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SEARCHAt Schardein's in Oklahoma City, Steve Schardein meets his salon's digital needs with an in-house digital director and an outside digital consultant.
Schardein’s The Ultimate Salon Experience
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
Owner: Steve Schardein
Digital Director: Sam Charboneau
Digital Consultant: Robyn Healy, Campbell & Company Advertising
Steve Schardein is a successful owner and stylist, and he’s also wise enough to know that computers aren’t his strength. For years, he’s had a solid working relationship with Robyn Healy of Campbell & Company Advertising. Healy leads the charge for many of the salon’s marketing initiatives, including developing and improving the salon’s website and launching the salon’s first social media programs.
Sam Charb.oneau, Steve Schardein and Robyn Healy
A few years back, Healy advised that Schardein bring the bulk of the social media work in-house, and he tapped one of the salon’s most social-savvy stylists, Sam Charboneau, to manage it. Both Schardein and Healy carefully groomed Charboneau and helped her develop the appropriate voice for the salon’s social site. Schardein gave her a few books to read about social media and Healy showed her posts that worked well for the salon for other clients. In addition, Charboneau and Healy have attended several social media seminars together.
With Charboneau’s inside perspective, she’s developed an engaging calendar of Facebook posts—many with accompanying hashtags—which draw on and feature the staff’s talent:
How To Mondays feature quick styling and beauty tips, many which Charoneau finds on Pinterest, which give clients a tidbit of advice while encouraging them into the salon.
Tuesday is Education Day, since it’s also the day the salon closes from 1-3 p.m. for technical, motivational, or success-building education. Charboneau captures an image from the class to share with followers. Schardein feels that regularly showcasing their education stresses that the staff are professional and up-to-date on the latest trends and techniques.
Tip-of-the-Week Wednesday harvests the styling team’s favorite tips and tricks. Charboneau posts them in quotes with attributions to the contributing team member, showcasing their specialty.
Product of the Day Thursday showcases a single product with a quote from the team explaining why they like it. Not only does this post feature the team’s expertise, it also offers clients 10% off that product when they mention the Facebook or Twitter post.
Friday is Fun Day, with lighthearted posts, such as humorous sayings, jokes and cartoons.
“Weekends are for all the extra stuff that is leftwover,” Charboneau says. “For example, we just entered Goldwell’s ColorZoom and and have been posting images from our photoshoots.”
Although Chafboneau only posts an average of once a day, it’s still a huge task on top of her full-time stylist’s responsibilities. So she uses a scheduling program, Sprout Social, to plan and schedule batches of posts on her days off.
While Charboneau focuses on the social side, Healy is hard at work on the salon’s website content and managing the site’s SEO (search engine optimization). Three months ago, the salon has embraced HubSpot, a software designed to generate more traffic, sales and leads. And, Healy also is hard at work building new landing pages, e-books, e-videos and blogs for the site, as well as promotional e-letters for the salon.
“We use HubSpot to measure everything, and while it’s an expensive service, we’ve seen our other clients double or even triple the number of visitors their sites receive,” Healy says. “On our own, we were able to design a site for Schardein’s that attracted 6,000-8,000 visitors a month—now we’re looking to kick it up a notch.”
The analytics from HubSpot is allowing Healy and the salon to tailor their content. “Now, we’re able to see what our audience are interested in and tailor the content for them,” Healy says. “You can have a cool-looking site, but if it doesn’t drive traffic, who cares?”
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