Where your salon marketing budget should actually go

If you have two or three hundred pounds a month to put behind getting clients in, the order matters more than the split. Two of the jobs on the list cost nothing at all, so there is no split to argue about: the free things get done first, and then the money goes on one thing. Here is that order, what each part actually costs, and where money leaves your salon without anyone deciding it should.

Do the free part before you spend a penny

Google’s own help page says you can manage how your business shows up on Maps and Search at no charge, read on 7 September 2026. That listing is where your opening hours, your phone number, your photos and your reviews sit, and the same page says you can send people from it to your website, your social pages and your booking links.

It is also what every paid click lands next to. Someone who taps your ad at nine at night reads your reviews and looks at your last few photos before she decides anything, so buying attention while the listing is half finished is paying to send people somewhere unfinished. Google puts the paid part after the free part on its own page, as the thing to consider once the profile is done.

An hour of tidying costs nothing. We do that bit free before we take a card, because there is no sense buying clicks for a shopfront that is still half boarded up.

The booking link is free too, on both marketplaces

Treatwell’s pricing page says it only charges 35% commission on first bookings made by new clients it brings you from the marketplace, and that aside from that and your monthly fee it will not charge you for bookings made directly with you, including calls, texts and clients you add yourself, or through the Book Now button on your social media and website. Fresha’s pricing page lists direct booking links, Facebook bookings, Instagram bookings and Google bookings as free, and says you will not be charged for new clients who find you through your own website, Google or social media channels.

So both have a door that costs nothing to walk through. It costs you nothing to make sure that is the door your listing, your window and your ads all point at, and every client who uses it is a client whose first booking stays whole.

What the paid pound should buy

The money goes on the people typing the thing you sell into Google tonight. Not on being seen generally, not on being remembered, on being there at the moment somebody in your town is looking for a balayage and has not chosen where yet.

Google Ads works off an average daily budget, and Google’s own page does the sum for you: take the monthly amount you are happy to spend, divide it by 30.4, the average number of days in a month, and that is your daily figure. Three hundred pounds a month is an average daily budget of about £9.87. You will never be billed more than twice that on a given day, or more than 30.4 times it in a month.

Said that way the scale gets honest. Three hundred pounds a month is a tenner a day of clicks in your own town. It is not a campaign, it is a small steady bid for searches that were going to happen anyway.

What that bought in the one month we can show you: £300 spent, 38 calls and 21 enquiries, which comes out at £14 an enquiry. Rachel Hartley at The Lockhouse spent £300 in her first month and got eight colour clients: “I’d tried boosting posts and it got me students. This got me eight colour clients in the first month and I didn’t touch a thing after signing up.” That is one salon and one month each, and it is all the proof we have. We would rather say that plainly than dress it up.

One more honest bit while we are here. We count calls, form enquiries and booking click-outs, and that is what we report. Neither Treatwell nor Fresha shares booking data with anybody, so nobody can draw you a line from a search to a client in your chair, and you should be wary of anyone who offers to.

Where the money leaks without you deciding

Commission is the marketing spend nobody budgets for, because it never leaves the bank as a payment. It comes off the top of a booking, before the money is ever yours.

Take a £70 first visit. Treatwell’s page says 35% on first bookings made by new clients from its marketplace, and that all commissions and fees are subject to VAT. That is £24.50, plus £4.90 of VAT, so £29.40 of a £70 first visit goes and £40.60 stays. Fresha’s page says 20% one time on brand new clients who discover you through its marketplace, which is £14.00 of the same £70 and leaves £56.00. The Fresha page served to us quoted the minimum in dollars, at $6 per client, with rates before local sales taxes, so check that one in your own account rather than taking a figure in pounds off anybody. Both of them charge nothing on returning clients.

None of that is a scandal and none of it is a reason to walk out. It is a finder’s fee, and a fee for somebody you would genuinely never have met can be worth paying. What it does change is the ordering. The same woman, at the same price, arriving through your own listing or your own ad, arrives with the whole £70 intact. If the marketplace is where most of your new names come from, you are already spending more on getting clients than the number in your head.

The percentage everyone quotes, and the question that works better

Spend 5 to 10% of turnover on marketing turns up all over the salon internet. We have not found a source behind it that we would stand behind, so we are not going to repeat it as a fact, and it is the wrong shape anyway. A percentage does not fill a Tuesday.

Two questions in pounds do more work. What can you put in every month for three months without missing it? And what is one more colour client a week worth to you? Both are answerable from your own price list at your own counter, and nobody on the internet knows those numbers better than you do.

Then the order does the rest. Free listing. Free booking links. The rest of it on searches for the services you want more of.

What we charge sits on top of the ad spend rather than inside it: £15 to £149 a month depending on your spend band, no commission on bookings ever, 14 days free, one click to cancel. And if the budget is currently going on boosting posts, that is the line we would move first. It is the one Rachel had already tried, and it brought her students.

Free things first. Then one paid thing, done properly, aimed at the searches you actually want.