How clients
choose a salon.

A haircut is the only thing most people buy that they then wear on their head for six weeks. That's why new clients are cautious. The fear of a bad result is stronger than the hope of a great one, which is loss aversion at work.

There's a legal safety net. Services must be provided with due care and skill, and the ACCC's own industry guide uses a beauty example: acrylic nails that fall off within an hour would be a major failure, so the client can choose a refund. But nobody books a salon hoping to use their consumer rights. They'd rather not take the risk at all.

So the job of your marketing isn't to shout. It's to lower the risk of saying yes to a stranger with scissors.

Salon marketing advice usually treats every service the same. Clients don't. How often they come, how much is at stake and what they check first all change with the service. These are typical patterns, not data from one study.

People trust proof from someone like them. That's social proof, and in beauty it's literal: a curly-haired client in Newcastle scrolling a feed of sleek blonde blowouts reads it as 'not for me'. Sort your photos by hair type, length, skin tone and starting colour, and label each one with the service and the stylist.

Keep the photos honest. Heavy filters set expectations you can't meet in the chair. Advertising standards also bar portraying an unrealistic ideal body image, or features that can't be achieved through healthy practices. For anyone registered with Ahpra doing cosmetic work, the 2025 guidelines go further: real images without misleading edits, and a warning that results vary.

Video helps here. A ten-second clip of a colour moving in daylight is harder to fake than a still, and clients know it.

Reviews matter for ranking as well as trust. Google says prominence, one of its local ranking factors, is based partly on your review count, and suggests replying to them.

The rules are strict, and a lot of salons break them without meaning to. Google bans offering discounts or free services for reviews, and asking selectively for positive ones. The ACCC says any incentive must apply regardless of whether the review is positive or negative, and be clearly disclosed, and that removing a genuine bad review can itself mislead. In one case, the Federal Court ordered a platform to pay $600,000 in penalties for publishing reviews businesses wrote themselves.

What works instead: ask every client, at the desk or in the booking system's follow-up message, the same way. Reply to the bad ones calmly and fix what you can. A 4.7 with replies reads more real than a perfect 5.0 with none.

A low 'from' price is an anchor. It sets what the client expects to pay. When the bill for a full head of foils on long, thick hair is double that, the client feels tricked, even if the work is great. That's anchoring working against you.

Give ranges, and say what moves the price: length, thickness, time, toner, treatments. A short line like 'most first balayage appointments in our Erina salon land between these two figures, and we confirm the price at your consult' does more than a menu of 40 items.

The ACCC's guide for personal services says suppliers should explain their terms clearly before the sale, including how prices can change. It's good law and good marketing.

Plenty of first bookings happen on a booking page, not over the phone. If the link is buried in your Instagram bio and missing from Google, you lose the people who were ready.

Booking marketplaces bring new clients, at a price. Fresha, for example, lists a 20% one-time commission on brand new clients from its marketplace, with a minimum fee per client, and no fee on returning clients. That can be cheap if they rebook, and dear if they don't. The hub's new client worth calculator does the sums.

One detail for home studios and appointment-only rooms: Google's guidelines say businesses that operate only by appointment shouldn't list business hours. Make the booking link do that job instead.

Pick your main service and tick what a stranger could find without messaging you.

The first booking is a trial. The real choice is the second one, and it's made in the chair: did the result match the photos, did the price match the quote, was booking the next visit easy?

That's why I'd put rebooking at the till, and a reminder at the right gap for the service, ahead of almost any new campaign. A barber client who'd come every four weeks and a colour client every eight are both worth far more than their first visit. Marketing that only counts new bookings misses most of the money.