4 Tips To Grow Your Beauty Biz in 2023

I can feel the determination from all of my fellow beauty biz babes to start the year off strong! A new year can feel like a fresh slate to try new things and improve. As it should! You have twelve months ahead of you to take the lessons, mistakes and accomplishments from the previous year and apply that knowledge to your strategies moving forward. The reality is that what has worked in the past may not work now. I try to take some time at the beginning of each year to take into account and reflect on what worked best to move the needle in my business, where I can improve and how I can change the way I work my business in order to move to the next level. The reason I have gotten to where I am today is because of what I did in the past, but I know that if I want to climb to that next level, sometimes that means I have to do something I haven’t done before or even go about things differently altogether.

Below I will be walking you through the four tips I have for you to grow your business in 2023 so that you can reach greater heights and accomplish more of the goals you have envisioned for yourself this year.

Delegation & Hiring 

This is for the biz babe that is just feeling burnt out AF! Maybe you’re starting to get into a position where you're so busy that it’s hard to do some, if not all, of your tasks. If you find yourself in this place in your business, it’s time to hire, girl! If you don’t hire now you will undoubtedly stifle your potential growth. Which is the exact opposite of what we are trying to accomplish this year, right!?

When going over my goals at the beginning of the year, I alway make sure to check in with how I envision myself as my most elevated self and what I see myself doing within my business. As our businesses grow, our roles within the business should be changing as well. It’s important to understand what role YOU want to play in the future of your business so that you can know which next steps to take in order to bring that to fruition. What I typically will do to get a clearer vision of this is ask myself what I need to do today to get out of the roles that I don’t see myself doing in the future. I always reverse engineer that ‘ish by thinking first about the end goal and working backwards! A few of the tasks you can consider handing over to a new hire could be:

• Social media/marketing help
• Bookkeeping
• Email & DM delegation

I want to acknowledge the fact that delegating tasks, especially for the first time when you’re brand new to hiring, can feel extremely scary. The practice of letting go of the control of something you’ve worked so hard up until this point to build is hard. I won’t lie about that, it will feel difficult! Every entrepreneur has gone through those feelings of potentially having a loss of control when they start to delegate tasks in their business.

When going through this process, I want you to remember these words: “In order to grow, you have to let go.” You can only sustain being a one woman show for so long! Eventually doing it ALL will start to wear on you to the point that you don’t even find enjoyment in the work you’re doing anymore because you’re so bogged down by the actual work that you’re not able to focus on creativity and growth activities that will take you to the next level. Think about the tasks that you least enjoy doing or that you know you can hand over to someone who will do it better than you can, and start that delegation process. I promise, this will feel freeing once you take the step, so just do it!

Marketing

The more that I learn about marketing, the more successful my business becomes. Engrain that sentence into your mind! This is why you need to find a way to put your marketing hat on, even if this means delegating it out to someone you hire. Although I greatly recommend that you do take it upon yourself to learn marketing tactics for your business before handing over the reins entirely to someone else. If this is something you just hate putting the energy into with a burning passion, it’s better that you hire someone to do it than just not do it at all. Neglecting the marketing side of your business because you don’t understand it or enjoy it will only cause you to have difficulty in reaching those goals you envision. 

When we talk about marketing, we are referencing:

• Your website
• Your social media 
• Branding

Everything that has to do with your business involves marketing. There’s really no way of getting around it. You can have the most massive passion for your craft and be the most talented artist in your town, but if no one knows about what you do then all of that talent and passion won’t be able to produce the type of success you’re looking to accomplish. This is why we see artists in all segments of the beauty industry who don’t have the level of certifications, knowledge and expertise as someone else, but they have more business because they know how to market themselves and they’re extremely consistent with putting themselves and their business out there. 

Online presence

Marketing! We just mentioned how important it is to effectively market your business so your ideal client can find you. What also goes along with that is understanding where you should be focusing your initiatives. Once you find out how your clients are finding you, you can then go in and create a system that makes it that much easier for people in your target market to come across your services and book you. 

It’s also not just enough to get the lead to you, but like I always say, “the fortune is in the follow up!” Most people that find you won’t book with you or buy what you’re selling the first time they come across it. Getting a sale can take time spent on nurturing that lead until they build enough trust to invest with you. That’s why creating a system to follow up with those leads that you draw in is crucial to making sales! One of the worst things you can do for the growth of your business is to fall through on following up with the leads that make it known they have interest in your offers. Hubspot notes that, “according to a study by Brevet, 80% of sales require an average of five follow-ups in order to close the deal.” Of course we don’t want to hound our leads for the next decade, but remember that people are busy and sometimes they need a nudge (or five) to finally commit. 

Refocus With Social Media

The algorithm does not favor you, queen! Unfortunately, unless we are paying for ads, just posting on social media is not going to move the needle as much as we hope it will. I know that most of the social media advice follows along the lines of posting consistently on social media in order to grow. Although it would be wonderful if we could just post on social media every day and that would be the social game changer we are looking for, it just doesn’t work like that. Most people aren’t even seeing your posts. So, where does this leave us with taking advantage of our social presence when it comes to growing our business?

It’s time to refocus these efforts! This refocus should take the form of relationship building. Afterall, it is called social media for a reason. If you’re constantly just posting on your page without interacting with others, you’re not going to see the growth you’re hoping for. I also recommend getting creative with this strategy! Hop into people’s inboxes and offer them a compliment or introduce yourself. Promote other people’s work and add value in any way that you can! The energy put into social media in 2023 should be toward being a connector with a focus on relationship building. This is something that takes a little more intention and time, but relationship building will be what helps your business see growth online. 

Email & Text Marketing

The money is in the mailbox! I have a sad short story for you. A while ago, my X-TAN Instagram account was hacked and I lost everything! All of my followers, all of my content, everything was gone. Social media accounts and our followers are not something we can count on when it comes to growing our business because we don’t own it. Your account could get hacked like mine was or the platform could become obsolete. We know that social media trends and new apps are popping up all the time. This is why it’s important to move away from putting so much reliance on your socials in order to market your business.

When you build an email and text message list, you own that ish! Those emails and phone numbers that you can use to keep your leads and clients in the loop is something that no one can interrupt or shut down. These forms of marketing will help you keep in contact with your people so you can continue to grow in 2023. Not only that, but it feels more personal to your clients and prospects and you already know that the people who sign up for this type of contact are in your warm market and are already interested in what you’re offering.  

I go into these four tips in more detail on the Beauty Business Babes Podcast, so if you enjoyed this blog, make sure to head over to the Podcast to get a more in-depth run down of these four ways to grow your biz this year. And don’t forget to subscribe to iTunes or Spotify!

Xoxo,

Kelly