Do not shut up because of the novel coronavirus!

Feb 28, 2020 | Get Help, Launch Your Web Store

Do not shut up because of the novel coronavirus, keep talking hair!

Many resellers of hair imported from China are facing difficult times. In this crisis, caused by novel coronavirus there are no borders, we all face similar kind of challenges. A travel ban will not stop the coronavirus, it will only hurt the business more. Also, all hair stores all over the world, sourcing hair from China, face with the problem where to get the hair from? China is the world’s largest exporter of human hair.

The factories collecting the hair and producing human hair products are still not at the full production level. Today a significant part of the factories still deals with workers who stay at home or supplies not delivered. Indian hair suppliers, for example, face difficulties in exporting the hair to China as we know.

The novel coronavirus shows again how much we depend on each other in the current global economy. It will take at least till the end of the year before a vaccine will be at the market. Even if China will be able to master the outbreak and get back to normal production, the demand will lack behind estimations. Overseas buyers are to occupied dealing with the virus and not capable to buy Chinese products. They are or in quarantine or have limited access to the markets.

The expectation is the world, or at least most developing countries, will face economic slowdown. Or even a recession due to the novel coronavirus. Your clients will buy less often new hair. At the same time, they will still feel the need to look and feel good. They might look for cheaper hair, or alternative products. Or wait longer before they buy new weaves.
Does this mean you have to wait until the virus has become a normal sickness? Do you have to close your hair business for the next coming months?

How to beat the novel coronavirus

No, please do not pause your hair business because I want you to stay in business. Let your clients know you are there for them. The time and the money to buy hair will come back. The novel coronavirus will not be there for ever. You want your clients to spend the money in your hair business when the times are better, right.
There are a couple of business strategies to stay in business long enough to be able to pick up the higher demand when this crisis is history. The most important and cheapest one is to increase the interaction with your clients. Even if you cannot sell hair.

Make money with your expertise

Use your knowledge and insight of the hair and beauty market to write the best blog postings ever. If the business is slowing down, use the free time to go out and look for hair and beauty trends. Share your experience in a blogpost or on social media. This is the best time to promote your brand and your expertise.

Writing blog postings and taking pictures will not cost you much money. You can create content that will be attracting leads and clients for a long time into the future. Having a business does not always allow you to divide enough time on your marketing strategy. Use this crisis to boost your marketing effort, and again without hardly spending money.

You can also promote the business of others, and they will be interested to pay you for this. Make sure the products and services you promote do fit with the ideal client needs and preferences. If you can also allow some AdSense advertisements on your website or blog. Not all over the site, but you can add value to the relevant blogs.

Interact with your clients

Social media is a great, but time consuming, tool, now you can interact more with your visitors. If people leave a comment, you can now respond much faster. Big chance they are still online after leaving the comment and when you respond in real time you can keep the conversation going.

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Can You Get the Coronavirus via the Packaging or the Hair itself?

Sell More with Your Olympic Focus

It is all about when the going gets tough, you need to make sure your clients know you are still there. Even if you cannot make a sale, invest in the relationship. The moment they can buy again, or you have enough stock again, your sales will pick up fast enough to make up all the lost sales due to the novel coronavirus.

Let me hear in the comments below how you deal with this.

Do not let the Coronavirus eat your profit!

Feb 1, 2020 | Get Help, Launch Your Web Store, WholeSale Companies

Sales will drop due to Coronavirus regardless the origin of your hair!

There is no more doubt, the Coronavirus will eat the profit of most stores all over the world. The measures to protect the outbreak, the uncertainty and uncontrollable spreading all over the world will slow down the economies and with this your sales too.

Despite the advice from the World Health Organisation, the US and Australia said they would deny entry to all foreign visitors who had recently been in China. Earlier, countries including Russia, Japan, Pakistan and Italy announced similar travel restrictions. The advice from the WHO is to limit the negative economical and health impact of the Coronavirus. But a ban also has a discriminatory impact, people start to avoid people who might be a risk to their health. Even if there is no reason whatsoever. I also think we should in times of crisis help and comfort each other. How difficult this might be because of all the uncertainties.

But all this means on top of lower availability of stock, there is less appetite to buy any new product or good. Less demand for hair and wigs will most probably hit your bottom line this quarter. Less sales and perhaps less profit.

Time for some measures to fight the Coronavirus.

Do not sit still and wait until the virus is gone and we have time to worry about other things. Now it is the best time to react and to fight the virus.

Why will people buy less hair extensions or wigs?

