How To Run A Virgin Hair Business With Social Media
You have taken the necessary steps to set up your virgin hair business, right? If you are not sure about them, let’s look at a quick list of the key steps you MUST do before you can start to use the top social media platforms as key business tools to grow your virgin hair business. Although many people think it is easy to setup a business selling virgin hair as a sort of “side gig” by locating vendors, pricing competitively and using free marketing tools like Facebook, there is a lot more to it if you hope to be a success.
In brief, the steps to follow are:
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Naming your company something unique and catchy that also attracts your desired audience
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Registering the name, which one expert explained clearly: “Register your company/name for your state (Google search “register my business {your state}” and get an EIN (employer identification number) through IRS. You can apply for one online or via phone.” Remember you can also be a sole proprietor and use only your own social security number for the business, but that will also mean all of your personal assets are at risk.
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Deciding on your “venue”. Will you operate out of a “brick and mortar” shop or an e-commerce shop online? Will you need storage? Where are you doing packaging and shipping?
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Choosing the type/texture virgin hair you are going to sell (HINT: A variety is the wisest choice) and the format you will sell such as bundles, other pieces, and so on. Are you a B2B supplier or vendor? Are you supplying people do will do weaves, make extensions or are you selling full products? You can operate in both ways, it just takes planning and research to do it well.
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Locating vendors and sources for virgin hair and other products
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Figuring out your prices by looking a competition, calculating all of your out of pocket costs (rental space, packaging supplies, marketing, and so on), and determining the best price for the quality of virgin hair you will sell
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Setting up your merchant accounts and commerce resources
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Branding and marketing your company…and it is THIS STEP that is the point of the rest of this article!
Branding Your Company Effectively
It does not matter if you are using a real-world storefront or operating entirely online, if you do not brand your business properly, you won’t attract the ideal customers. Think of this as the first step in using social media to sell successfully.
Your brand is your website, logo, and even the packaging and tags you use. It is also YOU as the official face or representative of the business. What “voice” are you going to use? Will you be fun and lighthearted? Maybe you want to be technical and market the advantage of virgin hair? Whatever voice you choose, be consistent with it in marketing messages, social media posts, blogs and ads.
As you make your way through your business startup steps, you can really identify the different matter of your brand and discover how to set yourself apart from the competition. This is incredibly important because you’ll have greater success on sites like Instagram and Facebook when you have a “unique proposition” for your customers.
Your Unique Proposition
If you have been reading up on marketing through social media, you might already have heard a lot about unique propositions. This is important because it is the information you use to:
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Identify your ideal buyers
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Figure out what to say to them AND how to say it
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Be ahead of the competition with issues like trends and pricing
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Continually grow, refine and expand your market
Before you start to market or make yourself known on social media, take the time to figure out your unique proposition. Does it relate to the way you package products? Maybe it is the type of virgin hair, or its source? Perhaps you offer lots of free advice about using your products – such as Instagram tutorials.
It is only with a unique proposition that you can pass by the competitors, find ideal buyers, and create a brand, voice and message that will speak directly to them. Next, it is time start creating those social media profiles.
Social Media for Your Virgin Hair Business
Virgin hair is a volume business. How do you sell volume? You use the world’s largest marketplaces, such as the internet (through your website), but also the billions of people using social media. While it is great that social media lets you have access to so many potential buyers, the competition is pretty fierce. To overcome that hurdle, you need to create “target” customer profiles and then use the different settings and options within social media to speak directly to them.
Pair this direct contact with your unique proposition and brand…and you are sure to succeed!
Keep in mind that a blog should be considered a key component of your social media work. This allows you to create a steady stream of content that you can then call attention to through a good calendar of social media posts. For example, write a blog about the hottest looks or the advantage of virgin hair. Post it to the blog and then share that to your social media sites. Make a Pinterest board about each of your regular blog topics, i.e. Trends, Styles, Tips, etc. and make each image “shoppable”. Do the same with Instagram images and embed links in Tweets to send readers to a landing page or product page.
It is not complicated, but it takes planning and research. It also takes listening, and social media is ideal for feeding you the exact information you need to know about what buyers want, what’s hot, what’s not and how to begin promoting your products.
The Best Platforms for Virgin Hair Sales
Let’s learn a bit about each of the most important platforms, and how you can make the most of them:
To begin using Facebook, just add a business page to your personal page and rely on your existing connections to help spread the word. However, you must also take steps to make it easy for your viewers to buy directly from the Facebook app. That means:
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Selecting a goal: Do you just want to develop brand awareness? Maybe it is time to get people engaged with your website? Perhaps you need store visits?
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Creating a Facebook Ad based on your goals
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Linking Facebook to other apps to help you connect with more and more buyers (You can connect to Instagram, Messenger, and other apps once you make your initial page)
You can incorporate social selling into a Twitter account, but it is different from Facebook because it is all about “engagement” rather than promoting products, sales, offers and so on through Facebook posts.
With Twitter you must build a high-quality profile, which means spending time “listening” to your prospective buyers and building a listening audience. You must then learn how to use the right hashtags for that audience and use what you learn to write engaging tweets. They shouldn’t be direct sales pitches, though. Instead, make your tweets relevant and show your audience why following you on all of your social channels (Facebook, Instagram, and so on), make sense.
Rather than anticipating sales from your Twitter activities, think of it as free marketing that enables you to build a large and qualified audience of potential buyers. They might be sent to your website landing page, your blog, other social media…the point is that they see you as relevant and worthy of their attention. You get emails, contact details and lots of leads for free!
Just remember, it is about listening as well as being heard. So, follow your followers and always respond quickly and professionally.
Think of as a combination of Facebook and Twitter. You can use image-based posts but all of the posts you create can be “shoppable”. Rather than using images of products, though, one of the best methods of selling on Instagram is to create an appealing image that features areas that viewers can tap or click to make a purchase!
You will have to build a product catalog to connect to the account and then tag products in posts, but your buyers never have to leave Instagram to make the purchase. In other words, if you use the same method of building an audience of active followers on Instagram, with the use of a shoppable post, you can seamlessly turn followers into paying customers.
NOTE: Facebook owns Instagram and may eventually link content between sites…it is worth watching!
Pinterest actually beat Instagram in the shoppable posts category. However, before selling here you have to have an ecommerce store that you can link to your profile. The site works well with Shopify and BigCommerce, among others.
Once you have your account and have linked an ecommerce platform, you create posts with “rich pins” that let viewers buy directly through the site.
If you use the same audience building methods on Pinterest as with other sites and encourage website and social media followers to also add your Pinterest profile, it allows you to make the most of the content you create.
This is a less preferred spot for sales because it takes a lot of work to be effective. The experts over at Inc. offer a lengthy tutorial about selling through LinkedIn without also offending your audience. They talk about creating a client-facing profile, engaging with the right audience, tagging and organizing your followers, and using lots of content to steer followers into your sales funnel.
If you are going B2B instead of selling to consumers, this might be a good approach. Otherwise, it’s best to focus on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest to start selling virgin hair effectively and successfully.
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