If you want your spa to stand out from the crowd, it’s critical to develop a strong, easily identifiable brand, as a spa and salon consultant, I’ve helped many spa’s establish new branding to help boost sales. Creating a strong brand can often be challenging for smaller businesses, generally because they don’t understand what branding is and how powerful it can be.

What is Your Spa Brand?

Branding is more than just your logo and a colour combination on your promotional literature and website. It’s something that reflects your values and acts as a cornerstone to your business.

It may be that you want to brand your spa as eco-friendly, for example, carefully choosing treatments and products that have a low impact on the environment. Or perhaps you want to focus on certain products or reach a specific audience.

Your branding will include how you set up your spa, the look and feel of it, the type of people you employ and, just as importantly, the type of customer that you want to attract. A strong brand elicits emotion in the people who use your service. They get excited when they book an appointment or see a new spa treatment on offer. They tell their friends about you and sing your praises or look for specific products or a certain level of service.

Branding is about making a meaningful connection with your core audience. It may be something solid like the décor or more ethereal such as how you take part in the local community. But it is important to develop a strong personality that delivers results.

How to Develop Your Spa Brand

It’s essential with branding to see it as an ongoing process rather than something static. You should be constantly taking a step back and looking at your brand from your customer’s point of view. The first question to ask is whether your spa has a crystal-clear personality that distinguishes it from the rest of your sector.

A good idea is to list all the things that make you different and how you are bringing these assets across in your daily operation.

  • Do your communications reflect your brand?
  • Does your logo need a refresh?
  • Does the design and layout of your spa match your branding?
  • Do the values you had when you first opened your spa still hold true?

There are a couple of ways to evaluate the current status of your spa brand. You could get your team together and have a brainstorming session. Another option is to ask your customers how they perceive your brand. This has the added advantage of getting an outsider’s view that isn’t biased.

The other option is to get a marketing team on board to take a look at your current branding, where it works well and how it could be improved.

How to Use Your Brand

A strong brand for your spa should also dictate how you market yourself to your customers. Everything from your website to email newsletters and social media posts needs to have the structural support of your brand behind it. This coherence across all channels is critical if you want to maintain your brand identity and present it to the world in a sustainable way.

Branding guidelines give marketing staff and other people involved at your spa a clear set of rules for producing content and how services are delivered. This includes the promotional messages you send out, the images you use, even the font and style of writing on your signage.

Get it right and a strong brand can have a profound effect on your spa business, whether you own a small business with a local customer base or are looking to expand and grow in the future.