To understand why people will buy less, you must realize economy has everything to do about feeling good. If your client know she will get a salary rise, even before she gets the rise she starts thinking in possibilities. “What if I buy more of this, or what if I redecorate my house, or what if I buy a new wig?” This has helped the healthy economic growth for the last several years. But now this is under pressure due to the Coronavirus. The weird thing is, even if you do not sell hair from Chinese suppliers, or if you are in an area far away from Coronavirus victims, people, will still prefer to keep their hands on the pockets.
If you want to see the proof of this, just check the red figures on the stock markets all over the world. Investors like to buy stock in companies they believe will make more sales and profit in the future. If they expect disappointing sales, they sell the stock and the value will go down.

Also, the CEO’s of major firms like Apple, Starbucks and McDonalds foresee lower growth and reduce operations. This will not only impact the operations in China, but all over the world. Chinese people will travel less and consume less. The Government has placed restrictions on family or group gatherings, while people have less to buy. This again will also influence the import of certain goods.
Overall there is less money to spend, and this will impact the economy all over the world. People will prefer to keep the money in their pocket.

What can you do about it?

As mentioned before, it is important to educate your clients about the risk of the Coronavirus. Or better how limited that risk is, especially for the hair you are selling. This is again an opportunity to show how well experienced you are. So, write a blogpost about the Wuhan Coronavirus in relation to the product you offer. For some background information see my previous blogpost. People are searching the internet for news about the virus, so it will help to be specific and to use the keyword Coronavirus with some terms related to the hair you are selling.

Next to this, see if you can offer some discount coupons. People might hesitate to buy goods they do not see as their first priority. We all know you can fight anything from scary spiders to the Wuhan Coronavirus if only your hair looks gorgeous. A discount might do the trick to seduce your client to still buy the hair. Make sure you put a time limit to the offer, otherwise she will still wait to buy the hair until the virus has been long forgotten.

Organize a hair extensions party with China as your special theme. People will be curious to know more about your hair and about china. The unknown has always been attractive. This way people can talk about their fears and share with each other stories. Make sure you have enough knowledge yourself to answer any question about the Coronavirus or ask somebody with a medical background to support you. You will see, once your guests are feeling relaxed, they will be very fast in the buying mode. And what can they buy? Your beautiful hair!

Leave a comment below to tell me how you are fighting the Coronavirus to keep on selling hair!

Never lose a client anymore thanks to the best Channel Sales Strategy

Jan 30, 2020 | Business Ideas, Launch Your Web Store, Sell Online, WholeSale Companies

Sell Hair Everywhere, thanks to the best Channel Sales Strategy

The right Channel Sales Strategy will help you to sell more hair and beauty products, because your products will always be there where your client is. Thanks to your Ideal Client template, you know where she is looking for information about her hair needs. What a petty if she finds an awesome Facebook posting with your hair, but you do not sell the hair on Facebook! She must switch over to your website. 80% chance you will lose her and thus miss a sales opportunity! That is so painful. But no worry, select the right channel sales strategy and you will never lose a client anymore!

You Know Your Client

When you defined the people on the hair market in need of your hair, there is a good chance you used the ideal client template. This template helps you to describe the client you have the solution for her hair needs. You know her demographics; like age, location and some background stuff as family and job. Or hobbies. The ideal client template will also tell you where your client is looking for information that helps her to find the hair she needs. This can be with her friends, on Facebook, the mall, Instagram or blogs. Everybody has her own preference to search for information.

You already use this insight when posting new arrivals, or a post about the latest trends of hair. You know that you must be where your Ideal Client is. Every time when your client goes online, or when she visits the mall, your tailor made message is waiting for her. By doing so, your hair brand will be automatically connected to the solution she is looking for.

For example, she likes to watch images of celebs with the latest hairstyles. Well, you have some posted on Instagram, because you know she uses Instagram a lot. She wants to read about how to maintain artificial hair. She will find you and your brand mentioned in a blog post, because you know she likes to read blog postings. That makes you the expert she will turn to if she has a question.

If she is on Instagram, sell on Instagram

So far so good, this is nearly as good as the art of the deal. But the next step is to make sure your client can not only find the information she is looking for. You also want to help her to buy your hair regardless where she is. If she likes your Instagram post with a smile, she is ready to buy the hair. You must be sure you have a link or channel that will allow her to buy from you at the place she is. This is called Channel Sales Strategy. A strategy where you make sure your clients can buy hair at the place and time, when they are ready to make a purchase. No risk you’ll miss a sales opportunity anymore.

How to make the Channel Sales Strategy work for your hair brand ?

I recommend you combine the Ideal Client Template and the Shopify Sales Channels option to never lose one single sale anymore. Or better to increase your sales. The ideal client Template is part of the How to Sell Hair Extensions all-in-one hair business package, together with a mentor and a handy guide to set up your business.

