willing to respond when they think you are a nice person. So do not only post your own stuff, but also comment on the postings of others.

Your client will tell you what she likes

Make sure you log the reactions on every post. The number of likes, the key messages in every comment. This insight will help you to share other post, with similar hair or other textures and lengths. It is really all about test, test, test!

See if you can discover a certain trend, that is a recurrent reaction from your followers on the hair. Do they share more reactions on Kinky Curly, or do images of the 30 inch not lead to any response at all?
The trend will help you to understand the kind of hair your market is looking for. Use this insight in a blogpost, the product description for your products or when you talk hair with clients or your friends.

And do not forget to add this information in your ideal client profile!

So, what hair does your ideal client prefer? And let me know in the comments below if you would like a free copy of the ideal client template.