I do a lot of sailing and I race competitively. One of the great things about sailing is how so many of our race strategies can be applied to running a successful business – like tuning your boat against the best to achieve the best.

No matter how fast you think your boat is, you have to go out there and tune it against a top competitor before the race to really achieve ultimate speed. As you adjust your riggings, sails and hull, you’re tuning to one another, always checking to see who’s going faster and how you can achieve that same speed. It’s about realizing your potential and the boat’s potential and then maximizing it.

Once you’ve both achieved that optimal speed, you’ve just eliminated everyone else from the race.

Ah, the elusive “virgin tanner,” that pale-bottomed individual who has never set foot in a tanning bed. While your repeat customers are most certainly your bread-and-butter, it’s those mysterious virgin tanners that are going to build your business.

Not only does a new tanner have the potential of becoming a valuable repeat customer, but they’re also more likely to talk about their experience and share it with others. For example, a few weeks ago I went for my first-ever acupuncture appointment. I’ve since told the story to numerous friends and now shared it here.

Why? Because it was a new and unique experience.

Glocalization is a marketing term that basically says a product is more likely to succeed when that product and its marketing are adapted for its local market.

Think about a massive international chain like McDonalds – they have fast-food restaurants all over the world and yet their menus and marketing vary from place to place. In Nova Scotia, Canada you can order a McLobster advertised by Ronald McDonald in a fishermen’s hat. In Delhi, it’s a paneer curry wrap. That is glocalization and you can make it work for your tanning business.

How Glocalization Can Work for Tanning Salons

Tanning salons are, by nature, a neighborhood business. Your clients likely either live or work within a 1-5 mile radius of your salon. That means you can really apply the concept of local marketing. Instead of wasting your advertising dollars covering an entire city, you can spend your money where it matters – locally.

I have a friend who recently opened a new tanning salon. She spent $1200 putting a color ad and welcome coupon in a local alt-weekly newspaper and $200 convincing a nearby gym to hand out coupons for her tanning salon at the reception desk. She saw 23 new customers thanks to her partnership with the neighborhood gym and not one of those newspaper coupons ever made it back to her. It was a hard lesson, but she learned the power of local marketing.

Satisfied and informed customers are your greatest resource for building a client base and for most tanning salons, our business is built on local referral business.

So, how do you build on that? How do you turn one customer into ten or twenty?

Here are 3 new marketing tips that will increase your client base and get those customers into your tanning beds: