In-store shopping might be perceived as increasingly becoming a thing of the past, but Aussie professional haircare, salon, and piercing retailer Hairhouse’s new omnichannel campaigns suggest otherwise.
Partnering with Meta, its Facebook advertising campaigns have been driving a surge of Gen Z customers to its franchises. B&T spoke with Hairhouse head of marketing and customer engagement Alina Malkin and DataSauce strategy lead Aaron Mudford to learn more about how Hairhouse is tapping Meta’s latest advertiser tool to drive offline shopping experiences and connect with Gen Z customers.
Whether it be from disillusionment with online shopping or a nostalgic yearning for real-life experiences, younger customers are increasingly drawn to in-store shopping. This presents an interesting behavioural shift that marketers would do well to leverage.
Leading the charge is Hairhouse; the retailer has seen 60-70 per cent of its revenue come from in-store purchases in campaigns using Meta’s ‘beta’ tool, a significant increase from previous campaigns. Meta’s omnichannel ad platform ‘beta’ is a solution that lets advertisers drive in-store and website sales using a single sales campaign. It includes new store location ad features to connect shoppers with their nearest store locations.
Employee-generated content is one of the initiatives launched by Hairhouse since using Meta’s beta, which enables customers to connect with their nearest physical stores, striking a balance between online content and in-store experiences.
The kind of data offered by Meta’s latest initiative is particularly useful for a franchise business such as Hairhouse, which has over 105 stores across Australia, 98 of which are owned by franchises.
“Our objective is twofold–keeping customers and the franchise happy. Driving customers to the website is great, but customers need to be driven to the stores, too,” Malkin said.
“For Hairhouse, being a franchise business, we’ve traditionally experienced challenges in measuring ROI for offline sales when we invested the franchisee’s funds in digital marketing. In the past, it’s been much easier to determine ROAS for online sales, but we’ve had less visibility on ROAS on driving customers back to physical stores, which is why the ability to track omnichannel sales/ROAS through Meta’s tools has been key for us.
“We want to ensure that we get the transparency of that omnichannel and use our marketing funds to invest into specific marketing activity,” she added.
Using beta in Hairhouse’s campaigns, the retailer has seen 8.94 return on ad spend for offline revenue, a sharp increase from the usual averages prior to tapping beta, 4.15.
“When we typically run these campaigns, we usually see much less reported from the in-store conversion part,” Mudford said.
Hairhouse spends most of its digital advertising budget on Facebook, accounting for 70 per cent of Hairhouse’s ad spend, with the rest allocated to Instagram.
Customers have lined up outside Hairhouse’s stores from 5 am to receive free products, and “without a doubt, they always hear about it through Facebook. It’s that targeted advertising within that radius of the stores. From a qualitative perspective, we know it definitely delivers,” Malkin said.
“For us, the figures are actually showing that conversion happens on Facebook. There is a perception that we should be pushing everything towards Instagram,” Malkin added.
Connecting With Gen Z
Hairhouse conducted a consumer research survey across all loyalty program customers. It found that customers value hair health consultations and in-store professional services offered by the retailer.
Hairhouse recently introduced its ‘Powered by Professionals’ platform to promote in-store expertise and personalised service, which Malkin and Mudford emphasised are key engagement drivers for Gen Z.
“We are seeing a lot of younger customers are now shopping in-store, and we feel like that’s really shifted. Many of Hairhouse’s own team members, who are in their 20s, want to go back in store as well. It’s an important insight that we wanted to include as we focus on in-store transactions,” Malkin said.
Hairhouse is experimenting with fun and engaging employee-generated content on TikTok and Instagram that connects users to their closest stores. It is tapping its own employees, the majority of whom are professionally trained hairdressers.
“There was a specific store where we had content featuring staff that worked there so customers could meet the team. That saw a huge uptake in terms of engagement. You’re identifying a specific store location, targeting people who live around it and showing the team working there. Connecting all those points can really help it be quite personalised”.
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The retailer also creates educational content by collaborating with suppliers and brands, and utilising their experts in content creation, rather than focusing solely on promotional content.
“It’s not just about promotions, it’s education and to some point, it’s just fun, engaging content,” said Malkin. “With TikTok, we make a lot of dance videos. It’s not relevant to haircare, but it’s fun and it engages younger customers. We’ve now got a lot of content created on the day because it’s on trend, rather than creating it four weeks in advance. It’s OK to not be super planned, we want to be on the fly and see what’s trending”.
Advice to Other Marketers
While Hairhouse has seen successful results using beta in its campaigns, the tool might not be intuitive to many marketers. Malkin and Mudford reiterated what to keep top of mind to see those results.
“Rather than having a generic message applied to multiple store locations, having bespoke content for each store works better. I also emphasise getting first-hand interaction with customers in any kind of capacity,” Mudford said.
“Creating personalised content and seeing it through. If it’s not working after a month, that doesn’t mean it’s not going to work long-term. These things take time, so I recommend having the confidence to say you’re going to wait six months, 12 months, to see what the results are,” Malkin added.
Hairhouses’ experience shows that an online-offline approach can drive real results and is particularly potent in engaging with Gen Z consumers. While social media is a key platform to engage young customers, the results from Hairhouse’s in-store success show that marketers should not forget about that archaic platform where it all began– the physical, tangible store.
