Good Hair Days & condition

Good Hair Days

Any fashion maven will tell you that long hair is like a little black dress: it never goesout of style. Natalie Brady knows this better than most.“I used to specialize in cuts,” Natalie explains, “but then in 2004 I found out I had a real knack for doing hair extensions and changed gears entirely. Since there’s a huge demand for high-quality extensions, I saw an opportunity to start my own business.” “And I saw dollar signs,” adds Franky, Natalie’s husband. “The demographics in our part of Florida were very supportive of a hair extension salon. With Natalie’s incredible talent and my moral support, there was nothing to stop us.” The couple rented a 12x12 room in the back of another salon and set a goal of getting one new client per week. “Franky was my assistant,” Natalie recalls. “It would be an understatement to say we started small and built Florida Hair Extensions from the ground up. But we knew the interest was there – we just needed a way to capture it.”

Letting their hair down

“Franky was great at handing me hairpins and sweeping up hair, but I felt his talents could be put to better use,” Natalie continues. “So I hired another stylist and had Franky work on our website. Then I told him to explore online advertising.” “I don’t mean to split hairs,” Franky says, drawing quotation marks in the air, “but I believe that was my idea. After I built the site, I moved some of our advertising budget to Google AdWords™ as an experiment. I had a hunch people in the area were searching online for hair extensions. I was right. As soon as we turned on our ads, four clients a month became twelve a month.” Encouraged by the results, Franky moved the salon’s entire advertising budget online and increased his AdWords spend from $30 to $150 a day. “I got more out of my AdWords campaign than from all the money I was spending on other forms of advertising. We got so much business that we had to move into a 1,600-square foot space.”

Hair today, gone tomorrow

The state of Florida is synonymous with seasonal migration. As temperatures drop throughout the Northeast, flocks of snowbirds make their way down the coast to soak up the sun – and to lengthen their locks. “With AdWords, we can modify our advertising campaign to reflect seasonal business trends,” Franky points out. “During our slower months, we show our ads within a 50-mile radius to reach more people. When business picks up in the winter, we only show our ads within a 20-mile radius. The more precisely we target, the more our clickthrough rate increases.” And best of all, we don’t end up spending any more than usual,” Natalie adds. “We can set our own budget and change it whenever we want. That type of control.

Good condition

With every new extension, the Bradys’ salon empire is growing. They now employ 26 stylists and recently began using AdWords to promote new locations in Houston and Las Vegas. “Our business grew 425 percent from 2005 to 2006,” Franky reports. “I would attribute about 75 percent of that growth to AdWords. As you can guess, it’s earned me a lot of points with my dear wife.” “Well, he did try one other advertising method that worked just as well,” Natalie clarifies. “He got a guy on stilts wearing a huge ’80s-style wig to stand outside our door. That got us lots of attention – but it’s not the kind of thing you do every day. I told him to stick with AdWords.”