Are You Building A Beauty Business Or A Beauty Brand?
Jenny opened her lashes extensions salon and did an amazing job in marketing her services on Instagram. Her business is booming. She gets amazing reviews. Everybody wants to collaborate with her. She’s almost like an influencer. But there’s one problem. Jenny has no time to do anything else but work. Jenny is not feeling well, despite her success. She has a toddler and mom guilt keeps her up all night.
Can you relate with Jenny? Is your beauty business booming and now you’re starting to feel like this is too much?
Keep reading, ‘cause we are giving you our ultimate recipe to make money doing what you love, without losing your life.
Grow A Beauty Brand- Not Just A Beauty Salon
While brand and business overlap and work together, they have different purposes and goals.
For instance, if Jenny keeps growing her lash extensions salon without making changes to account for the growth, she will be out of business sooner than later. The best way to avoid this pitfall is by having a business model where Jenny considers, at some point, scaling her business with more people, more income streams, and more ways to leverage her audience.
This is where building a brand makes sense and can become another source of income itself down the line.
Business vs. Brand
In the digital-everything era, a beauty salon should not be limited to the revenue they can generate from hair treatments. Bossbabe.inc is a great example to picture a big-picture of how far your brand can go.
What would you do if you have a community with 3.2 million followers?
Just imagine… Your great work being amplified, to a point that doing lashes is a small piece of what you do. You would have several other streams of income that are on autopilot. With the right systems in place, you can earn passive income.
While building a brand is very exciting, you might not have all the resources you need in order to take your new beauty business to that level. However, that doesn’t mean that you don’t have this phase of turning your business into a brand-based model. You can consider this as part of your business model, and make a plan to scale. The only way to reach a brand goal is to go through the steps to grow proportionally and arrive at your goal with the supportive tools required.
Business Path
You will probably pick the business path for your starting point as it is the more common and well-known path.
If you decide you want to stick with the business side, for now, it’s important to have a clear business model. In other words, how do you intend to continue making income? Is your industry going to stay profitable for years to come? Are your products competitive now, and will you need to catch up to new trends in a few years? Do you want to stay in the beauty industry or branch out?
Keep in mind that building a business also includes building a great reputation. You certainly want to build a strategy to give your business a solid presence in both, online and offline.
If you want to keep selling for a profit, you must learn how to leverage your position and pivot when needed. Your business might need multiple brand faces to keep selling as not all products work equally well in all market sectors. You might sell mainly beauty products, but specialty wet wipes might get more sales in the child care market. That does not mean there is anything wrong with your products or marketing, simply that some items will always perform better in some places. Take an objective look at your business and consider how you can leverage what you have built to make something longer-lasting. Your unique business situation and goals will act as guides so you can find the best path forward.
Making your income strictly from a business means you will need help at some point. Hiring your first employees is tricky because you want people who are equally passionate about the business, but you also need skilled workers who will legitimately help you. Be very clear with your job listings and include details that you want in a dream team. There is nothing wrong with not hiring people as well. This is your business, so only bring on employees who add to your goals rather than hold you back.
Brand Path
Making your income off of branding is a bit of a less straightforward path, but it is possible. Income from branding is typically closer to passive income with royalties than active profits like selling products. If you are not actively selling something, you must figure out passive income with your skills. There are a few different ways to pull income out of your business, but there is rarely a single path that will replace your typical income.
In the brand path, content creation becomes the main focus. You’ll become a voice for a community. And the quicker you polish your ability to create amazing content, the quicker you will experience growth.
You are an interesting person! So you might as well make money from sharing your thoughts on a website you built. Put your personality to work and show people how great you are while getting paid.
Nowadays we have plenty of options to raise funds to create content. Patreon and other subscription models let creators make what they want to make, and fans pay to support the content directly, with some fans paying more to access certain content. Many blogs, online stores, and all varieties of websites have transitioned to a subscription model and found great success.
The Subscription Model
The brand path also includes the subscription model. Here, the main ingredient is not just the content, but the traffic that you generate as a brand, from your raving fans.
An excellent way to check if your website could pull off the paid model is by checking your website traffic. To get enough money from subscriptions to act as income, you need enough visitors in the first place. Look at your website metrics to determine if a community-based payment model could work for your goals.
Growing your social media audience will be key, if you are planning to build a subscription model at some point. Create dedicated campaigns to grow your followers using Instagram- it’s the platform we recommend our beauty clients.
Looking at your possible futures is always scary, but research and planning can make it less intimidating. You have a beauty business now, but what do you want to build later, and what do you want your actions now to lead to later? You can choose any path, but at some point, you should choose between business and brand for your future goals as growing both at the same time is too much for a single person.
How to pick which business model is best for your beauty business?
By now we have given you plenty of options. If you’re confused, no worries. We are here to help!
We are a boutique firm specializing in helping small businesses get the attention and success they deserve and then create a plan that will help you reach your goals. With forensic marketing tools, we can take an objective look at your current status and work with you to create a plan that will address your unique pain points to get your business where you want it to go, even if that means leaving the business aspects behind.
