362 The New Rules of Salon Marketing in the Age of AI with Phil Evans

[upbeat music] Hello, and welcome to today's episode of the Grow My Salon Business Podcast. I'm your host, Anthony Whittaker. And whether this is your first time or perhaps you're a regular listener, either way, it's great to have you here with us today. Now, today, we are going to talk about digital marketing, and specifically, where salon owners should really be putting their time, their energy, and of course, their money. Because, well, there's no shortage of things that we're told that we should be doing, whether that's Instagram or TikTok or Google or websites or reviews or SEO and now, of course, AI. But which of those things are actually driving new clients into the salon? And perhaps more importantly, as the way people search for salons continues to change, what should we be doing differently? Well, my guest today has some fascinating new data that helps answer those questions. So with that said, let me introduce returning guest, Phil Evans. Phil is the founder of Salon Guru. So welcome back, Phil. It's always good to have you on because the digital world of marketing is constantly changing, so I love having you on to keep our listeners informed and up to date.

Thank you, Anthony. It's good to be back.

Well, I'm really looking forward to today's, uh, recording because I know there's a lot of new stuff that we've got to talk about. So Phil, can I just begin by saying that the focus of this episode is to debrief a report that you and the team at Salon Guru have produced. So can I get you to start with what the report actually is and what the aims and objectives are, and importantly, where people can find it?

Yes, okay. So I created the company 20 years ago, and we only look after hair and beauty salons, the majority are hair salons. And we've been doing it for 20 years, and we have about 250 current clients. In the last 12 months, our salon websites had 4.6 million visitors. That means we can really measure the changes and the key n-numerics, the statistics that are influencing what those clients are doing to find the salon. So that's the starting point, enormous numbers of traffic and visitors. Uh, so we were analyzing in great detail what are the most important factors, what are they doing, what are they searching for, how are they interacting, and how has that changed from where we were a year ago and five years ago? So I think that was the purpose of the report because although we may have a gut feeling how AI may be affecting things, we wanted to see the actual proof because it not only informs our clients of a direction they should take, but it informs us as the, as the expert for our clients to develop their website, their SEO, and their answer to AI.

Yeah. Okay. So that, that sounds like a, you know, putting a report together like that sounds like a huge amount of work. You know, you sort of sit down at the beginning with some assumptions, I suppose, uh, a-and you're gonna put this report together. But when you actually dig into it, I'm sure you find some things that are maybe surprising, even for someone like you who's, you know, at the coalface with this all the time. So let me ask you, what was there, uh, that surprised you when