Social Media for the Tattoo Artist

We are continuing in our series of blogs offering digital marketing advice to businesses in different niches. No one really talks about marketing tattoo parlors but tattoos are big business now. To give you an idea of the size of this industry we found some numbers in “The Week” magazine. Tattoos are about a $2.3 billion industry. It’s hard not to imagine this with more than 15,000 tattoo parlors in the America along. According to this article, 21% of Americans have a tattoo.

So how do you go about marketing a tattoo parlor? The answer is VISUALLY. Tattoos are 100% about the artist. If you like the artist, you will pay whatever fee he/she asks and since your new tattoo will be very permanent, this is one investment you don’t want to bargain with. So the successful way to market a tattoo parlor is through highlighting the work of its artists. Here are three pieces of advice that will help grow any tattoo business.

Build a Tattoo Website

Tattoo parlors are filled with brilliant, creative artists but many fail because they don’t focus on running an effective business. Marketing is often solely through referrals and these can eventually dry up. To be successful, you have to start with a great website. The site should be simple. Post information about your artists, your hours/fees, contact information and samples of your work. That’s all. You can do it quite effectively with a WordPress site and a few easy plug-ins.

Visual Marketing Socially

There are two amazing social media platforms for promoting tattoo artists and parlors. First is Instagram. Instagram seems to appeal most to the age demographic and urban culture that has the highest propensity to get a tattoo. The hashtag #tattoo has more than 37 million posts on Instagram alone. The hashtag #tattoos has more than 17 million. Those are some huge numbers. Post all of your work to Instagram and use hashtags like these and others to get noticed. You can now even promote these posts to specific geographies and demographics. Facebook is another platform that can work just as well. Create an Instagram account and Facebook page for your business. Over time you will gain experience with advertising on these two platforms, and discover what works for your niche and what doesn’t.

Implement a Review Strategy

Similar to our article for restaurateurs last week, it is critical that tattoo parlors create a review strategy. A review strategy starts by encouraging reviews. Now there are a lot of rules from Yelp, Google and other people regarding reviews. You cannot incentivize positive reviews. You cannot reward them. But there is a cool product that we developed (sorry for the plug, but it works) that will help you boost your positive reviews while simultaneously collecting email addresses and identifying customer service issues. They are called ReviCards and you can learn more about them at www.getrevicards.com.

After implementing a collection strategy, you need to make sure you monitor online reviews. There are a few ways to do this. The most simple and effective is just to make sure that you have claimed your restaurant and have registered a working email. You will be notified if anyone leaves a review. Make sure you acknowledge and thank those who leave positive reviews. More importantly, make sure that you acknowledge and reply to all negative reviews. There will also always be unsatisfied customers. Acknowledging this, fixing issues and communicating with unhappy customers will mitigate the negative effects online. Overall, people understand that there will be complaints. If you respond properly, they will value your response more than the original complaint.

There you go… three simple steps that you can take to market a tattoo parlor – an effective website, a visual social media plan and a review strategy. You can implement these tactics by yourself or with professional support from a company like Boxless Media. Either way, if you have questions and need help, tweet us at @BoxlessMedia. We are happy to answer your questions whether you are a customer or just interested in growing your business!