Shopify has many options to link various channels. Today you can link your Facebook, Amazon, Pinterest, Instagram and messenger application with Shopify. And of course, your own blog. More options are available thanks to outside developers.

Imagine your client will not only see your brand when she is looking for a hair solution, thanks to the Channel Sales Strategy she can also buy right away.

If you leave a comment below this post, I will mail you, for free the Ideal Client template. This way you can see how the all-in-one hair business package can help you start selling. If you are ready to start selling, I recommend checking for the free trial of Shopify to make your channel strategy work!

Create your own Shopify commerce website with a free 14 day trial today!

Darling Selling Hair Successfully in Africa

Dec 29, 2019 | Darling Hair

Home 9 Tag: social media

Darling Selling Hair Successfully in Africa

Darling Selling Hair Successfully in Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa. They are planning to grow in neighbouring countries soon. Profit from the insight Darling gives about their successful strategy. This strategy gave Darling Hair Sales a stable double-digit growth. Adapt the strategy to your own position and give your hair sales a boost.

Darling shows Selling Hair at Double Digits Growth and you?

Darling Hair is a brand owned by Indian Consumer Product giant Godrej. Thanks to this Darling can show double digits sales growth year on year. This gives you a good benchmark to know if your hair business is healthy. If your sales show a growth of 10 percent or less, you can learn from the strategy Darling Selling Hair.

You should never copy the strategy from another company. But there is nothing wrong to learn from others. Especially when the other is the number One Selling Hair in Africa, Darling!

The Overall Strategy

For the Consumer Products in general the mother company of Darling Hair has defined the following. In bold the strategy formulated and after this a translation to your situation. This gives you great suggestions for your own hair selling business.

Keep the Core Business Healthy. This means you should always have the right focus on the business people know your business for;
Create New Growth Boosters. Plan to regularly launch new products or services;
Ensure Adequate Funding to Support Growth. Keep an eye on your cash flow, once a year scrutinize your expenses. Is the supply chain still optimal or can you make things more efficient;
Pursue Sensible Acquisitions to Accelerate Growth. Think about a collaboration with a stylist or salon to broaden your market and to grow faster;
Build a Higher Performing Organisation. Every day see if you can do things more efficient, logistics, purchase, marketing, selling, bookkeeping;
Do Our Part for an Inclusive and Sustainable World, invest and participate in your community

The strategy above shows you can not write your business plan and sit back and relax. You have to work on the company, the world around you, your clients, the competition and the suppliers, changes all the time and you have to adapt to this. Surprise your clients with new products or services. Look for a collaboration with a stylist or salon and work out together a new hair product or service. Do not do the numbers once a year for tax purposes only. But check on a monthly basis how your profit margins evolve, and your commitments where can you cut expenses. Start the conversation with the hair supplier and see how you can get a shorter time to delivery. Do not forget every morning to think what have I done yesterday and what can I do better or faster. And make sure the local community knows you care.

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How does Darling Increase Selling Hair

Darling hair is increasing the sales of the hair and growing their business because the follow the following guidelines (in bold). See my suggestions for you how to put this in place in your own business:

Invest heavily in the brand. Select your logo and brand and be active on social media and local events
Innovate Your Products. Make your products available for everybody. Perhaps you have to organize a special event near a college, or think about other payment methods;
Be Unique. Think about how your products can be unique in solving the needs of your clients. Remember you are not selling hair; you are selling an experience;
Disruptive Pricing. Even if you are a small player, if you have a unique service you can be the price leader for that kind of hair solutions;
World Class Package and Design. Have eye and patient for the details like packaging and design.

No need to allocate all your money to market your brand. You can also use the lost hours in a day to keep the conversation going on Social Media or in real life. Make sure you have an inviting and eye-catching hair style. Go to the mall or places your ideal clients likes to be and get their attention. If people do not buy from you, it is possible they like the hair and they feel they get value for money. But they can not find a parking space or they payment method is not convenient for them. Spend time and energy to look after the slightest detail on packaging and website design. All this will help you to increase the sales of the hair.

Let’s get digital

Darling understands they have to get digital. This is both the marketing and the supply side. They team up with bloggers to be sure they will reach their ideal clients. Clients will find education on the hair and maintenance, but also how to use the tools available. How user friendly is your webstore for somebody who was not involved in the design? Use social listening to catch new trends before there is a standardize solution on the selves.

But also, the shopping experience should be smooth and help your supply chain to be the most efficient possible. Consider a platform like Shopify that provides both Point of Sale solutions for your store and a webstore. But also integrated drop shipping and payment facilities.

