Marketing budget is one of the most common questions salon owners ask — and one of the hardest to answer well, because the honest answer depends on factors specific to each business. But there are useful benchmarks, frameworks, and principles that most salons can apply to make better decisions about where their marketing money goes.
The benchmark figure — and why it varies.
For most businesses there will be low-hanging fruit or quick and easy wins. For many, those opportunities won’t be obvious. In-fact, it’s entirely possible if you have the time to invest solely in marketing to commit your own time and under £100 per month and achieve 100+ new client bookings monthly. However for the majority reading this, spending 30+ hours weekly, not to mention the time to become adept at salon marketing is an intense process.
My own salon spends less than £100 per month on various subscriptions, however the time implication is significant. However as a non-Stylist this works for me. Conversely, if I were a Stylist, business operator, manager and marketer, it would quickly present a conflict of both time and interest. I would need to drop a couple of these roles to ensure the marketing worked (although it helps that I have the expertise!).
The commonly cited benchmark for service business marketing spend is 5-10% of annual revenue. For a salon turning over £200,000 a year, that’s £10,000-£20,000. For a smaller salon at £100,000, it’s £5,000-£10,000. I tend not to subscribe to fixed percentages in business. It’s too linear and marketing is often treated like a tap that can be switched on-and-off as soon as next Wednesday looks like it needs some nudging in the right direction. Salon marketing is largely time-intensive rather than cost-intensive, but you do need to know where to invest that time sensibly.
If you are looking to spend; website maintenance, social media management, Google advertising, print materials, photography, events, and any agency or consultant fees. They’re a useful starting point but they’re not a rule — salons in growth mode often need to spend more, and established salons with strong word-of-mouth may need to spend less.
The more useful question isn’t “how much should I spend?” but “what return am I getting on what I’m spending?” A salon spending £500 a month on marketing and acquiring 50 new loyal clients from it is getting excellent value. A salon spending the same on advertising that produces no measurable bookings is wasting it.
Where to spend first.
If you’re starting from scratch or working with a limited budget, the hierarchy of marketing spend for salons looks roughly like this:
First: Google Business Profile. Free to have, low cost to maintain properly, and the fastest route to new local clients. If you’re not appearing in local search, this is where to start. The cost is primarily time — or the cost of having someone manage it for you.
Second: your website. A slow, outdated, or poorly structured website is actively costing you bookings. A properly built website is a one-time investment that pays returns for years. It’s the foundation everything else sits on.
Third: review generation. The cost of a systematic review process — a WhatsApp message template and fifteen minutes a day — is minimal. The impact on your Google ranking and booking conversion rate is significant. This is probably the highest-return marketing activity available to most salons.
Fourth: social media. Either time investment (doing it yourself) or agency cost (having it done for you). The value is real but slower to materialise than Google — social media builds brand and trust over months rather than driving immediate bookings.
Fifth: paid advertising. I personally don’t use paid ads. However Google Ads or Meta Ads can be effective for salons, but they require either expertise to run well or budget to learn from mistakes. They’re a sensible addition once the organic foundations are in place — not a substitute for them.
The cost of doing nothing.
The most underestimated marketing cost for most salons isn’t the money spent on marketing — it’s the revenue lost by not marketing effectively. A salon that could be 90% occupied but runs at 70% because its Google presence is weak, its social media is inconsistent, and its retention system is non-existent is losing thousands of pounds a month.
That loss is invisible precisely because it’s counterfactual — you can’t see the bookings you didn’t get. But they’re real, and they’re often far larger than the cost of fixing the marketing that’s causing them.
Measuring return on marketing spend.
Every marketing investment should be measurable in some way. Google Business Profile performance is directly trackable — views, clicks, calls, direction requests. Website traffic and booking conversions are measurable through analytics. Review count growth is measurable. New client numbers month on month are measurable.
Build the habit of checking these numbers monthly. Not obsessively, not in granular detail — but enough to know whether the things you’re spending money on are producing results. The salons that manage their marketing spend most effectively are the ones that measure it consistently and make decisions based on what the data shows.
When to bring in outside help.
The honest answer is that most salon owners are better at cutting hair than running marketing campaigns — not because they’re not intelligent, but because marketing is a specific skill set that takes time to develop, and time is the scarcest resource in a busy salon.
The break-even point for outsourcing your marketing is roughly this: if the time you spend on marketing would be more valuably spent in the chair, and if the marketing you’re producing isn’t getting measurable results, the cost of having it done properly is almost always justified by the return.
Our full marketing service is designed to deliver exactly that return. Book a free audit and we’ll show you specifically what’s holding your diary back and what it would take to fix it.