Hair Business 101: The Difference Between Marketing, Advertising, and Branding

Hair Business 101: The Difference Between Marketing, Advertising, and Branding

Do You Know The Difference?

In the new digital age, these three things help you secure customers and obtain sales. However, for some reason marketing, advertising, and branding are interchanged and can confuse you when it comes to creating a marketing strategy. This is because advertising can increase your awareness of a brand. But the action of branding a business is pursued when brand loyalty causes customers to speak on behalf of your brand or continuously purchase from you because they enjoy your product. Both advertising and branding are a part of the marketing process, which makes it very easy to reference one while meaning the other. Keep reading for definitions of each component and tips on how to combine them to better market your hair business.

Marketing

Unfortunately, when asked, a lot of people refer to marketing as advertising on social media. That is because paying an influencer to post your hair or lashes is currently the new trend that a lot of hair businesses use to help generate sales and it works. Nevertheless, this is not the definition of marketing; it is actually a marketing tactic. Marketing is the umbrella under which your business strategizes to make your products meet your ideal customer, and it is a process. Marketing is not just one action. It encompasses several steps including:

Step #1

Knowing your audience and who is going to go through with buying your hair.

Step #2

Understanding the products and in this case, hair types that your buyer is going to purchase.

Step #3

Pricing the hair and accurately estimating at what dollar amount it will sell.

Step #4

Promoting your company as a whole and hair product using blogs, social media, PR, paid to advertise, and placing these promotions places that your customer frequents physically or digitally.

Step #5

Selling to the customer that you pinpointed in the beginning. Now that you see the steps that it takes to successfully market a product you know that you need a plan. This marketing plan should include statics of other hair companies sales, your demo, and realistic sales objectives that you can hit in three, six, and nine months to determine the success of your marketing efforts. Pro Tip: It is essential that your marketing department has some sort of connection to the development of the line or product you plan to sell. This way, they can have a jump start on identifying the key factors or selling points of those products. A marketing department with no connection to the product is a promotions department. This exposure to the product allows them to create full-blown marketing campaigns to appeal to your customer.

Advertising

Advertising is the action part of marketing. It involves crafting a message to send to your target customer and then finding ways to get that message to them via paid media, newspaper, television, radio, or any other medium. Advertising is aggressive, and usually, the one message that your company is focusing on will be blasted and re-blasted across all of the mediums selected until you hit the sales goal for that campaign.

Creating the Perfect Ad

To create advertising that will work for your hair company, start with a theme! This theme should be your company’s or product’s unique identifier. For example, if you are a fan of the Raw Indian hair offered by Private Label Extensions and you are introducing it as a new line for your hair brand, you would want to focus on the hair’s ability to color up to a 613 Russian blonde. The Brazilian and the Malaysian hair cannot lighten to this color, and that would catch the eye of a custom that is in the market for versatility with their hair. Then figure out how you are going to communicate that theme, it could be with a snappy one-liner or an image, but it just has to be something that stands out to the customer you defined in your marketing plan. After you have crafted your message, give it some credibility; using the same example from above you can edit a 30-second video showing the hair going through a coloring process. This is a necessary evil for advertising because people are natural born skeptics. Advertising is used to sell, and your customer knows that not everyone is truthful when they want your money so you should keep this in mind when crafting your campaign. No one wants to do business with a company that they cannot trust. The last thing that you need to complete your ad it something that a lot of companies forget: contact information. Dot no invest hundreds or thousands of dollars into a campaign and forget to include your web address, telephone number, or social media handle(s) within the campaign.

Branding

Branding is the creation of your company’s perception. This perception should be unique to foster an obvious connection between you and your customer. You can create it in two ways, through the physical characteristics that are used to identify your brand and the response to doing good business and professional actions.

Tangible Branding Tools

The colors you use, your logo, the font type, and layout of your website is all “marketing” by way of physical branding. Because the retail hair industry is considered saturated by many, use your branding to evoke certain feelings for your company that other hair businesses may not have. For example, customers naturally associate colors like purple and pink with the fashion and beauty market. Traditional branding may entice you to use brand colors in that family. However, you may want to add to that by ensuring that your target audience sees your company as not only a beauty vendor but professional. Use factors like how clean your logo is if your establishment is clean and convenient for their use, and how your product is packaged to push this narrative. When you invest in quality branding, you are not only showing your customer that your company is on trend with your industry. But you are also saying that they are investing in quality when they purchase from you and you appreciate their dollar. Some additional steps that you can take to make sure you are creating a quality brand image via the physical product aspect are:

Step #1

Ensure your brand colors work well together, and your logo is apparent on all branding and packaging materials. If you cannot afford to get, the logos printed on your bags at this time invest in bags that are your brand colors.

Step #2

Invest in a website that works quickly and has a clean layout. Troubleshoot all e-commerce issues as soon as possible so that your consumer feels safe spending money with you.

Step #3

Source your hair from vendors who take pride in their product. We have evolved as a hair industry, and the corn chips hair smell is no longer acceptable.

Step #4

To set yourself apart from other brands include a thank you card with your orders.

Intangible Branding Tools

You should pursue branding techniques outside of what you can control to connect with the ideals of your target audience. Your brand is built by things like customer reviews and their promotion of your company to outside sources through feedback. Intangible branding tools impact the way prospective buyers who are helping you build an image via word of mouth, view your company. Examples of what you can do to impact the perception of your brand include:

Example #1

Practicing and demanding quality customer service to every customer. Regardless of the dollar amount they are spending, you should treat every customer like royalty. This ensures that they not only come back, but they bring people with them and lets your customer know that your company treats people with respect.

Example #2

Launch goodwill sales or projects that cater to your community. Let people know that you care about significant events in their lives. A lot of companies use this idea when doing their back to school hair sales; it is a big win for hair companies that cater to mothers of older school-aged children, or college students.

Example #3

Keep introducing new products and hair types to show your target audience that you are ahead of the trends, and they should shop with your first.

Can You Tell Them Apart?

Although all these initiatives work with each other to boost your company’s image they are not the same. To maximize the effectiveness of your marketing campaign overall you need to know how to use each of these elements to get more sales from your hair extensions company. Know that advertising will increase the reach of your brand. Branding drives the style of not only the campaigns that you create, but also how the outside world sees your brand, and marketing uses both of these tools along with other things to complete your sales objectives. Comment below and let us know how your marketing campaign will involve marketing, advertising, and branding to reach your company goals!
Back to blog

Leave a comment

Please note, comments need to be approved before they are published.

Featured product