See how one point for every sale helps you selling more

Thanks to the digital world we know much more about customer behaviour then ever before. Darlings keeps on working on better measurement and reporting of the crucial drivers of customer behaviour. Do not only use your bookkeeping to know what drives your business. Measure and report behaviour using tools like Google Analytics and the analytic tools of your webstore.

Darling Hair Supply Chain

What is driving you to success and allows you to scale your business is a very efficient supply chain. How does the hair get ordered at the wholesale store. Shipped to you or the fulfillment centre and delivered at the doorstep of your client? This process should have your daily attention. Reduce complexity because this will also reduce the number of errors. On your quest for hair suppliers, take into account their order and delivery processes. Are they able to work out a supply process that supports your business?

The future

Darling has selected the countries they see as the upcoming markets for hair extensions. Next to mature hair markets like Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa and Nigeria. They have identified the countries that will be interesting for the near future, because they see the hair market will expand. Think of countries like Mozambique, Namibia, Angola, Ghana and Senegal. They even work on new distribution models; this all could be very interesting for new entrepreneurs too.

Get the all-in-one hair business package, complete with hair samples and launch your own hair store now

Ready to go for double digits growth and sell hair like Darling?

Are you ready to start selling hair or grow your hair business, leave a comment below or contact me on WhatsApp if you need any support!

How to Sell Your Hair Extensions on YouTube

Nov 25, 2019 | Prepare for the Launch, Sell Online

Video, or movies deliver the most engaging content, and are seen as the best medium to show the beauty of the hair you are selling. Learn how to sell your hair extensions on YouTube.

Draw the attention for your video using a picture

To survive, our brains are trained to make decisions what gets our attention in seconds. When we all lived in the mother continent, Africa, this was the difference between eat or be eaten. To be honest, times did not change that much. Now it is the difference between selling hair or keep on dreaming. You need to make sure, your marketing message gets the attention. If not, nobody will ever see your gorgeous hair.

The thumbnail, the first impression

Make the thumbnail, the image that YouTube will display before people click on it, outstanding. Try to make something special out of it. The thumbnails should be an introduction of what the video will be showing. If there is a mismatch between the video content and the viewers expectation; they will bounce away before they will understand your message. If you want to know if the thumbnail you picked meets viewers expectation, check the drop-off of viewers in the first 10 to 15 seconds of your movie.

The thumbnail should inform the viewer about your brand. If you already have loyal followers and clients, they will be much more interested in your messages. Often before they will click on the message of the competition, unless they are not happy anymore.

Please, make sure the resolution of the image you use for the thumbnail is high enough. You must avoid blurry images. Check how the images look at the various devices, like smartphone, tablet or laptop.

You title should be short and telling everything, or at least make the viewer curious about what you are going to tell in your video.

Launch your own hair store with the all in one hair business package, complete with hair samples

Drive your viewer to desirable action

Great your video is being watched, but you produced the video with a goal. Do you want:

to grow your YouTube channel (subscribe!)

to increase the watch time, which gives your channel a higher ranking

an interaction with your audience

your viewers to visit your website or hair blog.

YouTube helps to drive action from the viewer. These calls to actions are the reason you have published these videos.

YouTube works with cards to:
– promote a video or playlist,
– promote another channel,
– encourage viewers to participate in a poll and
– guide them to your website or blog.

Using the cards help you to get messages on the video that will encourage the user to interact.

You can also edit your movie before you upload the movie to YouTube. Using an editing app will give you more freedom to place your call to actions in a more creative way.

Experiment until you have the best performing video

Producing movies is one of the most creative ways to share your marketing message. You can experiment with how you play the movie, portrait (with black fields on the left and right side, more or less colours and much more variations).

Because every business is different, and every audience is different I advise you to experiment. To see what kind of production has the highest level of engagement.

No need to re produce the Titanic

Your video does not have to entertain your audience for a very long time. Although there are videos of one hour and more, but these are most often instruction videos. For example with the aim to build a website from scratch to the launch.

A short video per topic allows your audience to be selective in what they want to watch. Because of this their engagement will be higher as they choose themselves to see more about the topic.

Do not forget

After you published your video, you need to promote your video. Use all the channels you have available. Like Instagram, Facebook or twitter to tell the world about your latest video.

You can also include your latest release in your newsletter or embed it on the blogpost.

The more channels to share your video, the better. You can even integrate your Youtube channel in your Shopify Hair Store.

Neither should you forget to add the right key words. YouTube is one of the largest search engines, so make sure people will find your story.

Ready to Sell Your Hair Extensions on YouTube

Let me know if you are ready to post a YouTube movie to sell your hair. So I can promote you too!

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