Booking portal or own salon website?

The argument is usually run as a matter of camps: portal against own page, reach against independence. Inside a business it looks different. Nearly every salon and studio ends up with both, a profile they set up years ago and a page they never quite finished, and no idea which of the two is bringing in the appointments.

This article therefore separates the two questions hiding underneath, and then offers a method for answering them for your own business. Other people's terms do not appear in it: portals bill on models that differ and change, and an out-of-date figure helps nobody. Salon Wizard sits on the side of your own booking path, not the side of the referral business, and that is worth saying openly when the question is this one.

The first question is a marketing question: where does somebody learn that your studio exists at all? The second is a process question: where does that somebody enter their appointment? Both can have the same answer, but they do not have to, and anyone who runs them together will necessarily decide one of them badly.

A portal is first of all a directory for people with no name in mind. Someone searching for a massage nearby, who knows no provider, ends up there. Your own page is first of all a destination for people who already have the name: from a recommendation, from a sign, from a post, from the receipt of the last visit.

A sober assessment follows. If your studio lives mainly on people who do not yet know you, reach is your bottleneck. If it lives mainly on returning clients, the booking path is your bottleneck. Most businesses have both, but rarely in the same proportion, and that proportion, rather than any general recommendation, settles the question. The routes people take are laid out under online booking across website, Google and Instagram.

A profile is a form. It has fields, and those fields are the same for every business in the directory, if only so that the search stays comparable. That is exactly where its usefulness lies and where its limit lies too.

Anything that does not fit a standard field falls away. The explanation of why a treatment takes longer with you than elsewhere. The note that the first session is a consultation. The materials you work with, and why that makes a difference for sensitive skin. The preparation clients should do at home. The pictures of your own work in an order that tells a story instead of filling a gallery.

For a trade whose services need explaining, that is not a cosmetic flaw but a restriction that costs revenue: somebody who does not understand what they are booking books the cheapest thing or nothing at all. So check concretely how much of your service can be represented in the profile at all. The more of it needs explanation, the less a directory can be your only public surface. What the alternative involves is described under building your own page with a booking system.

The first appointment is the advertising service everyone talks about. The second is the business. A studio rarely lives on people who come once; it lives on the ones who are back in eight weeks, and the question is by which route they return.

This is where it divides. If the route back leads through the directory again, your studio appears at that second booking alongside everyone else once more, with their pictures and their availability next to yours. If the route back leads directly to you, that comparison no longer takes place.

So the most important move after a referred first visit is not the next marketing step but a pointer: the card with your own booking address, the next appointment proposed while the client is still in the studio, the confirmation email that comes from you. Portals bill differently, some only for the referral, some for every booking, but whatever the model: a client who knows and uses the direct route belongs back in your own accounts.

Reviews are the part most often overlooked when moving, and the part least able to move with you. They are tied to the account the booking was made under, and they almost always accumulate wherever the system asks for them.

If your bookings run through a directory, your stock of reviews grows there. That is valuable inside the directory and hard to use outside it: in general search and on your own page it helps you only so far, and if you end the profile, it stays behind.

So it makes sense to build the stock from the start in the places where it serves you permanently: in your Google business profile and on your own page. That costs nothing beyond a fixed habit, meaning an ask at the end of the appointment, a line in the appointment confirmation, and a visible place on your own page where the responses land. Anyone who only starts once they want to switch the profile off starts from zero.

This question cannot be settled with opinions, but it can be settled with a tally sheet at reception. Keep one for four weeks and the discussion is over afterwards.

The sheet has five lines:

• through the portal;
• through your own page;
• by telephone;
• agreed in person in the studio;
• through a message on a social network.

Make a mark for every incoming appointment, and a second one in a different colour for first visits. Nothing more is needed.

After four weeks you see three things at a glance: how many appointments the directory actually brings, what share of those are new clients, and how much scheduling still runs over the telephone. A directory that collects almost nothing but repeat appointments from regulars is no longer performing a referral service; it is only in the way. A directory that regularly brings new faces is worth its place, as long as you bring the second appointment onto your own route. And a telephone column that towers over all the others tells you the real building site is neither the portal nor the page, but that there is no usable route to an appointment online at all.